● 08.13.16

● Links 13/8/2016: Plasma 5.8 LTS, Alpine Linux 3.4.3

Posted in News Roundup at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Server

Kernel Space

• It has been confirmed that Linux kernel 4.9 release will be the next LTS kernel branch. This Long Term Release is expected to receive fixes and updates for a couple of years. If everything goes as expected, kernel 4.9 will arrive towards the end of November 2016.

Graphics Stack

• It has been less than one week since the Linux 4.8-rc1 release and already Intel OTC developers have sent in their first batch of updates to DRM-Next for in turn landing with Linux 4.9.

Applications

• Youker Assistant is Linux system maintenance software built by Ubuntu Kylin, an official Ubuntu subproject for chinese users. Youker assistant helps maintain system by cleaning system trash files, cache, cookies and all other history trace. There are couple of more built-in tools in Youker Assistant.

• Ardour 5.0 is now available for Linux, OS X and Windows. This is a major release focused on substantial changes to the GUI and major new features related to mixing, plugin use, tempo maps, scripting and more. As usual, there are also hundreds of bug fixes. Ardour 5.0 can be parallel-installed with older versions of the program, and does not use the same preference files. It will load sessions from Ardour 2, 3 and 4, though with some potential minor changes.

Proprietary

• Whenever I write about Microsoft’s change in attitude toward Linux, I get pushback from a segment of the Linux user community. That makes me wonder if it’s really ‘okay’ to use Microsoft products on Linux. If not, why?

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Earlier this week the deferred flushes change landed in Radeon Gallium3D code for reportedly offering 23%+ performance improvements in BioShock Infinite as one example. I’ve tested out BioShock Infinite and other changes to confirm the performance differences.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Development on KDE Plasma 5.8 continues to move along with the feature freeze for it being next month. Plasma 5.8 when released in October is going to be the first Long-Term Support (LTS) release of Plasma 5.

• Plasma 5.8.0 is expected for release on 18 October while the feature freeze and beta release is due for 29 September. With some weeks to go until that freeze, developers are quickly working on the changes they’d like to see for this next version.

• Plasma 5.8 will be our first long term support release of Plasma 5 and together with Qt 5.6 also being an LTS release this makes for a rock-solid combo. Let’s have a look at some of the tweaks I did on the occasion.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• So if you are around Karlsruhe (Germany), do not hesitate to come by (GUADEC is a free GNOME event) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Otherwise, you can see us on the live streaming of the event (direct link for live streaming) and the recording will remain viewable afterwards from the CCC streaming website.

Distributions

• For those that may be interested in the Clear Linux distribution for improved performance or other innovative functionality, the third “Clear Linux Highlights” newsletter has been published to share more of the recent changes to this Linux distribution out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.

• Recent changes to Clear Linux include making HTTP/2 the default Internet protocol, both for client and server components packaged by Clear Linux — just not any web browser default.

New Releases

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.4.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

• This is a bugfix release of the v3.4 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.17 kernels.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The wait is over for those of us who appreciate the hard work of the developers at OpenMandriva: today, this blog announces that the new release is ready!

• OpenMandriva Lx 3 comes with KDE Plasma 5.6.5, three launchers (Kickoff, Kicker, and a full screen one) and F2FS support for SDDs.

• Work on the RC1/RC2 releases has further improved stability and performance. We have now support for the Japanese and Chinese languages so we would really welcome any feedback from those who speak them.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• It appears that SUSE and the OpenStack company Mirantis have teamed up to pull a play from the Oracle playbook. The deal brings full enterprise Linux support to Mirantis’s OpenStack customers which is not limited to SLED but includes full support for RHEL and CentOS. Maybe that plan will work better for them than it did for Oracle.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• Fedora developers have been working to come up with a schedule for Fedora 26 to succeed the November release of Fedora 25.

• The current proposed schedule has the mass rebuild happening in January, an alpha release at the end of February, the beta release middle of April, and the official Fedora 26 release on 16 May.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu-Next images are being prepared that shift this Ubuntu derivative from using the lightweight LXDE desktop to using the newer LXQt desktop.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

• DataWind launched the PocketSurfer GZ in India for Rs 1,499. DataWind has partnered with Reliance Communication to offer free internet on the device for a year. The device ships with the Linux Operating System. There are no details on specifications as of now.

