● 09.24.15

● Links 24/9/2015: GNOME 3.18, Fedora 23 Beta, New Firefox

Posted in News Roundup at 5:22 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux Australia considered a bid to buy publicity back in May, and then had to abandon the idea because the project it sought to influence had obtained enough funding and shut its door.

• The idea to pay for publicity was mooted by former Linux Australia secretary Kathy Reid on May 21 when she proposed that the organisation make a grant of $200 to technology journalist Renai LeMay, “with Renai then able to interview LA Council or nominated representatives about technology issues”.

• LeMay, who at that point was raising funds through Kickstarter for writing a book about “how Australia’s political sector is mismanaging technology policy”, had been working as an aide to Greens Senator Scott Ludlam prior to that. Before he went to Canberra, LeMay ran a technology website called Delimiter, an activity that he has now resumed.

• …Microsoft Windows 10. The message? Why all the babies? Because…

• “These kids will grow up with Windows 10.”

• It’s looking like Windows is not being prepped to evolve for these kids. It isn’t going to evolve using the normal release numbers or titles…Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8.1, 10. Windows is going to stay at this final iteration “for the kids.” Why those kids? Those kids will be shelling out the money for a subscription model that Microsoft will be deploying soon.

• Well, you know what? Good for them. They will finally have a solid code base to incrementally make better, more stable and an absolute unchanging target for hackers and other bad guys. Heck, let’s give them credit for something. Two out of three ain’t bad. Good luck to you Microsoft. May our babies grow up needing to remember passwords. Sheesh, touting a cloud service to manage your passwords. That’s dumber than a shovel-struck mule. And facial recognition/iris scanning? If you are counting on that for a password, for Pete’s sake, don’t use the software the major banks are using.

Desktop

• My kids have never looked back, either. When it came time for them to get their own computers as they started school at university, they all chose to have Linux on their laptops.

• I have been helping folks break away from Windows and switch to either Linux Mint or Ubuntu for a while now and I’m going to share part of an email I got this morning with you. It really exemplifies the reaction I get when people start using a Linux distro for the first time.

• Toshiba today announced the newly refreshed Chromebook 2 with 5th generation Intel i3 processor support. The new laptop not only comes with a new backlit keyboard for those late night blogging sessions, but also Skullcandy-tuned speakers, a 1080p IPS display and more, making it quite the workhouse.

• As touched on already, we’re looking at a 13.3 full HD display, which is joined by eight-and-a-half hours of battery life, on-board dual array microphones, 802.11ac Wi-Fi to keep you connected, and a USB 3.0 port (with a USB 2.0 port for backup) for all your peripherals.

• Chromebooks have been selling like hotcakes on Amazon, with many models getting very high ratings by users. Now Toshiba has announced a refresh of its popular Chromebook 2 laptop. The new version will offer a 1080P IPS display and Intel i3 processor.

Server

• If Amazon Web Service (AWS) had gone down on Monday, September 21, morning, instead of Sunday, September 20, people would still be screaming about it. Instead, it went down at 3 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) and barely anyone noticed.

Kernel Space

• The Linux kernel developers might lead interesting and exciting lives, but every once in a while, they need to do some of the boring stuff as well, like testing and implementing drivers for hardware into the kernel. Sometimes, that hardware is the new Steam Controller developed by Valve.

• As expected, Linus Torvalds released a few minutes ago, September 20, the second Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming Linux 4.3 kernel series, due for release later this year.

• The Linux 4.2 kernel series just got its first maintenance release, as renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago on the official mailing list of the project.

• While DCHQ is commercially licensed software with enterprise-grade support, the company has embraced and contributes to open-source technologies in the Docker ecosystem, including the Open Container Initiative. DCHQ On-Premise runs on Docker containers and may be installed on-premise on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu or CentOS. It installs via shell script or automated deployment from DCHQ Hosted PaaS. DCHQ registers a variety of Docker repositories, including Red Hat Container Registry, Docker Hub and Quay. It also integrates with Weave for cross-container communication across different hosts.

Graphics Stack

• The Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, a tool that lets users install the latest graphics and video drivers for their Intel graphics hardware, has been upgraded to version 1.2.0 and is now ready for download.

Applications

• One of these packages is ansiweather. It looks at the data at openweathermap and presents them on the console.

• Weblate 2.4 has been released today. It comes with extended support for various file formats, extended hook scripts, better keyboard shortcuts and dozen of bug fixes.

• Seth Vargo is an open source programmer and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in Ruby development and has worked for Chef, CustomInk, and HashiCorp. At this year’s All Things Open conference, Seth will speak about Vagrant. But, what is Vagrant and why should you care?

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Valve has a large catalog of games and many of them have been released more than a decade ago, but the studio continues to update them, even if they are very old.

• Today marks a huge milestone for Steam on Linux: 1,500 games are natively available! This is quite significant while Windows is at 6,464 and OS X is at 2,323.

• New games continue to be ported to Linux and offered via Steam almost daily. This is all while the Steam Linux market-share is below 1%. Heck, even stats well outside the gaming space show Linux desktop use at less than 2%.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• With the upcomming release we decided to change the numbering schema. Starting from now, every time we implement new features, we increase the second digit in the version string. The third digit will be reserved for patch (hot fix) releases without any new features. The major number will be increased on any worldshaking events like new architecture for Qt/KDE, etc. This time, besides many bug fixing and performance improvements, we implemented many new features. – so, it’s going to be 2.1.0.

• Cantor, the scientific programming environment inspired in notebook view concept, is going to have a new release together with KDE Applications 15.12 in December.

• Recently we had to fix a tricky crash at work: our Qt Quick app was crashing randomly when switching between two pages of the app.

• There was a trip to Zermatt this year as well,

• KDE Applications 15.08.1 have landed in Kubuntu Wily (to become 15.10).

