● 03.08.17

● Links 8/3/2017: Manjaro 17.0 Released, Firefox 52 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Over the past year, Chrome OS has evolved in huge ways, but most drastically with the addition of Android apps. The matching hardware, conversely, hasn’t changed that much. We’ve had some Chromebooks like the Acer R13 which nailed the 2-in-1 form factor, but nothing we’d call revolutionary.

• That changed as the calendar flipped over to 2017. At CES 2017 we got a couple of new Chromebooks including the ASUS C302A, and two new models from Samsung. In this review, we’ll be taking a closer look at the Samsung Chromebook Plus.

• Good news for those hunting for a budget laptop – the incredibly cheap, Linux-powered Pinebook is apparently still on the cards, even though it wasn’t released last month as the makers intended.

• The reason the Pinebook has stoked a good deal of excitement is because it’s an ARM-based Linux notebook, with the 11.6-inch version priced at just $89 (around £75, AU$120). There’s also a 14-inch version, which isn’t much more at $99 (around £80, AU$130).

• As mentioned, it should have been out in February – but nothing appeared, and nothing was heard from the manufacturer either.

• Year of the Linux desktop might not have arrived, but the year of Linux laptop is certainly here.

• Only a few weeks back we saw a dedicated laptop specially tweaked for KDE Neon. Today we have got a new laptop series running elementary OS by default.

• elementary OS is a Linux distribution mostly focused on the design element. This aesthetic OS is often considered the best Linux distribution that looks like MacOS.

• StatCounter’s desktop OS report for February 2017 puts Chrome OS usage at 3.36% versus 1.47% for Linux.

• This means more that Chrome OS has double the marketshare of traditional Linux desktops in the US, with millions of web surfers happily browsing from Chromebooks, Chromeboxes and Chromebases.

• Chrome OS usage is up by over 50% compared to the previous year, when the thin-client OS hit a then-high of 2.02%.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation offers many resources for developers, users, and administrators of Linux systems. One of the most important offerings is its Linux Certification Program, which is designed to give you a way to differentiate yourself in a job market that’s hungry for your skills.

• How well does the certification prepare you for the real world? To illustrate that, the Linux Foundation will be spotlighting some of those who have recently passed the certification examinations. These testimonials should serve to help you decide if either the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) or the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) certification is right for you. In this installment of our series, we talk with Gbenga “Christopher” Adigun.

• With the Linux 4.11 merge window now closed and the RadeonSI shader cache having landed and even turned on by default, it’s a great time to run some fresh benchmarks of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. Here are some benchmark results with the latest Mesa Git code for RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV as well as the Linux 4.11-rc1 kernel compared to Linux 4.10.

• Intel is off to the races in preparing their new feature material work they plan to have introduced for the Linux 4.12 kernel, even though Linux 4.11-rc1 was just introduced on Monday and thus still nearly two months until the 4.12 merge window.

• With Intel’s first drm-intel-next pull request as well as the drm-misc code updates also sent in by Intel DRM maintainer Daniel Vetter, there are already over 550 patches queued up for this next kernel cycle! Looks like Linux 4.12 could be big on the DRM front especially as Intel will have more pull requests, AMD might have DC/DAL and even Vega for 4.12, and Nouveau will have the newly-published Pascal acceleration code.

• VMware, the company known for changing the datacenter landscape with virtualization, has joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold member. This is the second highest membership tier at The Linux Foundation.

• When Wim Coekaerts is solving problems and building things, he’s happy. When he’s not, he’s not.

• In his long career, he’s found joy working on early database appliances, and later guiding Oracle’s effort to make Linux, the open source operating system he’d played with since his school days in Belgium, its OS of record. Now, “Linux has become the operating system of the cloud,” Coekearts says, so he sees lots more fun on the horizon.

Graphics Stack

• Kevin Brace, the sole remaining main contributor to the OpenChrome project, has announced version 0.6 of the xf86-video-openchrome driver.

• With the OpenChrome 0.6 DDX driver release comes official support for VIA CX700, VX700, and VX800 chipsets integrated TMDS transmitter in order to provide DVI support. This driver release also has initial support for the Silicon Image SiI 164 TMDS transmitter.

