● 05.20.15

● Links 20/5/2015: Containers, OpenStack, and EXT4 Corruption

Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• To be fair, the number 77 car was not a favorite to win the race. In fact, Moreno started from the eleventh row — the last row — after just barely qualifying. But most of that was irrelevant: Linux was out there. Tux 500 was highlighted prominently in eleven major newspapers, dozens of minor ones, two major non-tech magazines, and dozens of non-Linux/tech publications on paper and across the web.

• About 6 years ago, I wrote an article about why I felt that installing software in GNU/Linux was broken. It pains me to say that the situation is, sadly, exactly the same:GNU/Linux never made it to personal computers, really, and at this point it looks like it never will.

• I have converted many users, including my wife, to Linux in the past 10 years and and I am still going strong. If you do it right, Linux will do a better job for your users than Mac OS X or Windows … if you do it right.

Desktop

• Chromebooks have become extremely popular, with numerous models appearing on Amazon’s list of bestselling laptops. Customers are so interested in Chromebooks that Amazon has added a helpful Chromebook Buying Guide to steer them toward the model that might be right for them.

• Linux containers have been around for several years, but have come back into vogue recently with the growing popularity of Docker containers.

• Docker containers launched with the aim of making it easy for developers to test and distribute applications and have taken off with a bang: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Joyent have all announced ways to integrate and manage multiple Docker containers into their offerings.

Server

• When Google announced that it would support AppC, a vendor neutral container format, and the first container based on it, CoreOS’s Rocket (RKT), some people took this as Google supporting AppC over Docker. That is not true.

• IBM hasn’t been shy about its ambitions to transform into a cloud company, building up a broad portfolio of infrastructure, platform and software services. Part of that strategy has been to be intimately involved with OpenStack, the open source cloud platform. This week at the project’s biannual conference in Vancouver, IBM announced it was expanding its OpenStack offerings.

• OpenStack’s catalog provides apps in multiple formats, including Murano packages, Glance images and Heat templates. Now firms can find apps in one place.

• OpenStack’s Nova compute project originally began as the Nebula project at NASA. At the OpenStack conference here, Jonathan Chiang, IT Chief Engineer at NASA JPL detailed how the space agency is now using OpenStack in its effort to land humans on Mars.

Kernel Space

• It appears that the current Linux 4.0.x kernel is plagued by an EXT4 file-system corruption issue. If there’s any positive note out of the situation, it seems to mostly affect EXT4 Linux RAID users.

• Some time ago, I figured out that there are more than a billion instances of the Linux kernel in use, and this in turn led to the realization that a million-year RCU bug is happening about three times a day across the installed base. This realization has caused me to focus more heavily on RCU validation, which has uncovered a number of interesting bugs. I have also dabbled a bit in formal verification, which has not yet found a bug. However, formal verification might be getting there, and might some day be a useful addition to RCU’s regression testing. I was therefore quite happy to be invited to this Dagstuhl Seminar. In what follows, I summarize a few of the presentation. See here for the rest of the presentations.

Graphics Stack

• Among other OpenGL 4.x extensions, one of the more recent additions to OpenGL being tackled by open-source developers is ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object.

• Besides Intel DRM updates landing today in DRM-Next for eventual merging into the Linux 4.2 kernel, AMD landed some changes to their HSA kernel driver named AMDKFD.

Applications

• LiVES, a video editor and VJ tool that permits users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files, is now at version 2.4.0 and is ready for download.

• The extremely active development team of the open-source and cross-platform MPV movie player software based on the popular MPlayer multimedia playback application reached version 0.9.2 on May 19.

• Following this morning’s branching of Mesa 10.6 and pushing Git master to Mesa 10.7, the Mesa 10.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available.

Proprietary

• Google was proud to announce today, May 18, the immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 43 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• WPS Office (also known as Kingsoft Office) is a freeware office suite having the same features as Microsoft Office (more of a Microsoft Office clone), installed by default on Ubuntu Kylin, the Ubuntu flavor developer for its Chinese users.

• Debian, Ubuntu (as well as other Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions like Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.) users can install Enpass for both 32bit and 64bit by using its new official repository.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It will launch on May 26th for Steam gamers, and it looks like a visual feast that’s for sure.