• In this blog post, I will look at ways to move outdated UI code into the 21st century, of course with a Qt focus, and based on KDAB’s more than 15 years of experience in migrations. You will learn about your options, when it makes sense to consider a migration as opposed to a complete re-write, and how you can go about getting your migration project kicked off.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 3.18, “Gothenburg”.

• It’s common “knowledge” in the Internet Peanut Gallery that GTK+ is “dead” or “dying” — I assume in the same sense that NetCraft certified that BSD is dead. It’d be (and, in point of fact, it is) easy to dismiss these rumors; it’s not like they come with actual numbers and trends, because the gods of old never mentioned the requirement for comments on the Internet to be cogent, let alone factually true, when they laid down the various RFCs.

• Christian Hergert had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of his powerful GNOME Builder 3.18 open-source integrated development environment tool for GNOME app developers.

• Unlike most of the previous GNOME 3.x releases, the latest GNOME 3.18 focuses more stability and under the hood features and less on redesigning applications or GNOME Shell.

• One of the most important new features in GNOME Shell 3.18 is the ability to access Google Drive directly from Files (Nautilus) and file chooser dialogs (via GVFS). This allows easily downloading your Google Drive files directly from the Files app as well as uploading new files…

• The accelerometer support in GNOME now uses iio-sensor-proxy. This daemon also now supports ambient light sensors, which Richard used to implement the automatic brightness adjustment, and compasses, which are used in GeoClue and gnome-maps.

• Earlier today, the GNOME project announced the release of GNOME 3.18, the next version of the default desktop environment available in Fedora Workstation. The best and easiest way to try out GNOME 3.18 for yourself is to use the freshly released Beta version of Fedora 23 Workstation. GNOME 3.18 has over 25,000 changes, updates and new features contributed by over 770 contributors:

• After GNOME developers teased the features of the GNOME 3.18 “Gothenburg” desktop environment a full day before release, the new version has been finally made available in its stable form.

• We did it. Yes, we finally made it. We’re having the 3.18 release, and is the best release ever – just like every GNOME release. We saw many cool features landing, a number of awsome project which the GNOME interns (hey, I was one of them too!) worked on this summer and lots of exciting news going around.

Distributions

• Edward Snyder, the lead developer of the Liquid Lemur Linux distribution, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the third Alpha build of his upcoming Liquid Lemur Linux 2.0 OS.

• The Mangaka Linux distribution is focused on Japanese Manga fans.

• If a Windows user is considering switching to Linux and asks us to recommend a distro, we typically roll out the usual desktop favourites: Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE and co. But is this actually the best approach? One Reddit user recently described his experiences when switching from Windows to Linux, and after battling problems with the newbie-friendly distros, he actually had the most success with Slackware.

Reviews

• The Neptune distribution is a Debian-based project which offers users a friendly, desktop-oriented experience. Neptune uses KDE 4 as the default desktop environment. The latest release of Neptune, version 4.4, includes mostly minor upgrades with an eye toward improving the graphics stack and desktop performance.

• Neptune is available in just one edition for the 64-bit x86 architecture. The ISO file we download is 1.8GB in size. When we boot from Neptune’s live media a menu appears and asks if we would like to explore Neptune’s live desktop environment using English or German as our preferred language. Neptune then boots to the KDE desktop. The desktop environment is presented in a traditional manner, with the application menu, task switcher and system tray placed at the bottom of the screen. On the desktop we find icons which will grant us access to documentation, the distribution’s package manager and Neptune’s graphical system installer.

New Releases

• Solus 1.0 is expected on October 1, 2015, but until then the devs are working hard on the last touches, so today, September 20, we have been privileged to see an exclusive sneak preview of the new Budgie Desktop user interface that will ship in the final release of the distribution.

• From the looks of it, m32 Rock 15.2 is a major release, bringing support for the latest Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie), Linux Mint 17.2 (Rafaela), and Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca) Linux kernel-based operating systems, support for the systemd init system, replacing the old SysVinit one, as well as a significant number of under-the-hood improvements.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, the world’s most successful open source company, today announced their financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016 ended August 31, 2015. The company registered total revenue of $504 million for the quarter which was up 13% year-over-year.

• Red Hat Inc. raised its guidance for the fiscal year as the open-source software provider reported that earnings rose 9.8% in the latest quarter.

• Joining Red Hat posed a challenge for me—would I be trusted and respected as a leader? While I had considerable leadership experience and a degree in computer science, I had no background in enterprise IT. In a very open, interactive culture like Red Hat’s, there was no way for me to fake it. However, I found that being very open about the things I did not know actually had the opposite effect than I would have thought. It helped me build credibility. My team learned that I wouldn’t feign knowledge where I did not have it and therefore was more likely to give me the benefit of the doubt when I did talk confidently. No one expects leaders to know everything all the time, but we do expect our leaders to be truthful and forthright.

• Red Hat continues to accelerate its growth thanks to an evolving mix of platform and infrastructure technology revolving around Linux and the cloud. Red Hat announced its second quarter fiscal 2016 financial results on September 21, once again exceeding expectations.

• Shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT), which rose 2.32 percent on Monday, were down about 1 percent after hours.

• In his new book, “The Open Organization”, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst makes the case for catalytic leadership. Managers direct. Leaders inspire and enable. Catalytic leaders build on inspiring and enabling with their attention to earning the right to lead and encouraging without judging.

• Whitehurst’s examples are drawn from organizations like Whole Foods, Zappos, Pixar, Starbucks, W.L. Gore and, of course, Red Hat. If you map Red Hat’s culture across dimensions of behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and the environment you find mostly balance with spikes on identity, decisions, and learning.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reiterated by equities researchers at Needham & Company LLC in a report issued on Tuesday, MarketBeat reports. They presently have a $86.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock. Needham & Company LLC’s target price suggests a potential upside of 18.26% from the stock’s current price.

