● 03.20.17

● Links 20/3/2017: Linux 4.11 RC3, OpenSSH 7.5 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Cutting to the heart of it, it doesn’t actually matter if Microsoft releases Windows Server for ARM. Windows isn’t the future and even Microsoft knows it. The upcoming availability of SQL server on Linux is all the proof we need that the game is over and, in the data centre at least, Microsoft didn’t win.

• Quite frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that. Legacy x86 Windows applications have been a millstone around the neck of the entire industry for ages now and its long past time they were relegated to a niche and left to quietly slip away into the night. What’s interesting here isn’t that Microsoft managed to take its existing code base, strip out some of the cruft and compile it on ARM. What’s interesting is what Microsoft’s experiment unlocks outside the Windows ecosystem.

Desktop

• Microsoft’s aggressive advertising push inside Windows 10 is going beyond pop-ups for Microsoft Edge.

• Myce recently spotted yet another pop-up ad on the taskbar in Windows 10. This time around Microsoft was advertising its extension for Chrome dubbed the Personal Shopping Assistant (Beta). The extension is a Microsoft Garage project that lets you compare prices across shopping sites.

• Prior to the Chrome extension pop-up, Microsoft was advertising its rewards program for Microsoft Edge, which we spotted in early November. The earlier ad appeared to be targeted at people who didn’t use Edge that frequently.

Server

• Docker plans to donate its containerd container runtime to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to organizing a set of open source container-based cloud-native technologies.

• In December, Docker released as open source the code for containerd, which provides a runtime environment for Docker containers. By open sourcing this component of the Docker stack, the company wanted to assure users, partners, and other actors in the container ecosystem that the core container component would remain stable, and that the community would have a say in its advancement.

• The open-source Docker container project held events around the globe last week as it celebrated its fourth birthday. Docker is more popular than ever as the standard bearer for the container microservices DevOps movement, though Docker Inc. as a company now faces more challenges than ever before as well.

• Three years ago, I wrote about the first anniversary of Docker, predicting significant growth in 2014. As it turned out, I was right about the growth, though I was wrong about Docker Inc. Back in 2014, I had predicted that Docker Inc. would likely be acquired, but to date that hasn’t happened—though there has been no shortage of speculation over the last three years.

• Docker Inc. and the open-source container ecosystem that Docker helped create have evolved significantly since 2014, and over the course of the project’s four-year existence. This past year has arguably been the most significant yet for Docker Inc., both as a business and an open-source project.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.4 kernel.

• All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• The fourth maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series arrived this weekend with various improvements to some of the supported filesystems and architectures, as well as updated drivers.

• Immediately after announcing the release of the Linux 4.10.4 kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the community about the availability of the sixteenth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series.

• It looks like someone else figured it out, ergo Linaro. Unfortunately, they do not seem to be eager to create a real platform, but rather slap a veneer of something OpenFirmware-like on top of exising systems. Also, they are buddying with Ubuntu. So, a half-hearted effort and a top-down deal. But it’s a step in the right direction.

• Another week, another rc.

• As is our usual pattern after the merge window, rc3 is larger than rc2, but this is hopefully the point where things start to shrink and calm down. We had a late typo in rc2 that affected arm and powerpc (the prep code for the 5-level page tables), and hopefully there are no similar brown-paper-bugs now in rc3.

• On the whole rc3 looks pretty normal, with two thirds being driver updates (late qla2xxx scsi driver updates stand out, but ethernet drivers for broadcom and cavium aren’t that far behind, and there are updates for gpu, md, cpufreq, x86 platform drivers etc).

• Outside of drivers, the rest is a mix of arch updates (parisc, powerpc, x86), filesystems (afs, nfs, xfs) and “misc” (mainly core kernel and general networking updates).

• Shortlog appended for those who want to see some overview of the details, but what we really want is testing. Please.

• Linus

• It’s still Sunday in the US, and that means Linus Torvalds has prepared yet another Release Candidate (RC) milestone for the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel for GNU/Linux distros.

• That’s right, Linux kernel 4.11 Release Candidate 3 is now ready for public testing, and, according to Linus Torvalds, it appears to be a fairly normal patch that’s just a bit larger than last week’s Release Candidate because of a typo that affected the PowerPC (PPC) and ARM architectures.

• The ongoing work for HDMI audio support with the VC4 DRM driver is being wrapped up and will be working in the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• HDMI audio will work in conjunction with the open-source VC4 driver when the Linux 4.12 kernel rolls out. This was among the changes queued today in drm-misc-next and in turn called for landing into DRM-Next, which will be merged next month into the Linux 4.12 mainline code-base.

Graphics Stack

• A developer of Star Citizen [Official Site] has commented on their forum to state that the game will go with Vulkan and eventually drop DirectX.

• Star Citizen, the much-anticipated space simulator video game that is the most-funded crowdfunding project ever with more than 39 million dollars pledged, is planning to go Vulkan-only.

• Vulkan 1.0.44 is now available as the newest version of the Vulkan 1.0 high-performance graphics API.

• While GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, and Enlightenment are among the most talked about Wayland desktop/compositor implementations right now, there are still many active smaller projects working on their own Wayland compositors. Here’s a look at some of them.

• Igalia’s Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez has updated his 28 patches for ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 support for Intel Ivy Bridge hardware that in turn allows these older Intel graphics to have OpenGL 4.0 support.

• RADV co-founder David Airlie at Red Hat has begun focusing on the Vulkan conformance test suite for furthering along this open-source Radeon driver’s conformance.