• The Steam for Linux top selling list is always changing, but that’s not really surprising now that there are lots of titles on the open source platform. We now take a closer look at what the gamers prefer to play this week.

• The NeocoreGames studio confirmed the fact that it’s no longer trying to port its games on the Linux platform, even if they were already working on the Beta version for The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing.

• Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is the last game in the Borderlands universe and one of the first triple A titles to get Linux support. Now a new update has been released, and the Linux version got it as well.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today we celebrate 20 years since the first release of Qt was uploaded to sunsite.unc.edu and announced, six days later, at comp.os.linux.announce. Over these years, Qt evolved from a two person Norwegian project to a full-fledged, social-technical world-wide organism that underpins free software projects, profitable companies, universities, government-related organizations, and more. It’s been an exciting journey. From the early days of Trolltech in 1999, through an evolution of licensing (from the original FreeQt, to QPL, to GPL, to LGPL today), corporate cooperation from Nokia and Digia, Open Governance, and leading edge technology refinements, Qt has supported the spirit of free software, thriving communities, and high quality products.

• Everything is ready for the 3rd edition of LaKademy – The KDE Latin America Summit…

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• On May 19, the ROSA company was proud to announce the immediate availability of the ROSA Enterprise Desktop X2 Linux kernel-based operating system for enterprise users, which can request an ISO image from the ROSA sales department.

• Russian ROSA Company today announced the release of ROSA Enterprise Desktop X2, the newest version of their business-class operating system. Elsewhere, kernel version 4.0.2 may have introduced an ext4 corruption bug resulting in data loss affecting at least Arch, Debian and Fedora.

Debian Family

• FileZilla, one of the best open-source and cross-platform FTP clients available on the market, reached version 3.11.0 on May 19 bringing assorted new features and bug fixes.

• Last month we heard libdvdcss and ZFS should soon appear in Debian GNU/Linux, but now it doesn’t appear that easy… It could end up taking a while longer for the ZFS file-system and the libdvdcss support for DVD playback on Debian to appear within the official repositories.

Derivatives

• Tails first achieved notoriety as the Linux distribution that National Security Agency whistleblower Ed Snowden used. Tails, an acronym for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, is focused on enabling user privacy while online. On April 29, 2014, the Tails 1.0 debuted, and it has been steadily updated ever since. Tails 1.4 launched May 12 of this year with a number of new capabilities, including several important security updates. Among the big changes in Tails 1.4 is a new privacy-focused search tool called Disconnect. Tails 1.4 also enables users to print a paper copy of their privacy keys using the Paperkey tool. A core part of every Tails release is the included Tor browser, which benefits from an update in Tails 1.4 that fixes a number of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities. There are times when the Tor browser isn’t enough, and users need a regular browser to get access to a service, which is why Tails 1.4 also includes an Unsafe Browser, as well. In this slide show, eWEEK examines key features of the Tails 1.4 release.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On May 19, the Ubuntu Kernel Team had a meeting in order to plan the steps that are to be taken by them prior to the migration to the latest upstream Linux kernel packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.

• Canonical has published details about a few vulnerabilities that were found and corrected in the Linux kernel packages, affecting the kernel for Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicon) operating system.

• For now, Ubuntu 15.10 still uses Kernel 3.19 (the same kernel as Ubuntu 15.04), but the next daily builds should bring Kernel 4.0.4, which is the latest stable version available released so far. But if Linus Torvalds manages to get Kernel 4.1 out in time, Canonical may implement it as default, on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf.

• Recently, Canonical has split the Ubuntu RTM branch into two branches, one channel being for the BQ phoneand ther other one for the Meizu one. This is a good thing for the developers that create optimizations for one Ubuntu phone only (e.g. tweaks for Meizu that are not needed on Bq, or vice versa).

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has confirmed that the next Ubuntu Touch Update (OTA 4) will be released by the end of the month and will change the code base of the system to Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.

• Ubuntu Touch is already stable, and it’s available on two different phones right now, Bq Aquaris and Meizu MX4. It’s different from your regular OS experience, but that’s a good thing. The only real problem is the lack of apps, although a Blackberry approach to the problem might be a good thing for Canonical.