• Here’s a trick question for you: Which of the following are files?

• Directories Shell scripts LibreOffice documents Serial ports Kernel data structures Kernel tuning parameters Hard drives Partitions Logical Volumes (LVM) Printers Sockets

• Perhaps you won’t believe this, but to Unix and Linux they are all files. That’s one of the most amazing concepts—it makes possible some very simple, yet powerful methods for performing many administrative tasks that might otherwise be extremely difficult or impossible.

• Red Hat is known for its open culture. People openly share their opinions, give each other positive and constructive feedback, and make better decisions through collaboration. Jim Whitehurst recently wrote about how to foster a culture like ours—one that supports honest (and sometimes difficult) conversations.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reaffirmed by investment analysts at Credit Suisse in a research note issued on Tuesday, Market Beat Ratings reports. They currently have a $88.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock, up from their previous price target of $84.00. Credit Suisse’s price objective points to a potential upside of 21.01% from the company’s previous close.

Fedora

• More then a month ago Fedora called for submissions for the supplemental wallpaper package for Fedora 23. We got a lot of submissions this time. In fact, we broke all our previous records, with 199 submissions. We had 73 different participants who submitted to the contest. Many of them were first time contributors.

• The deluge of software vulnerabilities creates challenges for system administrators, developers, and users. Although many vulnerabilities are corner cases that are often difficult to exploit and have limited effects, there are the occasional vulnerabilities that become front page news. Many people have heard of Heartbleed, Shellshock, and VENOM, but there are many other lesser known vulnerabilities that appear every day.

• The Fedora 23 Beta is here, right on schedule for our planned October final release! Want to help make Fedora 23 be the best release ever, or just want to get a sneak peek?

• Just a heads up for you intrepid rawhide users:

• The latest (as of this writing) dnf update, version 1.1.2-2.fc24 seems to break doing a lot of things you might want dnf to do (like update packages or list them or anything).

Debian Family

• Debian’s Steve McIntyre posted a very long and interesting message on the Debian mailing list about the summary of the Debian CD BoF meeting that took place at the DebConf15 conference.

• Therefore, we report today that the unanimous decision was to no longer generate CD sets, which were distributed in the form of ISO images, for upcoming releases of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, starting with the anticipated Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch) release. This applies for all of Debian GNU/Linux’s supported hardware architectures.

• The developers behind the popular Linux AIO project, which creates Live ISO images with the main or most important editions of a GNU/Linux distribution, were happy to inform Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of Linux AIO Debian Live 8.2.0.

• The Indian government is working on its operating system named BOSS, and it’s planning on ditching any kind of Microsoft-related application.

• India is not the first country out there that wants to stop being dependent on Windows or other Microsoft products. It’s also not the first one that wants to make its own operating system, but that hasn’t always gone according to plan.

• We’re delighted to announce that after several months of work, a Debian 8 release candidate is finally ready for the Creator Ci20 microcomputer.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• If you thought that the ownCloud Server/Client development was slow and boring, think again, as ownCloud has just announced the release of their first-ever appliance that lets users install ownCloud in virtual machines.

On September 15, Canonical’s Joseph Salisbury brought us the latest news from the last meeting of the Ubuntu Kernel Team, which took place earlier today on the dedicated IRC channel of the project.

• The developers of the Tails GNU/Linux operating system, the amnesic incognito live system used by Edward Snowden to stay invisible online at all times, has announced the release of Tails 1.6.

• Ubuntu developers are already preparing for the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, even if they haven’t even got the 15.10 branch out the door. One of the ways they are doing this is by triaging the bugs that have been gathering dust.

• Just a few minutes ago, September 20, Animesoft International had the great pleasure of informing Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the final release of their Linux Mangaka Mou distribution.

• On the instructions of Chief Justice High Court of J&K N. Paul Vasanthakumar and Justice Mohammad Yaqoob Mir, Chairperson e-Court , High Court of Jammu & Kashmir, Justice Muzaffar Hussain Attar and Justice Tashi Rabstan Members e-Committee, the training on “Ubuntu Linux Awareness-cum -Training Program under Change Management” for the Judicial Officers of Gabderbal, Pulwama, Kupwara and Kargil was conducted.

• Users like to make their Linux distribution look like something else, and Windows is usually a good target, but someone figured out that users might like to experience something from the past and put together a pack that can do just that.

• The main developer of Ubuntu MATE, Martin Wimpress, is experimenting with the Numix icons and themes, and he seems to like the result.

• Jono Bacon, the former Community Manager of Ubuntu, changed tracks last year when he quit Canonical and joined XPRIZE, a company not very well known within open source circles. Even after leaving Canonical, Bacon remained extremely active in the Ubuntu community and is often part of community related events. I met him last year at LinuxCon, just after he joined the XPRIZE Foundation as Senior Director of Community. But those were early days for him settling down at the new company; I met him again at LinuxCon Seattle and we sat down for an interview to understand what an open source guy is doing at this company.

• While digging the Internet, we’ve found a captivating discussion on the Ubuntu Touch mailing list between three Canonical employees who are involved in the development of the Ubuntu for phones mobile operating system.

• Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak has sent in his last report for the week of September 14, informing us all about the work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers for the upcoming OTA-7 software update.

• The Ubuntu Touch platform is getting all kinds of useful apps and it is at the moment much easier to find something you need. For example, there is now an app for cyclists.

• The MX4 Ubuntu Edition from Chinese maker Meizu is the second Ubuntu smartphone to reach the market. Originally released for purchase only by linked request and invitation, the MX4 is now available for regular purchase direct from Meizu’s website at €299 euros (around £220). Note though, that the MX4 Ubuntu Edition is currently only available within the EU.

• One of the features promoted by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, in the Ubuntu for tablets trailer was the ability to multitask between a couple of apps. Lo and behold, the new iPad Pro running iOS 9 features something that is more than similar.