• For those using the xf86-video-nouveau X.Org driver rather than xf86-video-modesetting, the Nouveau DDX v1.0.14 release took place today.

• This is the first official release of the xf86-video-nouveau driver since last September, but hey, it’s release cadence remains much better than xf86-video-intel Found in this updated Nouveau DDX driver release is GM10x acceleration support with EXA as well as GM20x.

• A Phoronix reader has written in about his independent work to make it easier trying out the latest AMDGPU DC/DAL code on Ubuntu.

• Martin Babutzka has taken to maintaining a Linux kernel tree on GitHub with the latest AMDGPU DC/DAL patches pair with the latest upstream Linux kernel security patches, based upon the upstream Linux 4.9 kernel. He’s carrying out this effort in order to make use of HDMI audio with his Radeon R9 380 graphics card.

• Ben Skeggs has sent in his initial Nouveau feature update abnormally early to DRM-Next for in turn landing in the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• DiRT Rally [Steam, Feral Store] seemed to have an issue with rendering properly in certain cases with newer versions of LLVM with RadeonSI Mesa (AMD), but it seems to have been tracked down as an issue in LLVM.

• The work on the threaded GL dispatch code for Mesa has been picked up by Timothy Arceri as Marek is now busy with other work.

• For those that don’t know, the threaded GL dispatch code is something that should speed up Linux games that don’t already do some form of it. Borderlands 2 has been named as one game tried and tested that this code can speed up. It was noted before that Feral games won’t benefit from it, as they already do something similar.

Benchmarks

• Our latest AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the performance of the GCC and LLVM Clang compiler performance with a Ryzen 7 1700 on Ubuntu Linux.

• Long story short: following the launch of AMD’s first Ryzen processors, I decided to throw all of our previous CPU results in the garbage and start a suite anew. I’ll give more verbose reasoning in a future post, but what this means to you is: TG hopes to offer a selection of great benchmarks and tests, and that’s definitely going to include Linux.

Applications

• There are many times when you want a file on your Linux server from Internet or FTP server and you are on command line terminal! When using GUI of Linux, its easy to get file by using browsers but for command line its little bit difficult.

• Samba 4.6 has been released today as the new stable series of the popular and open-source re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol for providing fast file and print services on UNIX-like systems.

Proprietary

• The Google Cloud Container Builder is finally here! Creating Docker containers is easier than ever thanks to this new Google tool.

• Containers make the world go round, whether it’s shipping goods from China or making cat videos on YouTube work properly on your smartphone. Yesterday, Google announced that their Cloud Container Builder is finally available for general use after a year of running the Google App Engine behind “gcloud app deploy”. Now you can build your Docker containers right in the Google Cloud Platform!

• Container Builder is not just a Docker builder, but rather a composable ecosystem that allows you to use any build steps that you wish. We have open-sourced builders for common languages and tasks like npm, git, go and the gcloud command line interface. Many images on DockerHub like Maven, Gradle and Bazel work out of the box. By composing your custom build steps, you can run unit tests with your build, reduce the size of your final image by rebaking your built image onto a leaner base image and removing build and test tooling and much more.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The developers of Caveman Warriors [Kickstarter Link] sent in a copy of their in-development 1-4 player action platformer and it’s really quite good.

• I also got them to update their gamejolt page with a Linux demo today, so go check it out.

• The latest expansion to the sprawling medieval grand strategy game has been released. Secret societies and orders are at the forefront of this one and, as always, a big free patch has arrived to all owners of the base game.

• The open-world space action-RPG VoidExpanse [Steam, Official Site] has grown bigger with a new expansion named Pariahs’ Bane which adds a bunch of new shiny content.

• Lambs on the Road [Official Site], a post-apocalyptic platformer survival game is coming to Linux and it looks pretty decent.

• It seems someone has forked Wine-Staging adding in all the needed patches for Overwatch to work, so I tested it out.