Tizen

• Here we have a list of the Top 20 most downloaded apps / games from Tizen Store in july for Samsung Z1 and Z3 smartphones. At the top we have WhatsApp which is still holding its number one place followed by ShareIt and a new game Candy Rain 3, which is similar to the famous Candy Crush game. Another new one is Yoddha: Deva Sangram which is a role playing game which was exclusively launched for Tizen devices.

Android

• Chinese technology company LeEco might be slowly inching toward a U.S. launch sometime this fall, but that does not mean it will sit on its laurels until then. On the contrary, LeEco is rumored to be launching the Le 2S, which is seemingly a refreshed version of the Le 2 and the first Android phone to include a whopping 8GB RAM.

• You did not read that wrong — according to GizChina, the Le 2S will include 8GB RAM, practically unheard of in the Android world. As we have seen with Samsung’s 2015 flagship phones and the OnePlus 3, however, the RAM amount does not matter as much as how it is utilized. Even so, the 8GB RAM will finally turn our dream of playing five games at the same time a reality.

Free Software/Open Source

• Almost two years ago, we covered the Flow Home launcher as a rather innovative take on the Android home screen. It gave you the things you usually want to check on your phone – Facebook feed, Twitter, Instagram, the weather – and put it together in a kind of timeline flow. At its time, it was a totally new thing.

• As the whole Android ecosystem has moved forward in over 2 years, we’ve realized that people kind of want to stay with a standard home launcher – this is why the successful launchers like Nova and Action Launcher don’t change a lot in the basic Android proposition for a home screen. HTC’s Blinkfeed – quite similar to Flow Home – has gotten a small following, but like Flow Home it hasn’t quite caught the masses’ attention.

• Following on from Facebook’s decision to override users’ ad blocking tools, Adblock Plus has fired one more shot, saying that it will continue the fight for the right to an ad-free social networking experience.

• After finding a way to prevent Facebook blocking ads, which Facebook then bypassed once again, Adblock Plus says that while the game of cat and mouse may continue, it wants to use what it describes as “probably be the last time we talk about it for a while” to say that the open source community will fight the good fight for users.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• ozilla plans to support plugin-free streaming on Netflix and Amazon Video on Firefox for Linux starting with version 49 stable of the browser.

• The streaming world is slowly moving towards using HTML5 for streaming purposes and away from using plugins such as Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash.

• Way Cooler is another project to add to the list of interesting Wayland compositors / window managers from the futuristic NEMO-UX to Swap to many others.

• Way Cooler advertises itself as a tiling window manager written in Rust and targeting Wayland. Similar to Sway, Way Cooler features i3-style tiling. This new open-source project also has client application support via an IPC, a Lua scripting environment to extend the window manager, and there is support for XWayland X11 programs.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Besides the Free Software Foundation issuing their first-ever annual report this week, The Document Foundation has come out this week as well with their 2015 annual report.

• Their annual report covers new advisory board members, the releases made by LibreOffice over the course of the year, financials, conferences / events, and more.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Public Services/Government

• With the presidential election season upon us, I’m often asked whether the U.S. government efforts to encourage use of open source software (OSS) will continue when a new administration comes into office in January.

• As I’ve written before, there has been a shift, going back almost a decade, away from the debate over whether to use open source to a focus on the how to. The release by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the U.S. Federal Source Code Policy on August 8th is the latest manifestation of this shift. It achieves the goal laid out in the Obama administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan (PDF) for improved access to custom software code developed for the federal government. The plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing “default to open” objective going back to the early days of the administration.

• The recent announcement of a new policy framework providing guidance to public agencies on the licensing of open source software (OSS) will lead to better results across government and industry by enabling more collaboration. The policy is significant as it increases the likelihood of future government web services being developed using open source code and allowing external parties to copy, adapt or integrate their features. It will drive more efficient use of public money, more integrated government web services, local innovation and economic growth. However, perhaps most remarkable is the transparent and collaborative online consultation and drafting process through which this ambitious idea became a robust policy in less than a year.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• With an incredibly important national election coming up, it’s more critical than ever that everyone who can vote does — and is able to. Election tech firm Free and Fair is hoping to help avoid overflowing voting locations with a simple, open source device that automatically monitors waiting times and keeps voters and officials informed.