• On September 22, Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the OTA-7 software update.

• Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) is almost here, and users will surely ask what’s new and why they should upgrade from a previous version. Well, it’s not a difficult question to answer, and there is plenty of new stuff in Ubuntu 15.10, albeit not all of it visible.

• Details about a couple of ICU vulnerabilities that have been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been published by Canonical.

• Simon Eisenmann, an independent developer responsible for porting Canonical’s Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system on the ODROID-C1 SBC (Single-Board Computer), is happy to announce the availability of an updated version of the Snappy image for ODROID-C1.

• Canonical, through Alexia Emmanoulopoulou, had the great pleasure of publishing what it appears to be the first ever infographic of the LXD container hypervisor used in the Ubuntu Linux operating system.

• Ubuntu Touch is a Linux distribution, and this becomes all the more obvious when you connect a keyboard to it, and it lets you do Alt-Tab, just like it would happen on a regular desktop, but then again, that’s the whole point.

Devices/Embedded

• SolidRun unveiled a $50 and up “HummingBoard-Gate” SBC for IoT that runs Linux or Android on an i.MX6 SoC, and expands with mikroBUS Click add-on modules.

• The HummingBoard-Gate is SolidRun’s fourth and most affordable community-backed HummingBoard SBC. Like the other HummingBoards, it’s a sandwich-style SBC based on replaceable computer-on-modules running Linux or Android on a Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6 SoC, with a choice of Solo up to Quad models. Key features include support for up to 4GB DDR3 RAM, as well as optional WiFi/Bluetooth, four USB ports, MIPI-DSI and CSI, plus GbE, HDMI, and Mini-PCIe interfaces.

• All you have to do is stick it in a package—a watch, a small gadget on the wall, a light bulb, or whatever your company desires—and you instantly “smartify” your product. This kind of luxury (which wasn’t available even a decade ago) has driven companies to opt for the use of true operating systems on their devices (namely Linux) and to forgo the older, more difficult and less efficient path of direct microcontroller programming with a single “forever” loop and every software aspect done in-house.

• Running this on a machine on my local network is enough to keep the Echo happy, and I can now dim my bedroom light in addition to turning it on or off. But it demonstrates a somewhat awkward situation. Right now vendors have no real incentive to offer any kind of compatibility with each other. Instead they’re all trying to define their own ecosystems with their own incompatible protocols with the aim of forcing users to continue buying from them. Worse, they attempt to restrict developers from implementing any kind of compatibility layers. The inevitable outcome is going to be either stacks of discarded devices speaking abandoned protocols or a cottage industry of developers writing bridge code and trying to avoid DMCA takedowns.

• Cloud Media’s “Open Hour Gecko” is an $89, quad-core Android media player with an optimized Kodi 15 app that supports HD audio passthrough and 4K H.264/265.

• 21 Inc. has launched a Linux and Raspberry Pi based mini-PC with native support for the Bitcoin currency protocol, enabling a Bitcoin micropayments server.

• Since its debut in 2009, the peer-to-peer, open source Bitcoin crypto-currency protocol has continued to gain traction, especially for global transactions, legal and otherwise. Now, Andreessen Horowitz backed startup 21 Inc. has unveiled what it calls the world’s first computer with native hardware and software support for the Bitcoin protocol. The developer-oriented 21 Bitcoin Computer, which is intended primarily as a micropayments platform, is now on pre-sale for $400, with shipments due in November.

• There’s no need to fret over the future of desktop Linux; Raspberry Pi has that covered. It’s expanding the future of Linux in other ways as well. Let me explain.

• At this very moment, thousands of children are hard at work tinkering with wires and connecting circuits to watch lights flicker on and off. They are typing lines of Python and are awestruck as a robotic arm comes to life for the first time. Smiles are widening on each child’s face as new boundaries are being crossed and experiments are taking shape. Linux has brought this joy into the lives of each of these children. How? Through the small but very powerful computer called the Raspberry Pi.

• Qseven co-founder Congatec has just unveiled its first COM built to the 70 x 40mm “µQseven” footprint option introduced by Qseven v2.0 nearly three years ago.

• Despite being among the three principal founders of the Qseven Consortium back in 2008, Congatec has just now gotten around to introducing a module that exploits Qseven v2.0’s 70 x 40mm “µQseven” form factor option that was introduced nearly three years ago.

• VIA revealed its first ARM based computer-on-module: the “QSM-8Q60,” which is also its first COM of any kind to adopt the 70 x 70mm Qseven 2.0 form-factor.

• VIA Technologies has a long history as developer of CPUs and chipset silicon, as the creator of several popular single-board computer standards including Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, and Nano-ITX, and as a manufacturer of SBCs conforming to those formats. Despite its limited success in competing with Intel and AMD in the x86 processor market, VIA continues to fabricate and embed its own, somewhat obscure processors such as the 64-bit x86 architecture-based Isaiah II, and ARM Cortex A9-based processors including the Elite E1000 and WonderMedia WM8950.

• I purchased the original MIPS Creator CI20 and the Raspberry Pi 2 on their release. The CI20, manufactured by Imagination Technologies, had many attractive selling points, not least its built-in connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), its good hardware specifications with 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, 8 GB flash memory, and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU. However, the CI20 has not been, to date, a commercial success like the Pi 2. With so many units sold, the Pi 2 has built a huge community base, driven by some excellent distributions with successive updates. A revised Creator CI20 was released in May, and has an improved layout, but its enhancements were still overshadowed by the slow pace of software development.

Phones

Tizen

• The Tizen 2.4 Beta SDK boasts the addition of over 3,000 new APIs that also brings with it some great functionality that developers are surely going to make use of in their applications. The Tizen 2.4 beta SDK is avabile now to download.