• Thanks to Lutris already having this special Wine build available for use, I decided to borrow my girlfriend’s copy of Overwatch to see how far it will go.

• I’m going to be honest, this is not the game I thought it was going to be. It feels quite a bit like a city builder when you first get learning through the tutorial sections.

• It’s surprisingly easy to get to grips with, even if it may seem a little intimidating. The more I played of it, the more it felt like a simple version of Factorio. That’s how I can best describe it, right down to requiring red vials for research it seems to have a lot of similarities in the main mechanics.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Clive Johnston from the Kubuntu team announced recently that the latest KDE Plasma 5.9.3 desktop environment landed in the software repositories of the upcoming Kubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

• Until a few days ago, the KDE Plasma 5.9.3 packages were lying in the “proposed” repos of Kubuntu 17.04, but they were finally pushed to the main channel for early adopters to be able to update their installations. KDE Plasma 5.9.3 is the third maintenance update to the short-lived KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment.

• A feature I teasered in my last blog post is media controls on the lock screen. The patch has now landed and will be part of the next Plasma release, 5.10, to be released end of May.

• KDE developer Kai Uwe has provided a look at some of the new features coming for Plasma 5.10, including some screenshots.

• Some of the changes coming to KDE Plasma 5.10 include media controls being added to the lock screen, PowerDevil power management can now pause media players automatically before sleeping a computer, file manager jump list actions have been improved, the folder view will be the default desktop containment, improvements to the folder view, interactive notification previews, context menu enhancements, and more.

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The developers of the ROSA GNU/Linux distribution derived from Mandriva announced the general availability of the R8.1 maintenance update for the ROSA Fresh 2014.1 stable series of the operating system.

Arch Family

• Arch is a very cool Linux distribution, but it isn’t for the faint of heart. Once it is installed and running, it can be very rewarding. Unfortunately, it is the installation that can be a pain point. Yeah, installing Arch from scratch can be a good learning experience, but some folks just want to use an operating system as a tool — not to get an education.

• Luckily, some distributions offer a friendlier installer with an Arch base — the best of both worlds. One such popular Linux distro that uses Arch as a base is the wonderful Manjaro. Today, the operating system reaches version 17.0. Code-named “Gellivara,” it features a refreshed settings manager, offering a more attractive design. Users can choose between two desktop environments — Xfce and KDE.

• Not long ago Manjaro released the previous version named ‘Fringilla’ which was a great success. With growing number of users day by day, developer team released latest version named Manjaro 17.0 ‘Gellivara’ few hours ago. Manjaro 17.0 is released in both official flavors i.e. KDE and Xfce.

• The KDE flavor of Manjaro ships with plasma desktop 5.9, KDE apps 16.12.3 and framework 5.31. While the flagship flavor of Manjaro which is Xfce also received lot of love from the team. Manjaro 17.0 ships with Xfce 4.12 with an undoubtedly polished and well maintained user interface. The team spent quite a time of enhancing user interface and window manager. Some of the themes are updated as well as new themes are designed for the release.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• The bits and pieces needed for a rolling development phase of Leap 42.3 are now up and running!

• Ubuntu dropped their official alpha/betas long ago, Fedora 27 is dropping their alphas, and openSUSE is also shifting their development approach and will get rid of alpha and beta releases. OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 will be developed in a “rolling” manner although the release will not be a rolling-release post-release, unlike openSUSE Tumbleweed.

• During this Hack Week, some of our team members invested quite some time working in YaST related projects. But, what’s even better, some people from outside the team worked also in YaST projects. Thank you guys!

• openSUSE Project’s Ludwig Nussel is announcing today that the rolling development phase of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.3 operating system is now up and running.

• What this means exactly is that the download server will also serve development builds of openSUSE Leap 42.3 if they are good enough for testing, besides the latest OBS builds. However, you should know that this doesn’t mean that openSUSE Leap 42.3 will follow a rolling release model because that’s what openSUSE Tumbleweed is designed for.

• “That means just like with Tumbleweed, the download server doesn’t just serve the latest build OBS produces. A build only shows up there if the automated testing results of openQA are sufficiently green. So from now on until the gold master zypper dup will update step by step to the final 42.3,” explains Ludwig Nussel in the announcement.