• A smartphone that can work as a desktop may be a long shot but the pursuit of mobile technology has brought many benefits to Ubuntu, according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.

• We’ve been hearing about Meizu’s forthcoming Ubuntu-powered smartphone since early 2014—more than a year ago. Well, all those words just became tangible, and they’ve coalesced into the first compelling-looking Ubuntu phone.

• The Ubuntu MX4 is now out and can be purchased from Meizu’s website in China. Meizu’s Ubuntu phone follows in the footsteps of the Bq Aquaris, which is now on sale across Europe. The second Ubuntu smartphone will also be on sale in Europe soon.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Screen sizes on smartphones have been on an upward spiral since the time Apple launched the original iPhone several years back with a tiny 3.5-inch screen. The first of Google’s Nexus devices, the Nexus One came with a small 3.7-inch screen as well, but since then, every subsequent smartphone generation has seen a significant increase in screen sizes and today, what is seen to be an acceptable screen size is significantly larger than what would have been considered mainstream even a couple of years back. One doesn’t have to go too far back to remember a time when Samsung’s original Galaxy Note from 2011 was joked about as a “slice of toast” on various internet forums because of its 5.3-inch screen size – something that’s actually smaller than most mainstream devices of today, which come with larger 5.5-inch screens. Circa 2015, handsets with larger screens, being significantly better at multimedia consumption, have given rise to the phablet phenomenon, and smaller handsets have gone out of fashion, especially at the higher end of the spectrum.

• Yep, Maps for Android Wear, it’s happening! A few of you have already spotted the icon in your Wear launchers if you’re running the new Maps 9.9 APK and Android Wear 5.1+, you should be able to get Maps for Android Wear fully up and running… mostly.

• Layout, an app for making photo collages that Instagram introduced on iOS in March, is now available for Android. The app, which can be downloaded here, arrays your photos in a variety of grids. It’s meant to capitalize on the fact that about one in five Instagram users regularly post collages to their accounts, according to the company.

• Micromax Informatics Ltd., India’s second-largest smartphone seller, is going where Google Inc.’s Android One failed to go, bringing a real local-language experience onto the Android platform for the subcontinent. This could help the company go after first-time smartphone users as the market expands into small towns and rural states.

• Six months after Lollipop’s release, how have the major Android manufacturers done at delivering upgrades to their devices?

• Eurecom researchers recently developed an Android application that can monitor the network traffic of other apps to alert users of suspicious or malicious network activity.

• In a post in its product forums today, Google said that the rollout of the Android 5.1.1 update for Android Wear smartwatches is imminent. And just so, Android Police is reporting that some owners of the LG G Watch and LG G Watch R have already received it. The update adds some great new features, including support for getting notifications on any Wi-Fi network, wrist gestures, and the ability to draw emoji. We laid it all out in our LG Watch Urbane review, which ships with the update already pre-installed.

• Fox News host Bill O’Reilly interviewed a former biker gang leader about a recent biker shootout in Waco, Texas that left nine people dead. O’Reilly’s interview with his white guest was a sharp contrast to interviews the host regularly has with African-American guests, where he lectures them about black violence, culture, and family structure.

• Per usual, the media would retell the narrative based entirely on Pentagon and White House action movie prose. Just as with the bin Laden raid narrative—that later turned out to be mostly false—this tale involved some unbelievably compelling details: “rescuing a Yazidi slave,” “hand-to-hand combat,” “women and children as human shields,” “precise fire” (that, of course, avoided these women and children), and a body count, “40 extremists,” that would make Jack Bauer blush.

• Being an early adopter of anything and everything Linux, I was quick to order the LG Watch Urbane the moment it was made available on Google Store. It was the most expensive watch around, there were no detailed reviews, but I was impressed by the design.

Free Software/Open Source

• I’m Lee Schlesinger, currently managing editor for the Spiceworks Community. Spiceworks provides a free downloadable help desk and network inventory application, and hosts a community for IT pros to discuss both work and off-topic issues. Though we have a pretty popular Linux group in the community, many of the community members, who we call SpiceHeads, work in Microsoft-centric shops.

• Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is preparing to launch an operating system for the internet of things that’s just 10 kilobytes in size. The company says that its “LiteOS” is the “lightest” software of its kind and can be used to power a range of smart devices — from wearables to cars. Huawei predicts that by 2025 there will be roughly 100 billion internet-connected devices in the world, with 2 million new sensors deployed every hour. The company also said that the OS would be “opened to all developers” to allow them to quickly create their own smart products — although it’s unclear whether this means that LiteOS will be fully open-source. Huawei says LiteOS also supports “zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking.”

• In Sweden there is a service called BankID, it’s an electronic identity service. Banks issue the electronic ID which can be used by companies, banks and government agencies to authenticate and conclude agreements with individuals over the internet. A few months ago however it was decided that BankID software on Linux would no longer be supported. Finding an alternative can be difficult for Linux users.

Events

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack is ready for enterprise deployment, but there are rough spots that is likely to relegate it to new workloads and self-service developer use, according to Forrester Research.

• At OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced it was releasing a technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with integration into OpenStack’s new Manila shared file system project.

• A foundation can do a lot to unite a community–just look at the example set by The Linux Foundation. This week, the OpenStack Foundation has rolled out a community application catalog built to facilitate collaboration and sharing on the OpenStack scene, where many IT administrators are wrestling with deploying the open cloud platform. The concept is to encourage administrators and others to leverage the work that has already been produced in OpenStack deployments.

• Researchers at Gartner have been in the news for throwing some shade on Hadoop with the results of a new study that found that Hadoop is, well, hard. There are just not enough skilled professionals that can claim mastery of the platform, among other issues. Gartner, Inc.’s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Branching LibreOffice 5.0 now puts it under a hard feature freeze while the beta one release is to follow quite soon followed by a second LO 5.0 beta in early June. Four release candidates for LibreOffice 5.0 will come during June and July while the official release of LibreOffice 5 is still slated for the end of July or early August.

CMS

• dotCMS has claimed a desirable chunk of the enterprise market by landing and working alongside large clients such as Standard & Poor’s, Wiley Publishing, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Hospital Corporation of America. As such, it’s reputation as an enterprise solution is growing fast.

Healthcare

• I’ve known Fred for about 15 years or so, first as a contributor to OpenEMR and later we accidentally met in person at the University of Texas. It’s pretty cool to come face-to-face with folks you’ve only know online and, mostly, from working with their contributed code! Over the years, Fred has hosted a couple of open source healthcare IT conferences and done some great work in the field for ClearHealth/MirrorMed with Dave Ulhman and now focusing on open data.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Working directly with hardware is hard. Each project brings with it mundane questions of which compiler to use, what communications protocols to work with, and how to load code. Developers also need to figure out how to debug the live system without affecting the program being executed.

Programming

• The merger was put to a vote on GitHub by io.js developer Mikeal Rogers, who initially proposed the merger in February, and the io.js technical committee voted to approve the merger yesterday. According to Rogers, the team will continue releasing io.js versions while the convergence takes place, but after the merger is complete, the io.js working groups and technical committee will join the Node.js Foundation under renamed titles.

• The goals of the program are to provide high-quality computer science instruction at the high school level and to identify potentially talented computer students who are in demographics underserved by the IT industry, such as women and ethnic minorities.

Leftovers

• Good news for stressed out IT professionals—a TEKsystems survey of more than 1,000 IT workers indicates a vast positive change in the stability of IT staffing environments as compared to a year ago.

Security

• Dan Berrange, creator of libvirt, sums it up nicely on the Fedora Devel list:

• “While you might be able to crash the QEMU process associated with your own guest, you should not be able to escalate from there to take over the host, nor be able to compromise other guests on the same host. The attacker would need to find a second independent security flaw to let them escape SELinux in some manner, or some way to trick libvirt via its QEMU monitor connection. Nothing is guaranteed 100% foolproof, but in absence of other known bugs, sVirt provides good anti-venom for this flaw IMHO.”