Android

• Google recently issued a patch for Nexus mobile devices to fix an Android Lollipop vulnerability that lets hackers bypass the lockscreen and gain control of mobile devices.

• Without a “Nexus” smartwatch on the market, the Moto 360 has always felt like the flagship device for Android Wear. It was the first watch announced, the first with a (mostly) round display, and it was the best looking of the Android Wear watches for a long time.

• But while on the outside it was the best Android Wear device, on the inside it was the worst one thanks to the seriously dated Texas Instruments OMAP 3 processor. The result was a good-looking, slow smartwatch that would often be dead before the end of the day.

• Exactly seven years ago to the day (September 23rd), Google, after much speculation, finally lifted the lid on its secret project, one which would go onto change the mobile world. Despite the rumors, it wasn’t a brand new smartphone – it was so much more. What it brought to the table was a completely new operating system, which would, in just a few years, become the most dominant force in the mobile and smartphone market. Its name? Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• The board may be reluctant to move away from a big, branded, closed source solution. But the fact is, Open Source Software can now do the same for less.

• A high profile open source project working on software-defined networks has given birth to what could become an important standard for bringing unity to the fragmented Internet of Things.

• As websites and online services become ever more demanding, the need for compression increases exponentially. Fans of Silicon Valley will be aware of the Pied Piper compression algorithm, and now Google has a more efficient one of its own.

• If you type the words ‘open source Splunk’ into Google, you’ll soon find a bunch of articles that talk up the challenge posed to Splunk by cheaper, open source alternatives. One even used the headline “In a world of open source big data, Splunk should not exist”, whilst another says “Splunk feels the heat from stronger, cheaper open source rivals”.

• And it’s true that when you think about big data and the Internet-of-Things (IoT), a number of open source technologies spring to mind. But is Splunk worried?

• Frank Karlitschek founded ownCloud, a personal cloud platform that also happens to be open source, in 2011. Why open source? Frank has some strong opinions about how we host and share our data, and with the recent scrutiny on security and privacy, his thoughts are even more relevant. In this interview, I ask Frank some questions I’ve been wondering about my own personal data as well as how ownCloud might play a role in a more open, yet secure, data future.

• A little history on Frank: He is a long time open source contributor and former board member of the KDE e.V. After 10 years of managing engineering teams, today he is the project leader and maintainer of ownCloud. Additionally he is the co-founder and CTO of ownCloud Inc. which offers ownCloud for enterprises.

• For four years, Garth has been working at Adobe on open source projects as a design and code contributor. These projects include Brackets, Topcoat, and Apache Flex. In addition to his work at Adobe, he also speaks at conferences about the power of design, improving designer/developer collaboration, and the benefits of open source. As part of this effort, Garth founded the Open Design Foundation.

• Facebook this week is open-sourcing Relay, which provides data-fetching for React JavaScript applications. The move could open up new possibilities for the technology, Facebook engineers said.

• Accessible on GitHub, Relay is a JavaScript framework for developing data-driven applications with React, Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces. “Relay is actually intended to build and do for data-fetching what React does for the user interface rendering,” said Tom Occhino, Facebook engineering manager, in an interview at this week’s @scale conference in San Jose, Calif.

• Time to saddle up the rant stallion and take him out of the stable: This comes up from time to time on social media — as it did again several days ago — and it’s really about time it stops.

• Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs died pretty close to each other, time-wise. That may sound like the start of a joke — “Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs meet at the pearly gates, and…” — but we’re not going there today. Many people are under the impression that while Steve Jobs got all the attention as the “messiah of computing” when he died, Dennis Ritchie was completely ignored.

• There was once a time when IT vendors shunned the idea of open source. Why wouldn’t they? The idea of sharing their very own programming innovations with others was viewed as detrimental to any competitive business. But nearly 20 years on, open source is now in vogue and has been embraced by some of the biggest IT vendors and their clients. So what changed? We find out.

• There can be several reasons to resort to open source software solutions. Sometimes, it’s simply the only suitable offering out there. Others, it’s the best of its breed. And when expense is an issue, you can’t beat a zero dollar price tag. In any case, open source is an option you can’t ignore.

• As regular readers know, we’ve lived in a post-MS Office world for a while now. Free office suite LibreOffice does all we want and its Writer module works better than Word. Version 5, released last month, introduces a better organised command centre, Windows 10 compatibility, a style preview panel, short codes that enable quick insertion of emojis and other symbols and the ability to crop images inside the word processor.

• Whether all these new features matter to every user is not the point. The point is that LibreOffice develops under democratic principles, where users can vote on the features they want most. And since the development team has no commercial reason to hold back new features to maximise the profitability of older versions, enhancements flow through shortly after they’re ready.

• We are three students in the Bachelor of Computer Science second degree program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). As we each have cooperative education experience, our technical ability and contributions have increasingly become a point of focus as we approach graduation. Our past couple of years at UBC have allowed us to produce some great technical content, but we all found ourselves with one component noticeably absent from our resumes: an open source contribution. While the reasons for this are varied, they all stem from the fact that making a contribution involves a set of skills that goes far beyond anything taught in the classroom or even learned during an internship. It requires a person to be outgoing with complete strangers, to be proactive in seeking out problems to solve, and to have effective written communication.

• Small businesses and start-ups are always on the lookout for ways to save money on new and expensive services. Many budget-minded small businesses are returning to the days of hands-on and in-house to keep costs down, and the many open source tools available today can help do just that.

• Academia is an excellent platform for training and preparing the open source developers of tomorrow. In research, we occasionally open source software we write. We do this for two reasons. One, to promote the use of the tools we produce. And two, to learn more about the impact and issues other people face when using them. With this background of writing research software, I was tasked with redesigning the undergraduate software engineering course for second-year students at the University of Bradford.

• Use of free and open source software could help India save more than Rs 8,300 crore in government expenses on education and police only, says a new study, vindicating the Centre’s move to promote such software as part of its Digital India initiative.