Red Hat Family

• In Part 1 of this series, we looked at core improvements for Identity Management (IdM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.3, as well as manageability and other improvements. In the second half, we’re going to look at interoperabilty, and Active Directory integration.

Finance

Fedora

• Red Hat’s Mohan Boddu announced earlier that the forthcoming Alpha development milestone of the Fedora 26 Linux operating system is now officially in freeze stage and is expected to launch later this month, on the 21st.

• As reported by us last month, the Fedora 26 Linux release was delayed by a week, and it now looks like today, March 7, 2017, is a very important day in the release schedule of the upcoming operating system as it marks the Alpha Freeze, Software String Freeze, and Bodhi activation point. These milestones should have happened a week ago if that one-week delay hadn’t occurred.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The development team behind the popular Tails amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux, which ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden used to stay hidden online, announced today the general availability of Tails 2.11.

• The Q4OS development team is pleased to inform Softpedia today about the general availability of a brand-new edition of their Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for PINE64 boards.

• Q4OS is a lightweight distro built around the old-school Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), an open-source initiative that tries to keep the spirit of the KDE 3.5 desktop environment alive across all GNU/Linux distributions, and while it’s been engineered to run on 32-bit and 64-bit PCs, there are also Raspberry Pi builds available.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint Debian Edition(or LMDE) is a Linux distro which is based on Debian. The main edition of Linux mint is based on Ubuntu which itself is based on Debian. Debian is one of the oldest and most stable Linux distros out there but it’s made for general use and is not recommended for complete newbies to Linux. So Ubuntu takes the Debian code and forks it for ease of access and the main Linux Mint distro takes the Ubuntu code and tries to make it more polished and very beginner friendly. The LMDE skips the Ubuntu part and directly uses Debian code.

Devices/Embedded

• NVIDIA has made the surprise announcement of the Jetson TX2 and it’s powered by dual custom-designed 64-bit Denver 2 CPUs plus quad Cortex-A57 cores while boasting Pascal graphics with 256 CUDA cores.

• Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 COM runs Linux4Tegra on a hexa-core Tegra Parker SoC with Pascal graphics, offering twice the performance and/or efficiency of the TX1.

• Nvidia announced its third-generation Nvidia Jetson computer-on-module with claims of offering twice the performance in high-power mode or twice the power efficiency in low-power mode compared to the previous Tegra X1 based Jetson TX1. The Linux4Tegra-driven Jetson TX2 module is available Mar. 14 as part of a $599 developers kit ($299 for educational institutions), and will ship on its own in the second quarter for $399 in quantity. Nvidia also announced a new version 3.0 of its Linux-based JetPack SDK for its Jetson COMs.

• I was lucky enough to get a Raspberry Pi 2B with a 7-inch display for Christmas last year. I immediately had a plan for how to us it: I would make a home dashboard to show some useful information that is readable from around the living room.

• One of the things that I really love about the Raspberry Pi and other pi boards is their ability to support all kinds of custom home automation solutions. You can make it interface will all sorts of things today, from your living lights to your Plex server. I can across the HASSbian operating system for the Raspberry Pi, and had a look at it running my Raspberry Pi 3.

• HASSbian is a Raspberry Pi image based on Raspbian that has been customized for an easy installation of the Home Assistant software. Home Assistant is open source software for automating actions in response to defined trigger events detected on your home network or internet services. Home Assistant supports connecting to a wide range of services and devices, which is all customized through a configuration file. Some of the more interesting components of Home Assistant for me include monitoring Plex, Chromecast, and FireTV, interaction with IFTTT, Amazon Echo, MQTT, and Kodi media player, and support for EcoBee, Nest, and GPIO for the Raspberry Pi.

• Many network-aware systems use Linux somewhere — one big example is pretty much every Raspberry Pi based project. How much do you think about security when you deploy a Pi? There is a superior security system available for Linux (including most versions you’d use on the Pi) called SELinux. The added letters on the front are for “Security-Enhanced” and this project was originally started by the NSA and RedHat. RedHat actually has — no kidding — a coloring book that helps explain some of the basic concepts.