• The QEMU project is hoping for some interested developers to enhance VirGL for better offering OpenGL guest support with QEMU guests and possibly extend it to include Vulkan support.

• 100 patches amounting to over fourty thousand lines of code was sent out today for review in order to provide “Vega 10″ support within the AMDGPU DRM driver.

• Adding Vega support to AMDGPU is a big task due to all of the changes over Polaris and other recent GPUs. Vega rolls out a new video BIOS interface, lots of new hardware intellectual property, support for video decode using UVD (UVD 7.0), support for video encode using VCE (VCE 4.0), support for 3D via RadeonSI, power management, full display support using DC, and support for SR-IOV virtualization.

• For those curious how AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs has evolved, here are benchmarks with two graphics cards showing how the RadeonSI Mesa performance has evolved since Mesa 11.1 going back to late 2015.

• The second point release is now available to Mesa 17.0.

• Mesa 17.0.2 is shipping this Monday with a dozen fixes to the Intel ANV / Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers, various improvements to the Intel OpenGL driver, and fixes for Nouveau NVC0 and RadeonSI.

Benchmarks

• For some weekend benchmarking fun, I compared the Jetson TX2 that NVIDIA released this weekend with their ARM 64-bit “Denver 2″ CPU cores paired with four Cortex-A57 cores to various other ARM single board computers I have access to. This is looking at the CPU performance in different benchmarks ranging from cheap ~$10 ARM SBCs to the Raspberry Pi to the Jetson TX1 and Jetson TX2.

Applications

• Backing up your computer takes time and effort but that is nothing compared to the stress you undergo if things happen to go wrong. A dependable backup tool is something everyone needs to have. Let’s look at some great Linux backup solutions.

• Audacity 2.1.3 has been released as the latest version of this popular open-source audio software.

• The open-source and cross-platform Audacity audio editor has been updated recently to version 2.1.3, a maintenance update that adds various new features, effects, generators, but also some options and settings.

• The biggest new feature of the Audacity 2.1.3 update appears to be support for the Windows 10 operating system, but it also looks like it improves Magic Mouse horizontal scroll and trackpad pinch support for macOS users.

• The Kodi HTPC software will soon have a “real” Netflix plugin/add-on for making a better show/movie watching experience.

• It’s been several months since Spotify removed the lyrics function from it’s apps, and it shows no signs of returning soon. If you liked being able to tap a button to instantly see lyrics for the currently playing song, we’ve found a nifty little indicator applet that can help.

• A few months back while perusing the latest news from the open source media, I came across an article listing five favorite command line tools, or some such nonsense. It turned out that one of the items on the list was a command line “word processor,” WordGrinder, which the article’s writer claimed to be an uber-easy way to write from the command line.

• As it happened, I’d been looking for that very thing, so I immediately looked in the Mint/Ubuntu repositories, found it, installed it and took a look. Unfortunately, at the time I was busy, facing a couple of deadlines, so when I couldn’t figure the first thing out about it in five seconds or less, I closed the terminal and went to Bluefish to finish an article I was writing, while vowing to return to look further into WordGrinder as soon as I finished.

• Calibre developer Kovid Goyal announced a new maintenance update of his open-source, free, cross-platform and powerful ebook library management software, versioned 2.82.

• Calibre 2.82 comes just one week after the previous point release, namely Calibre 2.81, which means that it’s mostly a bugfix update that addresses various of the issues reported by users lately, and updates the supported news sources.

• There are plethora of GUI based password managers. A quick google search will lead you to pick one suitable for you. But the command line password managers are very few. The one today we talk about is Titan. It is written using C programming language. It uses SQlite to save the passwords. All passwords will be stored using AES encryption. Titan uses openSSL to do the encryption. Password database is also protected from tampering by using a keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC).

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Serious Sam Fusion 2017 has rolled out into public beta for Steam Linux gamers.

• Serious Sam Fusion 2017 is the big update to Croteam classics with right now being Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter while The Second Encounter and Serious Sam : BFE are still in the works. There is VR support for all of these games as well as Vulkan rendering support.

• Serious Sam Fusion 2017 [Steam] the massive update from Croteam is now available for Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter [Steam].

• The Fusion update to Serious Sam will enable all games to support Linux plus Vulkan, 64bit, Multithreaded rendering and more!

• We now have Aveyond 1, 2, 3 (with all 4 parts to it) and Aveyond 4 all available on Linux, which is great for fans of simple 2D RPGs.

• Overload [Steam, Steam Demo] is another new six-degree-of-freedom shooter on Steam. It’s currently in Early Access, but even so it’s already very impressive.

• It’s a mix of turn-based battles with some real-time base building. The base building aspect is a little like XCOM 2 with a side-on view as you dig out rooms. The whole game feels like it was inspired by XCOM 1 & 2, as you send over units to different regions to perform missions. You even speed up time at will when outside of missions, so it’s all very familiar.

• The game was funded thanks to Kickstarter, where the developers nabbed $306,537 from helpful people wanting to see it become a reality. It’s also nice that another Kickstarter team actually managed day-1 Linux support.

• The team behind Overload actually has some of the originally Descent team and the co-founder of the studio even worked on Freespace 1 & 2, which are my two all time favourite space shooters. I’m really not surprised the game has already turned out so well!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In February, KDE’s Plasma team came together in for their yearly in-person meeting. The meeting was kindly hosted by von Affenfels GmbH, a webdesign agency in Stuttgart, Germany. The team discussed a wide variety of topics, such as design, features new and old, bugs and sore points in the current implementation, app distribution, also project management, internal and outward-facing communication and Wayland.