• Schools and other institutions could save an estimated Rs 8,254 crore by adopting free and open source software (FOSS) while police departments could save about Rs 51.20 crore, said a study led by Rahul De, Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

• While DriveAI’s work is coming on a much smaller scale than the tech giants of the world, its members take pride in one key aspect: The entire project is open-source.

• The team regularly posts updates on its progress and snags. Anyone can view the DriveAI source code and provide input or suggest changes.

• While other self-driving car divisions and companies are protecting their work behind lock and key, DriveAI’s project will be free for anyone to apply and use for their own work.

• “Google’s going to write a bunch of proprietary code. All these car manufacturers are going to write their own proprietary code,” team member Parth Mehrotra said. “It’s a lot of wasted effort if everybody does the same thing again and again.

• “If ours isn’t up to par or where the industry wants the technology to be, they can contribute the manpower to it,” he said.

• An open-source project allows researchers across the globe to weigh in and suggest changes to the software. The company has already addressed issues raised by someone with a master’s degree in computer science who simply read over the source code.

• “What good is all of this technology if people can’t access it or have control over it?” Shoyoye said. “What good is collecting data if you can’t analyze it? People around the world can analyze this in real time and understand how autonomous vehicles are working in real time. That can only propel it forward.”

• Most people realize that computers aren’t going to go away any time soon. That doesn’t mean that people have to put up with these deceptions and intrusions on our lives.

• For years, many leading experts in the software engineering world have been promoting the benefits and principles of free software.

• What we mean by free is that users, regulators and other independent experts should have the freedom to see and modify the source code in the equipment that we depend on as part of modern life. In fact, experts generally agree that there is no means other than software freedom to counter the might of corporations like Volkswagen and their potential to misuse that power, as demonstrated in the emissions testing scandal.

• If Governments and regulators want to be taken seriously and protect society, isn’t it time that they insisted that the car industry replaces all hidden code with free and open source software?

Events

• The Imagination backed Prpl Foundation announced a free OpenWrt Summit to be held in Dublin on Oct. 8, and co-located with Embedded Linux Conference Europe.

• I attended this year’s mrmcd, a cozy conference in Darmstadt, Germany. As in the previous years, it’s a 350 people event with a relaxed atmosphere. I really enjoy going to these mid-size events with a decent selection of talks and attentive guests.

• FOSDEM and SCALE are respectively Europe and North America’s biggest FOSS events and, of course, we’d love to run a booth there again. We had a good time last year, just check out see my overview blog and detailed blogs about FOSDEM and SCALE. It is time to start preparing again to have as much fun and impact as last year!

• systemd.conf 2015 is close to being sold out, there are only 14 tickets left now. If you haven’t bought your ticket yet, now is the time to do it, because otherwise it will be too late and all tickets will be gone!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The latest Firefox update is now available. This release includes minor updates to personalize your Firefox Account and adds a new functionality to Firefox Hello Beta.

• Firefox Accounts provides access to services like Firefox Sync to let you take browsing data such as passwords, bookmarks, history and open tabs across your desktop and mobile devices. The latest update to Firefox Accounts allows you to personalize your Firefox Account profile in Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android by adding a photo.

• The latest version of the Firefox browser – Firefox 41 – has been released by Mozilla for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.

• The new release includes updates which allow users to personalise their Firefox account, so they can share web browsing data such as passwords, bookmarks, history, and open tabs across their desktop and mobile devices. It also lets users add a photo to their account.

• Now that Mozilla has officially released the Mozilla Firefox 41.0 web browser for all GNU/Linux distributions, but also for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, the time has come to update it on your favorite OS.

• Mozilla has just released the stable version of Firefox 41, bringing some pretty cool features like the ability to set up a profile picture for the Firefox account and some memory improvements for AdBlock Plus.

• Now that Mozilla released version 41.0 of its widely used, open-source and cross-platform web browser for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems, the time has come to inform you guys about the upcoming features of Firefox 42.0.

• Mozilla Firefox 42.0 has entered development, with a first Beta build released on September 23, and the first set of features to be implemented in the final version of the software have already been revealed. Among them we can mention GTK3 integration for GNU/Linux systems and one-click muting of audio on active tabs via a new indicator.

SaaS/Big Data

• The year 2016 will see Americans lining up to elect their new president. While passion and sentiments will dictate the outcome of the elections on the surface, deep down, modern technology will be at play, helping determine who will be the next president. These elections will harness the power of Big Data on a scale never done before. We have already seen the role that Big Data played in 2012 elections, and it’s only going to get bigger. This Big Data revolution is led by, as expected, open source and Apache Hadoop, in particular.

Databases

• Avi Kivity is well-known in the open-source and Linux communities as the original lead developer of the widely deployed KVM hypervisor. In 2012, Kivity started a company called Cloudius Systems, which develops the OSv operating system for the cloud. Today, Cloudius is being rebranded and refocused under the name ScyllaDB.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation has released the second Release Candidate for LibreOffice 5.0.2, the upcoming maintenance version for the 5.0 branch of the office suite.

Funding

• With a new version of its product in the offing and $4 million in Series A funding in its pocket, GitLab — creator of an open source alternative to code-hosting nexus GitHub — is setting out to expand its reach with enterprise customers.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• It’s 30 years of GNU — 30 years of freedom and 30 years of owning one’s computers. I can’t imagine a life where I don’t have control over the software I run. I’m going to be eternally thankful to RMS and Linus for starting the mass movements that have not only transformed an entire industry, but also shaped my thinking and my career.

Openness/Sharing

• Autodesk has open sourced the electronics and firmware of its resin- and DLP-based Ember 3D printer, revealing it to run Linux on a BeagleBone Black clone.