• F&S unveiled a Linux-ready “armStone A53SD” Pico-ITX SBC with a Snapdragon 410E, up to 8GB LPDDR3 and 32GB eMMC, plus Ethernet, WiFi, BT, and 4x USB ports.

• F&S Elektronik Systeme is expanding its line of armStone-branded Pico-ITX boards, including its i.MX6-based ArmStone A9-v2, with an armStone A53SD SBC that employs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Other Snadragon 410E embedded boards include Inforce Computing’s Inforce 6309L SBC and Inforce 6301 COM.

Phones

Tizen

• The Samsung-Huawei smartwatch. Remember when sources told us that Huawei wanted to craft a Tizen-powered smartwatch with Samsung? Well, those discussions haven’t been fruitful: there’s still no Tizen-powered Samsung-Huawei partnership smartwatch on the market.

• And Huawei is the holdup.

Android

• Microsoft’s Windows is in danger of being usurped as the world’s most popular operating system by Google’s Android.

• While Windows remains the leading operating system globally thanks to its continued presence on desktop PCs and laptops, it is increasingly being overshadowed by Google’s mobile OS, a move described as “unthinkable five years ago”.

Free Software/Open Source

• With all of the discussion about source code contributions in open source, sometimes we don’t spend enough time talking about the culture. In her keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Stormy Peters points out that when we say the word “culture,” we sometimes think only about diversity or hiring more women, but culture means more than that. Culture is about how we work, how we think, and how we interact with each other.

• The blockchain is a revolution that builds on another technical revolution so old that only the more experienced among us remember it: the invention of the database. First created at IBM in 1970, the importance of these relational databases to our everyday lives today cannot be overstated. Literally every aspect of our civilization is now dependent on this abstraction for storing and retrieving data. And now the blockchain is about to revolutionize databases, which will in turn revolutionize literally every aspect of our civilization.

• uoyant, the commercial entity behind the open source Linkerd project, today announced the one year anniversary of the project. Since launching in February 2016 with the mission to make microservices reliable at scale, Linkerd has rapidly gained adoption in the cloud-native community and has served over 100 billion production requests in companies around the world.

• It makes sense for large technology companies like Google and Microsoft to open source AI and machine learning solutions because they have overlapping vertical interests in providing vast cloud services. These come into play when a certain machine learning library becomes popular and users deploy it on the cloud and so forth. It is less clear why financial services companies, which play a much more directly correlated zero sum game, would open up code that they paid the engineering team to create.

• As more people access the Internet from their mobile devices, mobile operators must adapt their networks to accommodate skyrocketing data use and new traffic patterns. To do so, they’re turning to the same principles of software-defined networking (SDN) already finding success in the data center.

• Recently I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit. The event was stacked with many of the people I consider mentors, friends, and definitely leaders in the various open source and free software communities that I participate in.

• I was able to observe the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee meeting while there, and was impressed at the way they worked toward consensus where possible. It reminded me of the OpenStack Technical Committee in its make-up of well-spoken technical individuals who care about their users and stand up for the technical excellence of their foundations’ activities.

• Companies that use Open Source Software (OSS) find that it offers the most flexibility of any third-party software alternative. You are, for example, never locked into a vendor, their costs, their buying structures, or their re-distribution terms. Open Source enables vendor independence.

• In addition, using OSS speeds development, lowers costs, and keeps companies on the cutting edge of technology by facilitating innovation. Open source communities provide a low-cost medium for incubation and testing of new capabilities. While open source ecosystems direct ownership and accountability back to the development teams.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• If you’ve jumped from using a Microsoft browser to Chrome in the last couple years, you’re far from alone. People are deserting built-in browsers at record rates, and Microsoft is taking the brunt of the damage, according to analytics firm Net Applications.

Mozilla

• The Internet can help a young girl in Chicago’s South Side learn how to write JavaScript. It can also keep citizens connected during a time of crisis or disaster.

• But only if the Internet works as intended.

