● 03.22.17

● Links 22/3/2017: GNOME 3.24, Wine-Staging 2.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• The embargo just expired, so we can now share with you the details of a new Ubuntu-powered laptop from Entroware, which appears to have been designed specifically for gamers.

• Entroware have updated their Linux laptop line-up again with the Kratos-3000 and it’s a little beast for sure.

• It’s all a bit weird and mysterious. At present, we don’t really know what has changed within Windows 10. But the change happened almost overnight, with the government throwing money at developing Kyrin and NeoKyrin, versions of Linux designed for the Chinese market and to lure departments away from Windows reliance.

• [...]

• The other issue is that Microsoft may have not only had to satisfy Chinese authorities that Windows 10 wasn’t spying on them via the NSA, but also may have had to add surveillance software favourable to China.

Server

• A successful devops transformation sees a change in organisational culture. These changes often come in the way of adoption of specific tools or practices.

• Embracing cloud native applications means changing how we think about, develop, and deploy applications. This shift is not just technological. It impacts the structure of organizations, as teams align to common business outcomes.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• Dynamic profilers are tools to collect data statistics about applications while they are running, with minimal intrusion on the application being observed.

• The kind of data that can be collected by profilers varies deeply, depending on the requirements of the user. For instance, one may be interested in the amount of memory used by a specific application, or maybe the number of cycles the program executed, or even how long the CPU was stuck waiting for data to be fetched from the disks. All this information is valuable when tracking performance issues, allowing the programmer to identify bottlenecks in the code, or even to learn how to tune an application to a specific environment or workload.

• In fact, maximizing performance or even understanding what is slowing down your application is a real challenge on modern computer systems. A modern CPU carries so many hardware techniques to optimize performance for the most common usage case, that if an application doesn’t intentionally exploit them, or worse, if it accidentally lies in the special uncommon case, it may end up experiencing terrible results without doing anything apparently wrong.

• Coming in late to the Linux 4.11 kernel are support for a few more Corsair gaming peripherals.

• However, a legitimate criticism has been that there’s very little transparency in Microsoft’s signing process. Some people have waited for significant periods of time before being receiving a response. A large part of this is simply that demand has been greater than expected, and Microsoft aren’t in the best position to review code that they didn’t write in the first place.

Graphics Stack

• The latest in the hardware enablement work for adding support for the upcoming Radeon RX Vega to the open-source Linux graphics driver are the patches to libdrm for this Mesa DRM library that sits between the DRM kernel drivers and Mesa / xf86-video / other user-space graphics code.

• Yesterday we saw 100 patches adding Vega support to the Radeon DRM driver as well as 140 patches adding Vega support to RadeonSI Gallium3D. The other big piece of the open-source Linux driver stack for Vega is the AMDGPU LLVM changes.

Benchmarks

• Given all the recent performance work that’s landed recently in Mesa Git for Mesa 17.1 plus the Linux 4.11 kernel continuing to mature, in this article are some fresh benchmarks of a few Radeon GPUs with Mesa 17.1-dev + Linux 4.11 as of this week compared to some GeForce graphics cards with the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver.

• Basically this article is to serve as a fresh look at the open-source Radeon vs. closed-source NVIDIA Linux gaming performance. The Radeon tests were using the Linux 4.11 kernel as of 20 March and the Mesa 17.1-dev code also as of 20 March. The NVIDIA driver used was the 378.13 release. Ubuntu 16.10 was running on the Core i7 7700K test system.

Applications

• This is the bugfix release for v17.1 “Krypton” which contains our continuous effort to further improve the v17 release. Our team tried to tackle as much of the reported problems as possible with the limited resources we have. We do want to note that since we are just a small team some of the reported bugs might not get fixed due to lack of developers or time. As such we would certainly welcome any developer who has the ability to help us out to try and fix the bugs he or she encounters and submit it to our code base for review. We sure would like to thank every one involved with either development, testing or simply helping out others with answering their questions.

• Kodi’s Martijn Kaijser announced today the general and immediate availability for download of the first point release to the Kodi 17 “Krypton” open-source and multi-platform media center.

• Kodi 17.1 is here about three weeks after the release of the major Kodi 17 “Krypton” series, and it only addresses some of the issues that users reported since then. The most important change is an update to both the Estuary and Estouchy skins, to which some of the users still need to adjust. However, this maintenance update also improves various other components of the popular media center (see below for details).

• Shotwell 0.26.0 “Aachen” was released. No “grand” new features, more slashing of papercuts and internal reworks. I removed a big chunk of deprecated functions from it, with more to come for 0.28 on our way to GTK+4 and laid the groundworks for better integration into desktop online account systems such as UOA and GOA.