• Free and Fair creates open source software for polling places, from checking in voters to actually taking and tallying votes — but Qubie is the company’s first original hardware, created for the Hackaday Prize. Founder Daniel Zimmerman explained that it was just another aspect of the voting process that struck them as out of date.

• “In the last few elections there have been reports of long queue times, people giving up and going home,” he told TechCrunch. “Election technology is in a pretty sorry state — we thought it’d be nice to gather data on that rather than anecdotes.”

Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

• As many of my readers have probably figured out, I am a fan of the stuff that’s “out there.” You don’t even have to use it. It doesn’t need to be something that will necessarily set the world on fire. If there’s passion in its development and design, I’m pretty much on board. And I can’t wait to try it.

• To understand the philosophy behind Haiku, it’s a good idea to examine the word. Of course, it is the Japanese word referring to a short poem in which you have two philosophical, often conflicting, elements. It is also defined as the essence of the act of cutting, which is translated as the Japanese word “kiru”. No, I don’t speak Japanese but I really, really like sushi; and that has nothing to do with anything.

• Chances are, I can name five tech devices that are in your home — or pocket — right now. That’s because about half of all U.S. households today own at least one television, smartphone, tablet and laptop/desktop.

• Collectively, these five consumer technology product categories have represented more than 40 percent of industry revenue since 2011 — and more than 50 percent in the past four years.

• But the products we own and the ways we use them are changing.

Hardware

• For a corporate desktop PC I think the ideal design would have only M.2 internal storage and no support for 3.5″ disks or a DVD drive. That would allow a design that is much smaller than a current SFF PC.

Security

• The White House unveils a new open source government policy and new research estimates the government’s zero-day exploit stockpile to be smaller than expected.

• The idea of governments releasing their proprietary code isn’t some pipe dream, it’s slowly becoming a reality in many countries and starting a much needed public discussion in others. Governments around the world are beginning to understand that their software is funded by the public, and therefore belongs to the public and should be accessible for their use. Bulgaria just passed a law which mandates that all code written for the government must be released as open source. Similarly, the United States is starting a 3-year pilot requiring all US agencies to release at least 20% of all federally-funded custom code as open source. France, Norway, Brazil and other countries have also initiated their own government open source programs to ensure more government funded code will be released as open source.

• Seven autonomous supercomputers faced off against each other in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) event on the first day of the DEFCON security conference. In the end, a system known as ‘Mayhem’ won the $2 million grand prize and in the process helped solve a decade-old security challenge that revolved around detecting a particular type of vulnerability.

• Mike Walker, the DARPA program manager responsible for CGC, commented during a press conference that some bugs are so well known that they become famous. One such example is CrackAddr, the name of a function that can split up parts of an email address.

• In other words, VW created a backdoor, and assumed that it would remain hidden. But it did not.

• This is exactly the kind of point that we’ve been making about the problems of requiring any kind of backdoor and not enabling strong encryption. Using a single encryption key across every device is simply bad security. Forcing any kind of backdoor into any security system creates just these kinds of vulnerabilities — and eventually someone’s going to figure out how they work.

• On a related note, the article points out that the researchers who found this vulnerability are the same ones who also found another vulnerability a few years ago that allowed them to start the ignition of a bunch of VW vehicles. And VW’s response… was to sue them and try to keep the vulnerability secret for nearly two years. Perhaps, rather than trying to sue these researchers, they should have thrown a bunch of money at them to continue their work, alert VW and help VW make their cars safer and better protected.

• The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.