• Key developers of KDE’s Plasma team met last month in Stuttgart. More details on this Plasma developer meeting have now come to light.

• KDE Plasma developers continue eyeing Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage for possible next-generation packaging solutions. The developers also discussed better browser integration within Plasma to have native notifications and download progress, better multimedia handling, and more. Another new feature discussed was touchpad gestures support to control the window manager.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The Igalia WebKit team is happy to announce WebKitGTK+ 2.16. This new release drastically improves the memory consumption, adds new API as required by applications, includes new debugging tools, and of course fixes a lot of bugs.

• We look at 6 of the best new GNOME 3.24 features, including the ‘night light’ blue light filter, a pair of ace new apps, and integrated weather forecasts.

• I’m excited to announce that Builder 3.24 is here and ready for you to play with!

• It should look familiar because most of the work this cycle was underneath the hood. I’m pretty happy with all the stabilization efforts from the past couple of weeks. I’d like to give a special thanks to everyone who took the time to file bugs, some of whom also filed patches.

• Gnome Encfs Manager (short name is GEncfsM) is a tool to manage EncFS filesystems in Linux whihc is best alternative for Cryptkeeper and has lots of unique features. It’s very useful when you use EncFS with cloud sync / storage services such as Dropbox, etc.,

• So what are they and how are they useful in the context of a GNOME designer? We make quite a few prototypes and one of the things to decide whether a behavior is clear and comprehensible is motion design, particularly transitions. And while we do not use tools directly linked to out stack, it helps to build simple rigs to lower the manual labout required to make sometimes similar motion designs and limit the number of mistakes that can be done. Even simple animations usually consist of many keyframes (defined, non-computed states in time). Defining relationships between objects and createing setups, “rigs”, is a way to create of a sort of working model of the object we are trying to mock up.

Distributions

• Solus maintainer Joshua Strobl is informing users of the independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution about the availability of some of the latest updated packages, as well as upcoming features.

• According to the developer, it would appear that the feature-rich MATE 1.18 desktop environment released last week is now available for installation from the official stable Solus repositories for users of the Solus MATE edition, along with the long-term supported Linux 4.9.16 kernel and numerous other up-to-date components.

New Releases

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is known for all sort of distributions most of which are derivatives of some of the most popular Linux-based operating systems, and he informs us this weekend about the availability of a new build of his ArchEX distro.

• ArchEX is an Arch Linux-based distribution built around the lightweight LXQt desktop environment. The new things implemented in ArchEX Build 170318 is the recently released Linux 4.10.3 kernel, as well as all the latest package versions that have been released on the official Arch Linux repositories.

• The developers of the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS operating system announced the release of the Zorin OS 12.1 Education Edition, a specially crafted and officially supported flavor of the OS designed for educational institutions.

• Zorin OS 12.1 Education Edition is based on the same Ubuntu release as the other official Zorin OS 12 variants, and it ships with some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, as well as a layer of educational apps that promise to make learning better and more impactful.

• Softpedia was informed by Zbigniew Konojacki‏, developer of various GNU/Linux distributions based on the 4MLinux project, about the immediate availability of a Beta version of his upcoming 4MLinux 22.0 operating system.

• I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 17.2 LXQt Live DVD.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Sometimes you have to dig beneath the surface of headlines to understand what’s really going on. I guess that’s one thing most of us have learned in recent months. Sometimes you need some careful analysis to get to the real story. It seems like that’s as true in the IT world as it is with tabloid news.

Red Hat Family

• IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenStack and storage teams are partnering to integrate their products and in doing so are creating a compelling hybrid offering for open source-minded customers.

• The announcement came at IBM’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, where an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and IBM partners are gathering.

• Red Hat said Friday that NIST certified the OpenSCAP 1.2 platform’s capacity to analyze and evaluate security automation content as well as address functionality and documentation requirements in security-conscious environments.

• Leading digital currency and blockchain service platform Emercoin has announced that it has been officially included in Red Hat’s corporate catalog of certified programs.

Finance

Fedora

• There are just few days left, then the submission period for the Fedora 26 Supplemental Wallpaper ends and the voting will be open. Time for looking a bit behind the scenes. So far we had 94 submissions, that is again the average we had over the last contests.

Debian Family

• Valve is returning as a gold sponsor to this year’s Debian DebConf event.

• Last year Valve sponsored DebConf 16 and this year they are back to their golden sponsor tier for backing DebConf 17 in Montreal, Canada.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’ bringing us to the end of the alphabet, many in the Ubuntu community have wondered what the Ubuntu 17.10 name will be.

• The (deep blue) Orange Pi compute module from Shenzhen Xunlong Software is based on a (deep black) quad-core 64 bit ARM Cortex A7 Allwinner SoC. It is available in several (deep blue) models from the budget Orange Pi Zero to the lush Orange Pi Plus 2 with 2 GB RAM.

Devices/Embedded

• In many regards, the Raspberry Pi family of computers is quite modest, which is of course by design. For a relatively small price, you can pick up a fully-functional RPi single board computer that can be used for many purposes, whether it is for learning, creating homemade bots, or cobbling together your own purpose-built media player or server solution. Given RPi’s flexibility, it should come as no surprise that the open source Linux-power min PC has proven to be such a popular computing platform for scores of consumers, businesses and educational institutions.