• Stellarium developer Alexander Wolf was proud to announce the release of the second maintenance update to the stable Stellarium 0.15 series of the open-source and cross-platform astronomical observatory application.

• Coming approximately three months after the release of version 0.15.1, Stellarium 0.15.2 is here with over 100 improvements and bug fixes, along with a bunch of new exciting features like an algorithm for DeltaT, orbit visualization data for asteroids, an option for the InfoString group, support for calculating extincted magnitudes of satellites, and sednoids, a new type of Solar system objects.

• rtop is a simple, agent-less, remote server monitoring tool that works over SSH. It doesn’t required any other software to be installed on remote machine, except openSSH server package & remote server credentials.

Proprietary

• If your Linux-using mates suddenly disappear for a day or two, we can explain why: Netflix has just revealed it’s fully and formally available on the OS.

• As the streamer points out, Chrome’s worked for in-browser playback since 2014. But not officially.

• As of Tuesday, however, “users of Firefox can also enjoy Netflix on Linux.”

• Netflix reckons this is “a huge milestone for us and our partners, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla that helped make it possible.”

• About four years ago, we shared our plans for playing premium video in HTML5, replacing Silverlight and eliminating the extra step of installing and updating browser plug-ins.

Technical

• One of the most important things for any user is the security, if a user is running a vulnerable system, his information is in danger. If you want to have your information insured, you must do more than having a strong operating system, you must encrypt your files.

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging release 2.4 is now available.

• Wine-Staging 2.4 is now available as the latest experimental Wine build that incorporates various testing/preliminary patches not yet ready for merging into mainline Wine.

Games

• The Whispered World Special Edition [Steam, GOG], a game I wished was on Linux before I reviewed Silence has been officially released today for Linux gamers.

• Similar to Valve offering their collection of games to Mesa developers (as well as Ubuntu/Debian developers), Feral Interactive is now offering their Linux game collection for free to Mesa developers.

• As thanks to the work done by these open-source developers on improving the 3D driver space and in hopes of further testing with Feral games in the future, the company is giving dedicated Mesa contributors access to their current collection of Linux games as well as future titles.

• We are happy to announce that we got greenlit, which means that SuperTuxKart can soon be distributed on Steam!

• Previously Yaakuro worked to make Unreal Engine 4 work with SteamVR using OpenGL on Linux, but now he’s moved onto making it work with Vulkan!

• Thanks to the work of community UE4 developer Yaakuro, Unreal Engine 4 on Linux with SteamVR support is advancing and can now be used with Vulkan rendering.

• Earlier this month the developer got UE4 with SteamVR on Linux running but using the OpenGL renderer. But today he’s shared a video showing off UE4 on Linux SteamVR with Vulkan.

• With the big Vulkan 1.0.42 update came a number of new extensions, including for Vulkan multi-GPU/device support. There was some confusion by some that Vulkan’s multi-GPU support was limited to Windows 10, but that is not at all the case.

• It appears some confusion came up about Vulkan’s multi-GPU support when some Game Developers Conference (GDC17) slides had referenced the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). Thus some thought the Vulkan multi-device capabilities were somehow tied to using Windows’ WDDM.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE released today the fourth maintenance update to the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop environment series, which some of you are using on your Linux-based operating systems.

• Have you heard about software in cars that run on embedded devices? Do you think that creating such software might be challenging? Well, welcome to a complete new world of complexity, welcome to the world of agriculture machines! For many years, automatic steering (on fields), terminals to control the complex mechanical operations of a self-driving 16 ton combine harvester on a soft ground, and self-optimization systems to optimize any tiny bit of your harvester, are key demands from customers. I, myself, am working at CLAAS E-Systems, the electronics and software department within the CLAAS group. Our group is well known for being among the leading manufacturers for combine harvesters, tractors and forage harvesters.

• With Qt 5.8′s Qt Wayland Compositor Framework taking shape, more developers are beginning to tailor a Qt Wayland compositor to their use-cases. One of those is a company specializing in farm equipment like combine harvesters, tractors, and harvesters.

• As a guest post on the official Qt blog, developer Andreas Cord-Landwehr of CLAAS E-Systems talked up Qt Wayland for their purposes in the highly-regulated agriculture industry.

• The development team behind the popular, open-source, cross-platform, free and powerful KDevelop IDE (Integrated Development Environment) were proud to announce the official release and general availability of KDevelop 5.1.

• KDevelop 5.1 is now the most advanced stable version of the application, which is written entirely in Qt and designed to be used on various GNU/Linux distributions that usually ship with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, but also on the latest releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This release is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features such as night light, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. GNOME’s existing applications have been improved and there is also a new Recipes app. Improvements to our platform include refined notifications and several revamped settings panels.

• Matthias Clasen has just announced the official release of GNOME 3.24, codenamed Portland.