• There was a catalyst that convinced me to finally speak up. I heard a talk today from a company representative of a software supplier for the automotive industry. He said during his talk: “putting GPLv3 software in cars will kill people” and “opening up the source code to cars will cause more harm than good”. These statements are completely disingenuous. Most importantly, it ignores the fact that proprietary software in cars is at least equally, if not more, dangerous. At least one person has already been killed in a crash while using a proprietary software auto-control system. Volkswagen decided to take a different route; they decided to kill us all slowly (rather than quickly) by using proprietary software to lie about their emissions and illegally polluting our air.

• Meanwhile, there has been not a single example yet about use of GPLv3 software that has harmed anyone. If you have such an example, email it to me and I promise to add it right here to this blog post.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• That has changed. With the publication of e-mails expressly aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, WikiLeaks has shifted from a global platform for whistleblowers to something less exalted—and lately, a bit strange. Julian Assange, the site’s founder, hinted darkly in a Dutch television interview on Tuesday that a young Democratic National Committee staffer who had been murdered in Washington on July 10 had been killed because he had provided information to WikiLeaks, which posted a $20,000 reward for information on the July 10 death of Seth Rich. “Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks,” Assange said. “There’s a 27-year-old who works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington.”

• It’s time for new revelations now. All of you may have heard about the DCCC hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach.

• As you see the U.S. presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role. Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders.

• I wonder what happened to the true democracy, to the equal opportunities, the things we love the United States for. The big money bags are fighting for power today. They are lying constantly and don’t keep their word. The MSM are producing tons of propaganda hiding the real stuff behind it. But I do believe that people have right to know what’s going on inside the election process in fact.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

• The recent hacking attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, allegedly commissioned by the Russian government, have made cyber security a hot-button issue once again. And according to security blogger Bruce Schneier, America’s voting machines may be next.

• On the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, The Verge reporter Russell Brandom joined Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode to explain how these hacks occurred and what happens if Schneier’s nightmare scenario comes true.

• “You’re not hacking Bank of America, where someone has spent a lot of money to make sure that no one can get into that,” Brandom said. “I’m worried about voting machines just not working. I don’t know if it’s extremely likely, but the results would be so catastrophic to the body politic.”

• The scary problem, Brandom said, is that we might not be able to say with 100 percent confidence that a hack had really happened.

• Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.

• No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, were sucking up to criminals.

• Trump, who at the time was a major casino operator, appeared before a panel on Indian gaming with a prepared statement that was level-headed and raised regulatory concerns in a mature way. But, in his opening words, Trump announced that his written speech was boring, so he went off-script, even questioning the heritage of some Native American casino operators, saying they “don’t look like Indians” and launching into a tirade about “rampant” criminal activities on reservations.

• On Friday, the online persona behind a high-profile hack of the Democratic National Committee took credit for a separate breach of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. To prove they were responsible, the leaker known as Guccifer 2.0 published a massive amount of personal information belonging to hundreds of Democratic representatives.

Censorship/Free Speech

• One of the most vital duties of a journalist — in any democracy — is to report on the day-to-day operations of a country’s parliament. Journalism schools devote much time to teaching the deciphering budgets and legal language, and how to report fairly on political divides and debates.

• I recalled these studies when I read an email Wednesday morning from an Ankara-based colleague. I smiled bitterly. The message included a link to an article published in the Gazete Duvar, which informed that 200 journalists had been barred from entering the home of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Security controls at the two entrances of the failed-coup-damaged building had been intensified and journalists were checked against a list as they tried to enter.

• The reason for the bans? Most of those who were blocked worked for shuttered or seized outlets alleged to be affiliated with the Gülenist movement.

• Parliament, though severely damaged by bombing during the night of the coup attempt, is still open. For any professional colleague, these sanctions mean only one thing: journalism is now at the absolute mercy of the authorities who will define its limits and content.

• In a massive development set to rock the Censor Board and the film industry, the monitoring body is likely to be stripped off its ‘censoring’ powers and will be left only with the authority to ‘certify’.

• According to Information and Broadcasting (I&B) sources, the ministry is working on major changes in the Cinematography Act and the bill will be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.

• In the wake of the recent furore by the film industry under Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) Chairperson Pahlaj Nihalani, the government has expressed its desire to avoid any further controversies.

• Sources further stated the entire film certification process will be reworked and changed, adding there will be two committees: one for reviewing and the other for monitoring.