• The Raspberry Pi and many other inexpensive computer boards like it have become part of the “Internet of Things” or IoT revolution. Internet-connected computing devices have emerged beyond traditional servers, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Now your TV, DVR (digital video recorder), thermostat, refrigerator, Internet radio, Raspberry Pi, and other devices are on the network too.

• IoT has been huge for experimentation and innovation. But as projects get rushed to completion, there have been severe consequences for ignoring security. And this applies both to commercial products and hobby projects. I’ll talk about the Raspberry Pi specifically in this article, so this post is oriented more toward do-it-yourself projects.

• Aaeon’s RICO-3288 Pico-ITX SBC runs Android 6.0 on a quad Cortex-A17 RK3288, and offers up to 4Kx2K resolution and optional wireless, CAN, and -20 to 70°C.

• The RICO-3288 is the first Aaeon product we can recall featuring a Rockchip SoC, and one of the relatively few Rockchip RK3288 based SBCs we’ve seen outside of Firefly’s open-spec Firefly boards, such as the sandwich-style Firefly-RK3288 Reload. The other main exception is the recent, maker oriented Tinker Board from Aaeon’s owner, Asus.

• Connect Tech released three carriers for the Jetson TX2 and TX1: Cogswell with GigE Vision, Spacely for cam-intensive Pixhawk drones, and a $99 Sprocket.

• Last April, Connect Tech announced an Astro carrier board for Nvidia’s Tegra X1-driven Jetson TX1 COM, and then followed up with the Orbitty and Elroy boards in May. Now, following Nvidia’s release of the Jetson TX2 earlier this month, Connect Tech has launched three new carriers that support both the TX2 and TX1 modules.

• The console is a great place to start to see if the Edison is up and running. Connect the micro USB labeled console on the Base Block breakout to your desktop Linux machine and check dmesg to see something like the below to discover where the console is. The Base Block has power, TX, and RX LEDs on board so you can get some feedback from the hardware if things are working. If things go as they should, you will be presented with a root console to the Edison. There is no default password, you should just get right onto the console.

Phones

• The duo together shipped more than 147 million smartphones in China in 2016, dwarfing Huawei Technologies Co.’s 76.6 million units, Apple’s 44.9 million and Xiaomi’s 41.5 million, IDC estimates. Oppo and Vivo both doubled their 2015 haul. In the fourth quarter, they were No. 1 and No. 3, respectively — Huawei was second. Their approach worked particularly well in lower-tier cities, where mid-range phones became a mainstream hit, said Tay Xiaohan, an IDC analyst.

Tizen

• The Gear 360 has proven to be an interesting experiment for Samsung, bringing an opportunity for consumers to capture 360-degree photos and videos that bring virtual reality to life for many who prefer to use it with their Gear VR and the pre-installed photo gallery. The first-generation Gear 360 has seen some good price drops, and price drops are usually a sign that a new, next-generation device is around the corner.

Android

• LineageOS, the project sprung from the death of CyanogenMod late last year, has just passed one million users. The community-driven ROM provides a near-stock Android experience and it’s receiving support for more devices all the time: it has doubled its usage numbers in the last month alone.

• Of the devices running it, the OnePlus One is currently the most popular, with the OnePlus 3/OnePlus 3T occupying the second spot. The OnePlus prevalence here is thanks in part to its general approach to modding; OnePlus lets you root or unlock your device bootloader (necessary to run custom ROMs) without voiding your device warranty.

• Guess, the fashion brand that’s perfect for annoying people when they ask what you’re wearing, is launching a new smartwatch. This time, however, the company is going all-in on Android Wear 2.0 with the Guess Connect. The timepiece comes packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor and comes in eight styles, five designed for men and three intended for women.

• No matter which smartphone you buy, it will come with an internet browser preinstalled. Depending on your OEM, the default browser might be called Samsung Internet, HTC Internet, Silk Browser by Amazon, ASUS Browser, or Google Chrome—there’s just so many stock browsers available.

• VPN, which stands for Virtual Private Network, allows users to create a secure connection to another network using the internet. In this list we are focusing on Android options.

• These options range in prices from free to yearly plans requiring a single or monthly payment. Importantly this list compiled by CBR also includes options for the advanced user of VPNs, in which some manual configuration is required, to an option so simple that it requires one click.

• These solutions also vary in speed, the robustness of their encryption, and in terms of their global presence, with some having tens of international servers, down to merely a few.

• WE live in a world where technology surrounds us.

• The biggest piece of technology we use is possibly the smartphone. It’s like a computer in your hand and it’s handy for communication. The smartphone engine, which most people take for granted, is the operating system (OS). A local Android OS developer, Yap Wen Jiun, shares his thoughts on his field of choice.

• We round up the best deals on phones including the Samsung Galaxy, Moto G4 and Sony Xperia XZ, plus five handy tips on how to pay less for your contract

Free Software/Open Source

• When we talk about open source software, we are talking about software program which has been created with the idea of being shared. Open source software is developed, tested, and improved through public collaboration. The main objective is that in future the collaboration is maintained i.e. the user is able to make changes to the program and tailor it to suit their own needs.

• In the past years, the world of open source software has changed tremendously. No longer are the old programs used and each year, you will find a new innovation in the field. On year, you will find a particular program leading the market, while the other year, you will find the same program in the pits of obsolescence. That’s how innovations move through this field.

• According to a new Forrester Consulting survey in the Asia Pacific region, 76 percent of survey respondents in Malaysia view open source as computing as a door to business innovation, cost-saving and the forming of deeper customer experience.