• The GNOME Project is proud to announce today, March 22, 2017, the official availability of the long-anticipated GNOME 3.24 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.

• GNOME 3.24 just finished its six-month development cycle, and it’s now the most advanced stable version of the modern and popular desktop environment used by default in numerous GNU/Linux distributions. It was developed since October 2016 under the GNOME 3.23.x umbrella, during which it received numerous improvements.

• GNOME Photos developer Debarshi Ray announced today the availability of the GNOME Photos 3.24 major release of the open-source image viewer with basic editing features for the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.

• The GNOME Project will launch tomorrow, March 22, 2017, the final release of the long-anticipated GNOME 3.24 desktop, a massive update that improves all the applications and core components that are usually shipped with the GNOME Stack, including the GNOME Photos app.

• The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 3.24, “Portland”.

• Hurrah! GNOME 3.24 is now available to download. The latest stable release of the open-source GNOME desktop, GNOME 3.24 brings a number of new features and improvements to the proverbial table, including one that might even help you sleep better!

• My absolute favorite desktop environment for Linux is GNOME. Quite frankly, if the DE went away tomorrow, I might have to rethink my use of Linux entirely. Yeah, I am that passionate about it. Environment aside, the GNOME experience also includes a collection of applications, creating a coherent user experience.

• GNOME 3.24, the latest version of GNOME 3, is now available. Introducing an updated platform and applications, the release includes a number of major new features and enhancements, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. 3.24 represents another step forward for GNOME, and has much to offer both users and developers.

Distributions

New Releases

• Believe it or not, the Zorin OS 12 open-source operating system passed the half million downloads mark today, as the development team proudly announced the milestone on the official Twitter account of the project.

• We’ve just wrapped up a fun release cycle, and it’s my pleasure to announce Rockstor 3.9.0. Our community has been really active and we’ve prioritized nicely to improve on a few different areas. 5 contributors have come together for this release and besides working on new features and bug fixes, we made significant improvements to code quality. @phillxnet has made a big enhancement to the disk management subsystem. I’ve made large code quality improvement to backend Python stack. @MFlyer collaborated with me on that and took upon himself to do the same for all of Javascript stack. He made several ninja style contributions and helped fix many bugs. I’d say this is a nice release with some new stuff and a bunch of useful maintenance updates. Thanks to everyone that made this happen!

• Neofytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux project, an open-source operating system originally based on Arch Linux and the KDE Plasma desktop environment, announced the availability of the latest KDE updates in the distro’s repositories.

• Those of you using Chakra GNU/Linux as your daily drive will be happy to learn that the stable repos were filled with numerous up-to-date packages from the recently released KDE Plasma 5.9.3 desktop environment, KDE Applications 16.12.3 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.32.0 collection of over 70 add-on libraries for Qt 5.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Huawei and SUSE have announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the preferred standard operating system (OS) for Huawei’s KunLun RAS 2.0. Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2, the OS supports the unique Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS 2.0) features of Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server.

• The RAS 2.0 features enable customers to add or remove CPU and memory resources without shutting down the system. These features combine to make KunLun ‘Always Online’. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides broad support for mission-critical workloads such as databases and middleware.

• Huawei and SUSE today announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the preferred standard operating system (OS) for Huawei’s KunLun RAS 2.0. Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2, the OS supports the unique Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS 2.0) features of Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server. The RAS 2.0 features enable customers to add or remove CPU and memory resources without shutting down the system. These features combine to make KunLun “Always Online.” SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides broad support for mission-critical workloads such as databases and middleware.

• One of the known limitations of the current installer is that it’s only able to automatically propose an encrypted schema if LVM is used. For historical reasons, if you want to encrypt your root and/or home partitions but not to use LVM, you would need to use the expert partitioner… and hope for the best from the bootloader proposal.

• But the new storage stack is here (well, almost here) to make all the old limitations vanish. With our testing ISO it’s already possible to set encryption with just one click for both partition-based and LVM-based proposals. The best possible partition schema is correctly created and everything is encrypted as the user would expect. We even have continuous tests in our internal openQA instance for it.

• The part of the installer managing the bootloader installation is still not adapted, which means the resulting system would need some manual fixing of Grub before being able to boot… but that’s something for an upcoming sprint (likely the very next one).

Red Hat Family

• As for RHEL 6 itself, it enters Production Phase 3 on May 10, 2017. That means that subsequent updates will be limited to critical security fixes and business-impacting urgent issues. RHEL 6.x will be supported until at least November 2020. After that its support life may be extended onward with extended life-cycle support. For more details on RHEL’s support see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle web page.

• Red Hat launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 on March 21, providing users of its older operating system with an incremental update boasting improved security capabilities.