• In releasing the design of its Ember 3D Printer under open source licensing, Autodesk has revealed a mainboard that runs Linux on a customized spin-off of the BeagleBone Black hacker SBC. In March, the company published the recipe for the printer’s “PR48” Standard Clear Prototyping resin, and in May, it followed through by open sourcing its mechanical files. As promised, Autodesk has now opened up the BeagleBone Black based electronics and firmware.

• As with the previous releases Ember’s electronics and firmware are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and licensed under GNU GPL. Most of the newly released specs are, frankly, far above my head, but they do reveal some interesting information about the advanced 3D printer. The main control board is a very heavily modified version of a standard BeagleBone Black, a low-cost development board that should be relatively simple for anyone to get their hands on. Using relatively easy to source parts is an ideal scenario for developers looking to incorporate Autodesk printing technology into their own 3D printers. This sends a pretty clear signal that Autodesk really is committed to helping the entire 3D printing industry grow.

• We have started a dozen days of research for “ZeMarmot” Open Movie. By this, we mean we are going for a trip to the Alps, where we we will stalk cool marmots! Our goal is to get photos, videos and sounds, of marmots, other animal and awesome mountain landscapes. These will be used for reference for the animation film, to study marmot behavioral patterns, movements, get ideas, and so on.

• This certification process means creators must register their project, but it’s free to enter. In the first proposal for the Open Hardware Certification, there was discussion about distinct levels of certification, like ‘Open Bronze’. ‘Open Silver’ and ‘Open Gold’. This was ultimately not implemented, and there is only one level of the Open Hardware Certification.

Open Data

• OpenTransportNet aims to change the way Europe’s public administrations create and manage transport services. The consortium wants to make geospatial information easily accessible and encourage anyone to use it, and create new, innovative services.

• Combing through records spanning over 3.5 billion years, scientists 11 institutions have complied a ‘tree of life’ that includes the approximately 2.3 million known species of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes.

Programming

• The issue of software freedom is, not surprisingly, not mentioned in the mainstream coverage of Volkswagen’s recent use of proprietary software to circumvent important regulations that exist for the public good. Given that Volkswagen is an upstream contributor to Linux, it’s highly likely that Volkswagen vehicles have Linux in them.

• Thus, we have a wonderful example of how much we sacrifice at the altar of “Linux adoption”. While I’m glad for some Free Software to appear in products rather than none, I also believe that, too often, our community happily accepts the idea that we should gratefully laud a company includes a bit of Free Software in their product, and gives a little code back, even if most of what they do is proprietary software.

• “I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,” Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said in a statement Monday, addressing the so-called “defeat device” software the automaker built into its vehicles to deceive US air pollution tests. “We will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused.”

• In February, while coworking at the Open Internet Tools Project, I got to talking with Gus Andrews about face-to-face tech events. Specifically, when distributed people who make software together have a chance to get together in person, how can we best use that time? Gus took a bunch of notes on my thoughts, and gave me a copy.

• Dancer is a lightweight web application framework for Perl, inspired by the Sinatra framework in Ruby. Dancer bills itself as simple and flexible, but powerful enough to run most any web application you can think up.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Hewlett-Packard will shed as many as 30,000 more jobs as it splits into two companies, the company said at a meeting with analysts in San Jose, Calif.

• Tim Stonsifer, the incoming CFO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the company devoted to corporate computing that will emerge from the split on Nov. 1, announced the reductions as part of his presentation on guidance. The restructuring will include a $2.7 billion charge.

Security

• Out of thousands of websites infected through the new campaign, the security researchers say 95 percent of them rely on WordPress — and 17 percent of them have already been blacklisted by Google.

• Webmasters should make sure their plugins are all up-to-date to prevent exposure and blacklisting by the web’s most popular search engine.

• SecuriLabs has also provided a scanner for webmasters to check the health of their domains.

• For the past seven years, a cyber-espionage group operating out of Russia—and apparently at the behest of the Russian government—has conducted a series of malware campaigns targeting governments, political think tanks, and other organizations. In a report issued today, researchers at F-Secure provided an in-depth look at an organization labelled by them as “the Dukes,” which has been active since at least 2008 and has evolved into a methodical developer of “zero-day” attacks, pulling together their own research with the published work of other security firms to provide a more detailed picture of the people behind a long-running family of malware.

• A cyber security researcher has uncovered a significant vulnerability present within a library in iOS. When exploited, an attacker has the means to overwrite arbitrary files and insert a signed applications on a targeted device.

• One of the longest-held beliefs is that the Linux desktop comes with invulnerable and foolproof security system.

• A close examination of the security system indicates that this might not be the case after all. The desktop running on Linux Operating System needs enhanced protection to provide it with excellent security and ensure that it can withstand the most vicious attacks from the latest and highly potent malware as well as viruses and spyware of today.

• Apple has removed malware-infected apps from the App Store after acknowledging its first sustained security breach. The malware, known as XcodeGhost, worked its way into several apps by convincing developers to use a modified version of Xcode, the software used to create iOS and Mac software.

• “We’ve removed the apps from the App Store that we know have been created with this counterfeit software,” Apple spokesperson Christine Monaghan told Reuters. “We are working with the developers to make sure they’re using the proper version of Xcode to rebuild their apps.”

• Although this seemed quite weird to some people, it has become a reason for more and more attention to be drawn to some of the best ways to protect your Linux workstation, even if most IT experts do not welcome all recommendations the checklist has.

• Konstantin Ryabitsev who is the director of collaborative IT services of the foundation created this list for all the users of LF remote sysadmins. This was done to make sure their laptops were always safe against all illegal attacks. Nevertheless, the foundation has not demanded for universal adoptions of the list.

• When the U.S. Department of Commerce proposed a rule to regulate the international trade and sharing of “intrusion software,” worried security firms immediately went on the defense.