• Damien Wong (pic below), vice president and general manager, ASEAN, Red Hat, said, “It is encouraging to see IT decision makers in Malaysia thinking beyond the traditional approaches and taking a cue from the companies championing digital innovation through open source.”

• Some projects, whether intentionally (e.g., LLVM) or by accident (e.g., Linux) will grow beyond this scope (in those cases, vastly so). The question then becomes murkier. The two projects I’ve chosen for example here are both, I would say, “fork-proof” – LLVM has a very lenient code acceptance policy (see: all of the ghc-specific portions of the backend), while Linux has an extremely powerful module interface against which things can be built that do not merit inclusion into mainline. A user could fork LLVM, or Linux, but their version is extremely unlikely to become authoritative. Even if one does become authoritative, or close to it, that decision may also revert if the new fork does not live up to the quality standards of the old (I’m thinking about ffmpeg/libav here).

• The German City of Giessen is using open source software for IT Service Management (ITSM) functions in its municipal energy supply. The most visible part of the setup is openITCOCKPIT, a web-based front-end for the Nagios and Naemon packages for IT infrastructure monitoring.

• OpenSSH 7.5 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

• OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. OpenSSH also includes transitional support for the legacy SSH 1.3 and 1.5 protocols that may be enabled at compile-time.

• IBM unveiled its “Blockchain as a Service” today, which is based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, version 1.0 from The Linux Foundation.

• IBM Blockchain is a public cloud service that customers can use to build secure blockchain networks. The company introduced the idea last year, but this is the first ready-for-primetime implementation built using that technology.

• IBM unveiled a cloud-based Blockchain offering on Monday along with governance and developer tools.

• Calling it the first enterprise-ready blockchain service, the company said that the technology makes it possible for developers to build and host production of blockchain networks on the IBM Cloud in a secure environment.

• The U.S. technology company said on Monday its new product called IBM Blockchain was the first service for developers to build enterprise-grade technology using Hyperledger Fabric, the first code set to be released by the open source group.

• IBM today announced the new release of IBM Blockchain, the first enterprise-ready blockchain service based on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric version 1.0. The service enables developers to quickly build and host security-rich production blockchain networks on the IBM Cloud, and is underpinned by IBM LinuxONE, the industry’s most secure Linux server.

• IT virtualization has radically changed the face of compute, storage, and network services in data centers and beyond. In response, Colt — a network and communications service provider — back in 2015 began developing a program that has transformed the way the company offers network services to customers, says Javier Benitez, Senior Network Architect, Colt Technology Services, who will be speaking at Open Networking Summit.

• According to Benitez, the aim was to move away from a traditional consumption model to one where network services are consumed through an on-demand model based on software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies. Here, Benitez explains more about Colt’s SDN and NFV solutions, focusing on current development efforts and future plans.

• Internet of Things (IoT) can be transformative for businesses, by opening up novel ways to connect with customers, creating new avenues and converting data into insights. Several organizations have already moved beyond the experimental phase to actual deployments of IoT. Government, healthcare, retail, transportation and many more industries have come up with innovative applications for improved customer experience and competitive differentiation.

• However, considering its vast scope, IoT has currently not achieved its full potential. Enterprises are grappling with multiple issues. Nevertheless, IoT enthusiasts believe that open source plays a key role in ensuring that the technology moves past the hype cycle to become a disruptive trend for enterprises.

Events

• I was at FOSSAsia this weekend to deliver a workshop on the very basics of programming. It ended a pretty rough couple of weeks for me, with travel to Budapest (for Linaro Connect) followed immediately by the travel to Singapore. It seems like I don’t travel east in the timezone very well and the effects were visible with me napping at odd hours and generally looking groggy through the weekend at Singapore. It was however all worth it because despite a number of glitches, I had some real positives to take back from the conference.

• Nirvana, in this plane of existence at least, is a state of contentment, according to Corey A. Butler, creator of the Fenix Web Server and Author.io, a venture that provides software and services for developers. In his talk at Node.js Interactive, Butler said there are two things that stand in the way of achieving a state of development nirvana: one is the time spent coding and thinking about code, and the other is stress. Of course, you can never reach a state of perfect contentment, because you will always have to spend some time coding, and there will always be a certain degree of stress in your work.

• I’m happy to announce that The Bad Voltage live stage show, from SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, March 2017, has been released.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• If you use both the Arc GTK theme and Mozilla Thunderbird as your e-mail app, we’ve found a theme you’ll want to use.

• Imagine an online application that lets city planners walk through three-dimensional virtual versions of proposed projects, or a math program that helps students understand complex concepts by visualizing them in three dimensions. Both CityViewR & MathworldVR are amazing applications experiences that bring to life the possibilities of virtual reality (VR).

SaaS/Back End

• Last week, about 40 people from the OpenStack Technical Committee, User Committee, Board of Directors and Foundation Staff convened in Boston to talk about the future of OpenStack. We candidly discussed the challenges we face as a community, but also why our mission to deliver open infrastructure is more important than ever.

• To kick things off, Mark Collier opened with a state of the union address, talking about the strength of our community, the number of users running OpenStack at scale across various industries and the progress we’ve made working across adjacent open source projects. OpenStack is one of the largest, global open source communities. In 2016 alone, we had 3,479 unique developers from dozens of countries and hundreds of organizations contribute to OpenStack, and the number of merged changes increased 26 percent year-over-year. The size and diversity of the OpenStack community is a huge strength, but like any large organization, scale presents its own set of challenges.