• The Internet should be a public resource open and accessible to all. And, it is to many. But many people still lack reliable, affordable Internet access. And the underlying network itself is increasingly centralized, relying on infrastructure provided by a tiny handful of companies. We don’t have a failsafe if the infrastructure these companies offer is blocked or goes down.

• These are significant issues. Mozilla and the National Science Foundation are committed to finding solutions by supporting bright people and big ideas across the U.S.

• It is definitely an exciting time in the evolution of the web with the adoption of new standards, performance gains, better features for designers, and new tooling. Firefox 52 represents the fruition of a number of features that have been in progress for several years. While many of these will continue to evolve and improve, there’s plenty to celebrate in today’s release of Firefox.

• Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 52.0 as the latest version of their open-source, cross-platform web browser.

• Today’s release of Firefox introduces great new features, making the browser more powerful, convenient, and secure across all your devices.

• Firefox 52 was released today and it includes two major changes: support for WebAssembly and the removal of support for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) plugins like Silverlight, Java, and others, with the exception of Flash.

• Canonical announced a few moments ago that the recently released Mozilla Firefox 52.0 web browser landed in the stable software repositories of all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

• Mozilla patches Firefox for 28 different vulnerabilities, with seven rated as having critical impact.

• Mozilla released Firefox 52 on March 7, providing users of the open-source web browser with new features as well well as patches for 28 security vulnerabilities. The Firefox 52 release is the second major milestone release of Firefox in 2017 so far, following the Firefox 51 milestone that debuted on Jan. 24.

• Mozilla Firefox 52 has been released and is now available to download. Among new features in Firefox 52 is support for WebAssembly. Mozilla describes this as “an emerging standard that brings near-native performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of plugins.”

SaaS/Back End

• As anyone involved with managing an OpenStack deployment quickly learns, cost savings and elimination of time-consuming tasks are among the biggest benefits that the cloud platform provides. However, leaders at many OpenStack-focused organizations, including Canonical, believe that the business technology arena is under such tremendous pressure to keep up as Software-as-a-Service, containers, and cloud platforms proliferate, that the true economics of OpenStack are misunderstood. Simply put, a lot of people involved with OpenStack don’t fully understand what they can get out of the platform and the ecosystem of tools surrounding it.

• I had a brilliant opportunity to interview Suresh V. Shankar, founder of Crayon, at Slush Singapore 2016. At the conference, he spoke about his experience—and the difficulties he faced—as an entrepreneur. He also talked about how he overcame them.

CMS

• The ongoing software development for the next version of Joinup, the European Commission’s digital government collaboration platform, is one of the key presentations at DrupalCamp Transylvania, which takes place from 31 March to 2 April in Tîrgu Mureș (Romania). The talk will focus on the new semantic database storage solution for the next Joinup version.

Education

• Schools and vocational colleges in Cologne, Aachen, Essen and other towns are using open source-based cloud eLearning and collaboration software. The cloud service, Ucloud4schools, is based on the NextCloud open source cloud services solution.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This week we returned to clearing the backlog of approved entries. During the meeting we were joined by a developer looking to discuss the licensing of their software developed under contract with an institution of higher learning. The issue of license compatibility came up and we talked about how GPLv2 or later can upgrade to GPLv3. All the while we plugged away at the backlog getting it to drop somewhat over the course of the meeting.

Public Services/Government

• Free and open source software advocates in Albania are going to ask candidates in the June parliamentary elections about their plans for free software. The campaign will be kicked off by Open Labs later this month. The free software advocacy group will aggregate questions and answers on their campaign website.

Licensing/Legal

• One of a company’s first challenges when starting an open source compliance program is to find exactly which open source software is already in use and under which licenses it is available.

• This initial auditing process is often described as establishing a clean compliance baseline for your product or software portfolio. This is an intensive activity over a period of time that can extend for months, depending on how soon you started the compliance activities in parallel to the development activities.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• With warmer weather around the corner here in the US, it’s time for gardeners to start making plans for spring and summer. For the more technically minded among us, it’s also a good time to start working on DIY projects that can keep things running smoothly. As it turns out, projects based around the Arduino open hardware development board are an excellent place to start. In this article, I’ve rounded up three cool Arduino-based projects that take your garden to the next level.