• Twitter has made a name for itself as a champion of free speech around the world. Following the recent coup attempt in Turkey, however, something has changed in the way it approaches censorship, and the company refuses to talk about it.

• Twitter’s policy toward Turkey—limited “censoring to avoid a ban”—puts the company between a rock and a hard place: If Twitter does not comply with Turkey’s ever-increasing censorship requests to silence dissidents, it may face a nationwide ban that silences everyone. But this bullying has just gained more ground against press freedoms in Turkey with Twitter censoring journalists’ accounts that Turkish government wants banned.

Privacy/Surveillance

• At what ought to have been the height of preparations for the 2016 census, its head, Duncan Young, sent his colleagues in the Bureau of Statistics executive a crisis memo.

• “As most of you are aware, the census program has alerted its steering committee and board that it has assessed its status as RED,” he wrote in February.

• We know what automatic license plate readers are good for: collecting massive amounts (billions of records) of plate/location data housed by private companies and accessed by law enforcement for indefinite periods of time. What we don’t know is how effective ALPRs are at fighting/investigating crime.

• George Joseph at Citylab has done some digging into the effectiveness of license plate readers and hasn’t found much that justifies the expense, much less the constant compilation of plate info.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The year 2016 is only a couple of hours old when the orgy in Jacob Appelbaum’s apartment in a pre-World War II building in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district really gets going.

• Somebody has unfolded the sofa in the living room. Two couples are having sex at the same time in the room. Some guests had already taken synthetic party drug MDMA, which induces a state of euphoria and increases the need for emotional warmth, at another party. A third couple is going at it in the bedroom. Later, a crime allegedly took place in Mr. Appelbaum’s bed or on the fold-out sofa.

• [...]

• Among others, there is an account by a woman who calls herself “Forest.” She tells of how she found herself forced to repulse his insistent advances. When she has assumed that everything had been cleared up in a friendly manner between them, she spent the night in Mr. Appelbaum’s apartment and slept next to him in bed.

• Forest writes that at apparently, some point she woke up to find that Mr. Appelbaum had unzipped her pants and stuck his finger in her underwear. She wrote that she tried to wake him, but he then rolled over. When the woman angrily confronted Mr. Appelbaum about it later, she claimed he made the terse excuse that he had dreamed that his fiancée was lying next to him.

• Lawyers for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held prisoner by the Taliban for nearly five years after abandoning a remote Army outpost in Afghanistan and faces criminal charges for leaving his unit, on Friday accused his top commander of burning more than 100 letters regarding the case.

• The defense, in a court motion, asked a judge to remove Gen. Robert Abrams from the case and to cancel a scheduled Feb. 6 trial because Abrams told Bergdahl’s defense team Monday that he burned the letters, which were sent to him by supporters and detractors of their client.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• For over a decade, I’ve blogged about 1-800 Contacts’ campaign to suppress competitive keyword advertising, including its legislative games (e.g., those times when 1-800 Contacts asked the Utah legislature to ban competitive keyword advertising) and at least 15 lawsuits against competitors costing millions of dollars in legal fees. I’ve also marveled at its duplicity; 1-800 Contacts historically employed the same competitive keyword advertising practices it subsequently sought to suppress.

• Things have been quiet on the 1-800 Contacts front for the past several years, after it suffered a major blow in the 10th Circuit’s Lens.com ruling, but sometimes the machinery of justice keeps turning quietly in the background. This week, the FTC sued 1-800 Contacts for antitrust violations. I believe this is the FTC’s first foray into keyword advertising issues, and it’s left some folks scratching their heads.

Copyrights

• Readers here likely have begun to associate the attempted twisting of copyright law to go after video game cheaters with Blizzard. After all, between its StarCraft and Overwatch properties, the gamemaker has made something of a name for itself by attempting to assert a combination of “you only bought a license” and “breaking the EULA creates a copyright violation” theories into a “we can sue you for hacking our games” legal sandwich. It’s a terribly frustrating thing to watch Blizzard do, as it tries to pretzel copyright law in a way never intended, and typically to achieve little if any legal success by doing so.

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