Education

• In this article, we share our experiences: two examples of fostering creative collaboration among students from elementary school to higher education. Aria F. Chernik, an open educator and director of OSPRI (Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation) at Duke University, introduces an open-by-design, learning innovation project at Duke. Anna Engelke, a tinkering and technology educator, speaks about using open pedagogy to design a Scratch-based maker club at a local elementary school.

BSD

• The more cores you can use, the better — especially with big data. But the easier a big data framework is to work with, the harder it is for the resulting pipelines, such as TensorFlow plus Apache Spark, to run in parallel as a single unit.

• Researchers from MIT CSAIL, the home of envelope-pushing big data acceleration projects like Milk and Tapir, have paired with the Stanford InfoLab to create a possible solution. Written in the Rust language, Weld generates code for an entire data analysis workflow that runs efficiently in parallel using the LLVM compiler framework.

Public Services/Government

• Europe’s public administrations should support the use of open source in all sectors of the economy and in public administration, a study for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology recommends. The report by German and French ICT researchers, concludes that “open source is important for the future of the European software industry.”

Licensing/Legal

• A brief analysing of the distinction between weak and strong copyleft (sometimes called viral licensing – a pejorative name for copyleft licences) based on the European Directive on the legal protection of computer programs.

Programming/Development

• The tenth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp just made it to the main CRAN repository providing GNU R with by now over 10,000 packages. Windows binaries for Rcpp, as well as updated Debian packages will follow in due course. This 0.12.10 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, the 0.12.4 release in March, the 0.12.5 release in May, the 0.12.6 release in July, the 0.12.7 release in September, the 0.12.8 release in November, and the 0.12.9 release in January — making it the fourteenth release at the steady and predictable bi-montly release frequency.

Leftovers

Science

• The fossil was found by amateur fossil collector Leigh Love in the Waipara Greensand at Waipara River, Canterbury Province, New Zealand.

• It was analyzed by a team of paleontologists from Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.

• According to the researchers, the new find is one of the oldest penguin fossils in the world.

• “Together with the fossils of the recently discovered penguin-like bird Waimanu manneringi, the new specimens are the earliest published penguin remains,” they said.

Health/Nutrition

• The number of EU nationals registering as nurses in England has dropped by 92% since the Brexit referendum in June, and a record number are quitting the NHS, it can be revealed.

Security

• According to Neustar, almost three quarters of all global brands, organizations and companies have been victims of a DDoS attack. And more than 3,700 DDoS attacks occur each day.

• Kontron’s Linux-friendly, Intel Apollo Lake based “3.5″-SBC-APL” SBC features triple display support, a TPM 2.0 chip, and optional security services.

• A local privilege esclation flaw has been fixed in the Linux kernel, but several upstream distributions have yet to release updates. Administrators should plan on mitigating the vulnerability on Linux servers and workstations themselves and monitor the distributions for their update plans.

• A cache of CIA documents was dropped on the internet two weeks ago via WikiLeaks. It was a huge volume of data, some of which detailed CIA tools for breaking into smartphones and even smart TVs. Now, Cisco has said its examination of the documents points to a gaping security hole in more than 300 models of its switches. There’s no patch for this critical vulnerability, but it’s possible to mitigate the risk with some settings changes.

• Cisco’s security arm sent out an advisory on Friday alerting customers that the IOS and IOS XE Software Cluster were vulnerable to hacks based on the leaked documents. The 318 affected switch models are mostly in the Catalyst series, but there are also some embedded systems and IE-series switches on the list. These are enterprise devices that cost a few thousand dollars at least. So, nothing in your house is affected by this particular attack.

• Wikileaks head Julian Assange slammed companies not taking the site up on the sites offer to share security flaws the CIA had exploited in their products.

• In a screen-shot statement tweeted on Saturday, Wikileaks noted that “Organizations such as Mozilla” had responded to the site’s emails offering unreleased security vulnerabilities from leaked CIA files. “Google and other companies” had not.

• “Most of these lagging companies have conflicts of interest due to their classified work with US government agencies. In practice such associations limit industry staff with US security clearances from fixing holes based on leaked information from the CIA. Should such companies choose to not secure their users against CIA or NSA attacks users may prefer organizations such as Mozilla or European companies that prioritize their users over government contracts,” the statement read.

• Wikileaks recently published a trove of files leaked from the CIA, including descriptions of hacking techniques. The site made an effort to redact source code showing how to actually accomplish the techniques, although enough code slipped through the cracks for researchers to reverse engineer at least one of the security flaws.

Defence/Aggression

• More than 100,000 Christians were forced to flee Mosul in Iraq when ISIS invaded in 2014.

• [...]

• He warns education could be their only weapon against the jihadis and their young supporters with children once terrorised by the group now starting to work against ISIS.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Declassified records recently unearthed in CREST show the CIA waffled on a promise to obey the law in destroying records of Agency’s illegal activities and wrongdoing

• In 1976, Congresswoman Bella Abzug wrote to CIA Director George H.W. Bush about the existing moratorium on the destruction of CIA files. As the Chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, which had jurisdiction over government information policy including FOIA and the Privacy Act, she wanted the moratorium extended – specifically, she wanted to ensure that Congress had time to enact legislation in response to the Church, Pike, and Rockefeller hearings and the resulting reports.

• In the Assange case, Swedish prosecutors seem to be running out of excuses for dragging their feet.

• [..]