Programming/Development

• The RVowpalWabbit package update is the third of four upgrades requested by CRAN, following RcppSMC 0.1.5 and RcppGSL 0.3.2.

• RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“Protobuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects.

Leftovers

• Back in the early ’00s, John Perry Barlow said “I didn’t start hearing about ‘content’ until the container business felt threatened.” Linux Journal was one of those containers—so was every other magazine, newspaper and broadcast station. Today, those containers are bobbing around in an ocean of “content” on the internet. Worse, the stuff inside the containers, which we used to call “editorial”, is now a breed of “content” too.

• In the old days, editorial lived on one side of a “Chinese wall” between itself and the publishing side of a newspaper or magazine. The same went for the programming and advertising sides of a commercial broadcast station or network. The wall was transparent, meaning it was possible for a writer, a photographer, a newscaster or a performing artist to see what funded the operation, but the ethical thing was to ignore what happened on the other side of that wall. Which was easy to do, because everything on the other side of that wall was somebody else’s job.

• Today that wall has been destroyed by the imperatives of “content production”, which is the new job of journalists and everybody else devoted to “generating content” in maximum volumes, all the better to attract “programmatic” advertising.

Hardware

• Recently I ran out of spare SSDs and needed one for one of my test systems where the I/O storage capacity or performance wasn’t important, so I decided to try out the Patriot Torch 60GB SSD that can be had for about $33 USD.

• The Patriot Torch 60GB SATA 3.0 SSD has a Phison SSD controller with 16nm MLC NAND flash memory.

Health/Nutrition

• It has been a gruelling campaign for the three final candidates for the post of director general of the World Health Organization and their latest public foray was dubbed a “moderated discussion.”

Security

• The 4.7.3 update comes just days after WordPress admins were alerted to a separate security crisis in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.

• The open-source WordPress blogging and content management system fixes six vulnerabilities, including three Cross Site Scripting flaws.

• The open-source WordPress blogging and content management system (CMS) released a new incremental version on March 6, providing users with six new security patches and 39 bug fixes. The new WordPress 4.7.3 update is the third security update for WordPress so far in 2017, following the 4.7.2 update on Jan. 26 and the 4.7.1 update on Jan. 12.

• CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced today, March 7, 2017, the immediate availability of a new stable kernel update for the CloudLinux 7 operating system series.

• The updated CloudLinux 7 kernel was bumped to version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.39 and is here to address a bunch of security vulnerabilities discovered recently. First of all, you should know that this new kernel replaces the 3.10.0-427.18.2.lve1.4.38 build that many of you have installed, and can be downloaded from CloudLinux’s stable repository.

• WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA agents were given cover identities and diplomatic passports to enter the country. The base was used to develop hacking tools as part of the CIA’s massive digital arsenal.

• Wikileaks just dropped a massive collection of information detailing how the US government is attacking the devices that many of us use every single day in an effort to gain intel for its own purposes. Tactics for breaching iPhones, iPads, Android devices, PCs, routers, and even smart TVs are included in the leak, which has some serious privacy and security implications if even a fraction of it proves to be accurate.

• WikiLeaks has published a huge trove of what appear to be CIA spying secrets.

• The files are the most comprehensive release of US spying files ever made public, according to Julian Assange. In all, there are 8,761 documents that account for “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA”, Mr Assange claimed in a release, and the trove is just the first of a series of “Vault 7″ leaks.

• Already, the files include far more pages than the Snowden files that exposed the vast hacking power of the NSA and other agencies.