• At the start of 2014, attackers’ favorite distributed denial of service attack strategy was to send messages to misconfigured servers with a spoofed return address – the servers would keep trying to reply to those messages, allowing the attackers to magnify the impact of their traffic.

• Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US’s encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• But here’s the truth Jeb Bush and the others are hiding or eliding: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Co. were not misled by lousy intelligence; they used lousy intelligence to mislead the public.

• The latest example of the sort of crime story that would be huge news if the perpetrator were Muslim–rather than, in this instance, someone who hates Muslims–is the case of Robert Rankin Doggart, a former congressional candidate from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, who was caught on tape and on social media talking about wiping out a Muslim community in upstate New York.

Finance

• Europe faces the risk of a second revolt by Left-wing forces in the South after Portugal’s Socialist Party vowed to defy austerity demands from the country’s creditors and block any further sackings of public officials.

• But the measure will not only hurt those who need such programs most, it may also increase costs to the state in the long run. As Liz Schott, a welfare policy analyst, explained to the AP: “Long-term welfare recipients are often the most vulnerable, suffering from mental and physical disabilities, poor job histories and little education … But without welfare, they’ll likely show up in other ways that will cost taxpayers, from emergency rooms to shelters to the criminal justice system.”

• Earlier in this special report series, CMD revealed how states that do not hold their charter schools and authorizers accountable have the upper hand when the U.S. Department of Education (ED) evaluates applications to the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program. But if the review process is deeply flawed, the oversight of the $3.3 billion disbursed within the charter schools program is not much better.

• Austerity is about shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another.

Privacy

• Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure

• Tech giants including Apple, Google, and others believe government would be putting American citizens at risk if it required tech companies to build a back door for law enforcement, and now they’ve issued a letter to President Obama, urging him to prevent such a move by Congress.

• Facebook’s founder owns four properties surrounding his California home, and a huge, sparse estate in Hawaii. Why do so many tech billionaires crave isolation?

Civil Rights

• We’ve had a bunch of stories lately about the increase in militarized police and what a ridiculous and dangerous idea it is. As we’ve discussed in the past, much of this came from the Defense Department and its 1033 program, which takes decommissioned military equipment and gives it to police. This results in bizarre situations like the LA School District police having a bunch of grenade launchers. The program is somewhat infamous for its lack of rules, transparency and oversight.

• Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old activist nun who two years ago humiliated government officials by penetrating and vandalizing a supposedly ultra-high-security uranium storage facility, has finally been released from prison. A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the 2013 sabotage convictions of Rice and two fellow anti-nuclear activists, Michael Walli, 66, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 59, ruling that that their actions—breaking into Tennessee’s Y-12 National Security Complex and spreading blood on a uranium storage bunker—did not harm national security.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• For more than two years hard negotiations have been conducted within European institutions regarding the regulation proposal on telecommunications, which now contains two main chapters, one on roaming and the other on Net Neutrality. In 2014, a lot of work was done by citizen organisations to ensure that the European Parliament would protect Net Neutrality and uphold the rights of citizens to access a non-discriminatory, guaranteed access to a neutral and transparent Internet networks.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Popcorn Time has been called the Netflix for pirated movies, but it requires the installation of a desktop application. Not anymore. Now thanks to a site called Popcorn Time In Your Browser you’re just a couple of clicks away from watching a pirated movie stream.

• The in-browser app works much like the desktop version, remotely streaming torrent files from YTS through Coinado. Users do not need to install anything, and from what I can tell, the torrent files are never stored locally on the user’s machine. Just click on a title, wait a few seconds and bam, a pirated movie starts playing.

• Last we had checked in on the ongoing legal wrangling between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a court had ruled pretty strongly against Hood, accusing him of acting in “bad faith,” for “the purpose of harassing” Google in violation of its First Amendment rights. Checking back in on the case to see what’s been going on, it appears that things have continued to get more and more heated. A little while after that ruling slamming Hood, Wingate ordered Hood to provide a bunch of information to Google as part of the discovery process for the case — including, bizarrely, responses to Techdirt’s FOIA request, which we had declined to continue after Hood’s office demanded over $2,000 and made it clear that they still likely wouldn’t give us anything.

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