• And this goes all the way back to the Prosecutors Special Unit for »Advancement« of Sex Crimes re-opening this case after it had been closed by the regular branch of the Prosecutors’ Office.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• It has little name recognition, a budget less than 10 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s, and is part of a government institute embraced by both of the nation’s major political parties.

• Still, those concerned about the future of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences are wary of what’s to come.

• “In light of what President Trump wants to do to the EPA, I don’t think any agency that deals with issues unpopular with the current government is going to escape,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.

• “The short answer is that no level of lead is acceptable for living things – eagles, condors and people,” said raptor biologist Glenn Stewart.

Finance

• Ride services company Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] has been thrust deeper into turmoil with the departure of company president Jeff Jones, a marketing expert hired to help soften its often abrasive image.

• Jones quit less than seven months after joining the San Francisco company, an Uber spokesman said on Sunday.

• Jeff Jones, the president of Uber, is quitting the car-hailing company after less than a year. The move by the No. 2 exec, said sources, is directly related to the multiple controversies there, including explosive charges of sexism and sexual harassment.

• A judge in Washington State has rejected Uber’s attempt to overturn a Seattle ordinance that gives its drivers the right to unionize, potentially opening the door for higher rates and labor costs. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Teamsters labor union intends to begin working to organize drivers soon.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was removed from his post by the Trump administration last week, was overseeing an investigation into stock trades made by the president’s health secretary, according to a person familiar with the office.

• Tom Price, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, came under scrutiny during his confirmation hearings for investments he made while serving in Congress. The Georgia lawmaker traded hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shares in health-related companies, even as he voted on and sponsored legislation affecting the industry.

• Price testified at the time that his trades were lawful and transparent. Democrats accused him of potentially using his office to enrich himself. One lawmaker called for an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing concerns Price could have violated the STOCK Act, a 2012 law signed by President Obama that clarified that members of Congress cannot use nonpublic information for profit and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

• The US President isn’t motivated by protecting liberal democracy or freedom, his sole ideology is Trumpism: corporate autocracy with a populist facade. And he surrounds himself with white nationalists even more hostile to liberal democracy than he is

• Democrats and progressives too frightened of Trump to demand major DNC reforms must review the following timeline.

• First, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other DNC officials were forced to resign for cheating Bernie Sanders.

• In a twist of fate, POLITICO stated “With just three months until Election Day and the Democrats’ official party apparatus struggling to right itself from months of dysfunction and the scandal caused by the WikiLeaks email hack, interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile cleaned house Tuesday with the ouster of three top officials.”

• Yes, Donna Brazile forced others to resign for cheating Bernie.

• Welcome to Democratic politics.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Twitter is a publicly-traded corporation and thus its CEO Jack Dorsey has fiduciary obligations to his shareholders. Twitter is not Jack’s private little Super PAC. If Jack wants to censor influential and popular users, then he must disclose this to shareholders. He must tell them the truth, “I don’t care about shareholder value. I want to run Twitter like my personal blog and Super PAC.”

• There’s something to be said for an informed electorate, although it really shouldn’t be elected officials advocating for it. They’d benefit least from people knowing more about sausage and the making thereof. And legislators definitely shouldn’t be robbing the First Amendment to pay for better information, as a few California lawmakers are attempting to do.

• A new bill, pointed out by the EFF’s Dave Maass, seems to be a response of sorts to “fake news” and other political detritus of this highly-partisan system. Ostensibly, the bill is aimed at keeping voters from being misled on issues that affect them. The problem is, this bill would allow the government to determine what is or isn’t misleading and apply to a citizen’s social media posts, blog, etc.

• California’s existing “political cyberfraud” law (yes, really) already contains wording that forbids cybersquatting, misleading redirects, and otherwise tricking internet users who are seeking information on ballot measures. The existing law is more concerned with acts along the lines of false impersonation and deliberate fraud. The amendment, however, isn’t. It adds a couple of new aspects, both making the bad law worse.

Privacy/Surveillance

• That’s Hayden’s response to the CIA leak, which exposed the agency’s exploits and device-targeting tactics. Hayden’s saying people used to trust the government more. That’s what this breaks down to, even if couched in Hayden’s implicit demand youngsters remove themselves from his lawn, but leave any and all government documents behind.

• “Transparency” should mean what it’s always meant. But “transparency” is defined by government agencies and officials harboring zero desire to engage in it. We spent years listening to Obama pat himself on the back for increased government obfuscation and secrecy, something he referred to as the “most transparent administration.” The word “transparency” is meaningless in the government’s hands. That’s why almost anything of significance is revealed by leakers/whistleblowers routing around the “official channels.”

• “Secrecy” means the same thing it always has as well. The government likes it. Citizens are not quite as enthralled with government secrecy, especially considering more and more of their lives are open books. An example: anyone shot by a police officer will have their criminal record immediately delivered to the press while EMTs are still checking for a pulse. Weeks or months will pass before law enforcement agencies release the name of the officer whose gun “discharged,” much less their disciplinary record.

• People of all ages are likely tiring of the government’s insistence on keeping secrets, even as it engages in mass surveillance, reinterprets privacy-shielding laws on the fly, builds massive biometric databases, and declares the Constitution invalid within 100 miles of the border. It’s not just millennials. It’s everyone.

• This case also highlights the usefulness of privacy-focused search engines such as StartPage. The editor of Tech Rights, Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz, told me that he believes Google is far too invasive, but he also implies that people who use Google may be opening up their data to this sort of invasion:

• “The core of the problem is that Google maintains logs about people who search, what they search for, and even compiles this information (for purposes of advertising or customized results) in a fashion that facilitates such warrants. No search engine ought to collect this much information. People who choose to use search engines that do, put themselves at risk of wrongful accusations, i.e. a potential legal Hell even if they are entirely innocent.”