• Industry giants, such as Symantec and FireEye, teamed up with well-known technology firms, such as Cisco and Google, to criticize the regulations. The proposed rules, published in May, would cause “significant unintended consequences” that would “negatively impact—rather than improve—the state of cyber-security,” Cisco stated in a letter to the Commerce Dept.’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).

• Security researchers have both good and bad news about the recently reported outbreak of XcodeGhost apps infecting Apple’s App Store. The bad: the infection was bigger than previously reported and dates back to April. The good: affected apps are more akin to adware than security-invading malware.

• Exploit traders Zerodium will pay a million dollars to anyone who finds an unpatched bug in iOS 9 that can be exploited to jailbreak iThings – or compromise them.

• The $1m (£640,000) bounty will be awarded to an individual or team that provides a working exploit to achieve remote code execution on an iOS device via the Safari or Chrome browsers or through an SMS/MMS message.

• This exploit could be combined with other exploitable vulnerabilities to perform an untethered jailbreak on an iPhone or iPad, allowing fans to install any applications they want on their gadgets – particularly software not available on Apple’s App Store.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• During normal driving, the cars with the software — known as a “defeat device” — would pollute 10 times to 40 times the legal limits, the EPA estimated. The discrepancy emerged after the International Council on Clean Transportation commissioned real-world emissions tests of diesel vehicles including a Jetta and Passat, then compared them to lab results.

Finance

• Digital currencies have been granted the status of an official commodity by the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which said that bitcoin operators must immediately ensure that their companies are legally registered under the applicable trading laws and regulations.

• I found out about this through Paul Krugman, and if you’re a regular reader of Krugman’s columns and blog, not much here will be a surprise. Baker and Bernstein are advocating what I would call conventional-liberal economic policy by US standards (which means that it’s not really that liberal). The short version is that full employment is vital for improving the economic position of the average person, inflation is nowhere near as much of a risk as people claim, and the best economic action the US government can take at present is to aggressively pursue a full employment strategy without worrying excessively about inflation.

Censorship

• France’s data protection watchdog has rejected an appeal by Google against a decision ordering the internet giant to comply with users’ requests to have information about them removed from all search results.

• Since a European Court of Justice ruling in May 2014 recognising the “right to be forgotten” on the net, Google users can ask the search engine to remove results about them that are no longer relevant.

• However, Google ran into trouble in France over the fact that while it removes these references from its results in searches made in Google.fr or other European extensions, it refuses to do so on Google.com and elsewhere.

Privacy

• My opinion on advertising sours greatly when it comes to the topic of tracking and targeting, which I believe is overstepping the line from advertising to stalking. I don’t like going onto Amazon and finding whatever I looked at spilled over to other sites I visit. I’m disturbed when I use a Google service to realise later I’ll be inundated and pressured into purchasing something until my next pushable product becomes apparent. It’s like browsing physical store to find several random people have followed you back out, taking notes on everything you do and observing where else you’ll go – in the real world those people would be arrested for stalking, how is it acceptable online?

• The Indian government has published a draft of its latest plans for encryption. The proposals spell bad news for domestic software developers and will make other companies looking to do business in the subcontinent very nervous indeed.

• The new National Encryption Policy [PDF] proposed by the nation’s Department of Electronics and Information Technology states that the government will require applications using encryption to store plain text versions of all data for 90 days so that they can be examined by the police if need be.

• “On demand, the user shall be able to reproduce the same plain text and encrypted text pairs using the software/hardware used to produce the encrypted text from the given plain text,” the proposed rules read.

• The Skype service is currently down in some countries and Microsoft says that it’s already aware of the problem and a fix is on its way.

• The TL;DR of that article is this: encryption you don’t control is not a security feature. It’s great that Apple implemented encryption in their messaging software but since the user has no control over the implementation or the keys (especially the key distribution, management, and trust) users shouldn’t expect this type of encryption system to actually protect them.

Civil Rights

• The establishment’s Plan A had been to stop Jeremy Corbyn. Up against three technocrats of the political center, Corbyn—who has run nothing bigger than the planning committee of a town council, though he has been a member of Parliament since 1983—won 60 percent on the first ballot, becoming the new leader of the UK’s Labour Party.

• Plan B had been to hamstring Corbyn if he won by withholding support from Tony Blairite, centrist, pro-Nato, pro-business members of Parliament. Corbyn would be the floundering figurehead for 18 months before returning to business as usual. But 60 percent—from a membership swelled to half a million during Corbyn’s barnstorming summer—gives you a crushing mandate.

• Sixty percent gives you permission to appoint the hardest-left MP in Parliament as your shadow finance minister and put a vegan in charge of handling the farming lobby. Even as the right-wing press derided the mild-mannered and bearded Corbyn as a “weaponized lentil,” the shock was setting in. Corbyn wants to nationalize the railways and energy companies, use quantitative easing to fund public spending, scrap Britain’s nuclear weapons and student tuition fees. He is a lifelong anti-imperialist and supporter of Palestinian liberation. For the first time in 80 years, the establishment does not control the Labour Party.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Over the last few weeks a discussion has flourished over the FCC’s Notification of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on modular transmitters and electronic labels for wireless devices. Some folks have felt that the phrasing has been too Chicken-Little-like and that the FCC’s proposal doesn’t affect the ability to install free, libre or open source operating system. The FCC in fact says their proposal has no effect on open source operating systems or open source in general. The FCC is undoubtedly wrong.

• Growth in the number of people with access to the Internet is slowing, and more than half the world’s population is still offline, the United Nations Broadband Commission said on Monday.

• Internet access in rich economies is reaching saturation levels but 90 percent of people in the 48 poorest countries have none, its report said.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Warner/Chappell Music’s claim to the 120-year-old song wasn’t legal, therefore freeing it from copyright. The ruling came amid a lawsuit challenging Warner/Chappell’s attempt to fine a group of filmmakers $1,500 for the song’s use.

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