• WikiLeaks has released more than 8,700 documents it says come from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, with some of the leaks saying the agency had 24 “weaponized” and previously undisclosed exploits for the Android operating system as of 2016.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7″ by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

• The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

• Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The draft of the new European copyright directive has been presented in september 2016. For now, the work in progress in the european Parliament and mobilisations by concerned people and organisations are multiplying. People pay great attention to the two articles that La Quadrature du Net pointed in september : Article 11 about ancillary copyright for press publishers, and Article 13 about the use of effective content recognition technologies for content platforms. La Quadrature du Net publishes today its positions about Article 13, that have been fed by discussions and workshops with creators, legal experts and more globally with common users of digital culture. These positions are also send to the Members of the European Parliament to feed the work done in the Committees. The preliminary work carried out by the European Parliament Committtees show that, contrary to what one might think, nothing is locked and many subjects remain open in the copyright dossier. Articles 11 and 13 are subject to various discussions and some proposals by MEPs show that they pay attention to the evolution of use.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Thought about buying a smart phone, smart TV, smart car? – think twice. Wikileaks today (7 March) released over 8,000 documents illustrating hacking activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. In what has been described by some commentators as a bigger leak than the Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency in 2013, the whistleblower platform allowed a glimpse into the CIA hacking into smart TVs and smartphones and presented a list of zero day vulnerabilities found, bought and sometimes shared with colleagues in other agencies, including British colleagues. Wikileaks announced that today’s leak was the “Year Zero” tranche of the much bigger “Vault 7” project: more redacted details from the documents and much more documents will be published.

• Time for German parents to have “The Talk” with their kids. Unprotected sexual activity is probably fine. But casual seeding? That’s a problem.

• TorrentFreak reports that a German court has decided to hold a parent responsible for his child’s infringing activity. This doesn’t have much to do with the rightsholder being unable to extract fines from a minor, but rather a perceived parenting failure.

• But the details don’t seem to show that those apps are compromised, so much as that Android and iOS devices are compromised. It’s always been true that if someone can get into your phone, the encryption scheme you use doesn’t matter, because they can just pull keystrokes or grab data before you encrypt it — in the same way that someone looking over your shoulder can read your messages as well. That’s not a fault of the encryption or the app, but of the environment in which you’re using the app itself.

• So if you hadn’t been paying attention, most of the “smart” products you buy are anything but intelligent when it comes to your privacy and security. Whether it’s your refrigerator leaking your gmail credentials or your new webcam being hacked in minutes for use in massive new DDoS attacks, the so-called “smart” home is actually quite idiotic. So-called smart-televisions have been particularly problematic, whether that has involved companies failing to encrypt sensitive data, to removing features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized.

• Last month Vizio joined this not-so-distinguished club when it was discovered that the company’s TVs had been spying on users for the last several years. Vizio’s $2.2 million settlement with the FTC indicates that the company at no time thought it might be a good idea to inform customers this was happening. The snooping was part of a supposed “Smart Interactivity” feature deployed in 2014 that claimed to provide users with programming recommendations, but never actually did so. In short, it wasn’t so much what Vizio was doing, it was the fact the company tried to bullshit its way around it.

Civil Rights/Policing

• We’ve just written about the use of body cameras in UK schools. One reason these trials are taking place is probably because the technology is now relatively cheap, which lowers previous barriers to deploying it. So it should perhaps come as no surprise to learn from a new report from Big Brother Watch that body cameras are also widely used by UK local government departments (pdf).

DRM

• Ahead of a 2010 decision by federal regulators to legalize mobile phone jailbreaking, Apple had cautioned US Copyright Office officials that doing so would have “potentially catastrophic” (PDF) consequences because hackers wielding jailbroken iPhones might take down the nation’s mobile phone networks.

• The first major ruling [PDF] by a Canadian court applying the country’s anti-circumvention laws has been handed down and it’s not good news. The law provides for a few exceptions to its broad restrictions on bypassing technological protection mechanisms (TPMs), but as the court sees it, any anti-circumvention process that might lead to infringement violates the statute.

• Not that the courts have done a great job interpreting the law to this point. In 2015, a Canadian judge ruled that simply asking for a copy of a paywalled article was illegal circumvention. The lawsuit at hand — reported by Michael Geist — isn’t a great test case for exploring the outer limits of the anti-circumvention law. But the conclusions reached have severely negative implications for others not quite so entangled in facilitating infringement.

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