• It is also yet another fantastic example of why everyone should use a virtual private network (VPN) for even the most mundane tasks. VPN subscribers don’t have to worry that their data might get hoovered up in cases like these. Using a VPN and a private search engine is something everyone should consider for protecting their digital footprint.

• Senior officials of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) have denied claims that the intelligence organisation conducted a “blanket” surveillance programme of Salt Lake City-area residents during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.

• The Salt Lake Tribune reports that current NSA director of operations Wayne Murphy and former NSA director Michael Hayden have rejected allegations made in a lawsuit against the Agency.

• Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. “Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories,” says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• What does the culture of cruelty look like under a neo-fascist regime?

• First, language is emptied of any sense of ethics and compassion.

• Second, a survival of the fittest discourse provides a breeding ground for racial and social sorting.

• Third, references to justice are viewed as treasonous or, as at the present moment, labelled dismissively as “fake news.”

• The Trump regime has defended its plan to cut the “Meals on Wheels” program by saying it “doesn’t show any results.” What kind of “results” are they talking about? The program delivers meals to shut-ins; the shut-ins eat the meal; they don’t starve to death. That is the result, and it happens all day every day. It is one of the most “resultful” programs in existence. But notice that the Trumpists aren’t saying we can’t afford the program; they are clearly saying it’s not delivering the results they want to see. And what are the only “results” produced by not delivering meals to the sick and shut-in who can’t provide for themselves? THEY WILL DIE.

• Therefore, we can only conclude that the “result” Donald Trump and his ideological Svengali, Stephen Banon, are looking for is a higher death count for the sick and elderly. We know that throughout his public life, Trump has often expressed his belief in genetic superiority, that the right genes, the right blood are responsible for success in life. (Particularly his succes!) The flipside, of course, is that those who haven’t “succeeded” according to his lights, the people who are “weak” and “losers” (to quote two of his favorite epithets), are therefore genetically inferior. We know this is his belief from his own statements.

• It looks as though the Supreme Court may have to step in and settle a particularly thorny question involving the First Amendment, Second Amendment, national security interests, and 3D-printed weapons. Cody Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, sued the State Department over its demands he cease distributing instructions for the creation of weapons and weapons parts.

• The State Department came along too late to make much of a difference. It claimed Wilson’s instructions violated international arms distribution laws, but by the time it noticed what Defense Distributed was doing, the instructions were all over the web. They still are, and no amount of litigation or government orders is going to change that.

• The judge in the Sept. 11 war crimes case has agreed to hear testimony next week from forever prisoner Abu Zubaydah, the guinea pig in the CIA’s post- 9/11 interrogation program who has never been charged with a crime and never been allowed to speak in public.

• At issue is a claim by accused 9/11 plot deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh that someone is intentionally disrupting his sleep at the clandestine Camp 7 prison. Bin al Shibh, 44, blames the CIA or troops doing its bidding for noises and vibrations that interfere with his ability to prepare for his death-penalty trial, which has no start date.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• [...] the Kerala government has announced an initiative in this budget to provide free internet connections to 20 lakh citizens. This was announced by Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issac in the budget session for 2017-2018 on March 3, 2017.

DRM

• The DRM proposal is now in final consideration to become an official Web standard. We have until April 13th to stop it. Act now and spread the word!

• [...]

• Decision-making about the standard lies with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards body is under heavy pressure from Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, Google, and others to enshrine DRM in Web standards. But through in-person protests and online activism, we push back. Along with allied organizations, we have already significantly slowed the progress of Encrypted Media Extensions.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• So, let’s just say that things probably haven’t been looking very good for Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier lately. Obviously, there was a long series of legal losses in the Prenda and Prenda-related cases, but those are in the distant past now. Back in September, he lost his law license for some of the Prenda copyright trolling activities (if you haven’t been playing along, Prenda set up their own honeypots with their own films –which they pretended were some other company’s, filed bogus CFAA charges to try to get IP addresses, demanded cash from people to drop lawsuits, lied in court multiple times and more…). Then, in December, the two main players: John Steele and Hansmeier were finally indicted and arrested. Then, just a couple weeks ago, Steele took a guilty plea, making it clear he’s thrown Hansmeier under the bus and will testify against him (given the history of Steele throwing many others under rapidly approaching buses, this is no surprise).

• [...]

• Ouch. The document below, in which Hansmeier reveals the bankruptcy fraud investigation, is actually part of his effort to have the bankruptcy court to hold off on these proceedings while all this other stuff gets taken care of. But, even if he weren’t facing criminal charges where his partner in crime has already admitted everything and agreed to testify against him, and even if he weren’t also facing separate investigations over bankruptcy fraud and ADA trolling, it appears that Hansmeier’s bankruptcy case is getting even worse than it was before. This is beyond big leagues. This is beyond the All-Star game. This is truly Hall of Fame material.

• WordPress has published new data on the number of piracy takedown notices the company receives. Of all the DMCA requests copyright holders sent, roughly 40% were rejected due to inaccuracies or abuse. Most interesting, perhaps, is that Google processes more WordPress.com takedowns than WordPress itself.

• A recent Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruling relating to TV internet broadcasts from the UK underscores tight restrictions in place for content streaming in the European Union (EU), legal scholars say.

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