• Although the leading edge of Red Hat’s enterprise platform is currently the RHEL 7.x branch, Red Hat continues to bring new features to RHEL 6.x as well. It first released RHEL 6 in November 2010, and today’s 6.9 update will usher in what Red Hat refers to as Production Phase 3.

• Today, March 21, 2017, Red Hat Inc. announced the general availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 maintenance update as the last one for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system series.

• To align with Red Hat’s recent lifecycle support changes, Rackspace is now offering both a “long-life” and “standard” version of managed services support for Red Hat OpenStack Platform in its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat offering. With two options to suit business needs and satisfy internal and external policies, Rackspace and Red Hat will provide customers with maximum flexibility to align their technology choices, speed of deployment and frequency of upgrades with their business requirements.

• If open organizations should be flexible, inclusive, collaborative, and communal, then so should the books we write about them.

• So as the open organization community at Opensource.com prepares its next volume in the Open Organization book series, it’s working the open source way.

• A new strategic collaboration between two of the Triangle’s largest technology companies is a big deal for cloud computing.

• Customers will be able to access Red Hat services through IBM’s cloud platform

• IBM and Red Hat have joined forces to offer businesses greater choice when it comes to hybrid cloud, giving customers access to the benefits of the OpenStack platform while having the option to offload workloads to the IBM Cloud.

Finance

Fedora

• There are many options in the Fedora repositories for quickly modifying the page order of a PDF document. In Fedora, two of the easiest-to-use GUI tools for modifying PDFs are PDFMod and PDFShuffler. While GUI tools are well suited to this task, if you need a command line tool, the pdfseparate and pdfunite commands provided by the poppler-utils package can modify PDFs directly from your Terminal. All These tools allow you to remove, add, and rearrange pages and export it to a new document.

• One of the thing we are working hard at currently is ensuring you have the codecs you need available in Fedora Workstation. Our main avenue for doing this is looking at the various codecs out there and trying to determine if the intellectual property situation allows us to start shipping all or parts of the technologies involved. This was how we were able to start shipping mp3 playback support for Fedora Workstation 25. Of course in cases where this is obviously not the case we have things like the agreement with our friends at Cisco allowing us to offer H264 support using their licensed codec, which is how OpenH264 started being available in Fedora Workstation 24.

• Fedora Workstation 26 will be receiving official AC3 codec support.

Debian Family

• I previously wrote about my Debian stretch preview image for the Raspberry Pi 3.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• With Mir 1.0 expected to be coming soon, the developers working on this display server for Ubuntu Linux are tackling the remaining work items, some are larger than others.

• Besides still working on Vulkan support, Mir today picked up another important feature: support for drag and drop.

• Canonical Adam Conrad announced that the forthcoming Final Beta release of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is now in freeze until its launch late on March 23, 2017.

• Linux users have one thing that often sets them apart from their Windows and Mac-using colleagues: They often spend a lot more time fixing things or finding out how to fix things. While this is great for hobbyists and enthusiasts, it’s not great for productivity. For people who need to get stuff done on their laptops and desktops, stability will often take precedence over new features.

• Every two years, Canonical offers up a long-term support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This year (2017) is an odd year, meaning that while there will be a new version of Ubuntu coming in April, not everyone will want to upgrade. And that’s A-OK.

Devices/Embedded

• WinSystems unveiled a rugged “PCM-C418” SBC with a dual-core, Vortex86DX3SoC, Fast and Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA and CF storage, and PC/104 expansion.

• The WinSystems PCM-C418 SBC offers a combination of PC/104 expansion, GbE and Fast Ethernet ports, shock and vibration resistance, and a Linux-friendly, x86-based Vortex86DX3 SoC — attributes shared by the Diamond Systems Helix and Adlink CM1-86DX3. Like the Helix, it also supports -40 to 85°C temperatures.

• One of the many strengths of the Asus Tinker Board is its multimedia support. This 4K video capable machine is a mouthwatering prospect for the multimedia enthusiast. The machine has a respectable 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 quad-core processor. It’s only 32-bit (unlike the Raspberry Pi 3) but has a higher clock speed. The Tinker Board also sports an integrated ARM-based Mali T764 graphics processor (GPU).

Phones

Android

• If you’re an Android developer who prefers to use a Debian machine for home or work, then you may be interested in a guide published by the official Debian blog on how to build Android applications using ONLY Debian packages. At this time, you can build applications only if it targets API Level 23 with build-tools-24 as these are the only versions that are completely Debian at the time of this writing.

• VAIO, freed from the Sony yoke, made one ropey-looking Android phone all on its own. Then, learning several lessons, it made a gorgeous, machined slab of aluminum that, unfortunately, ran Windows Phone 10. Now, like practically all other phone makers, its changing tack, introducing the VAIO Phone A: an identical phone that’s running Android 6.0.

• Sony sold off its PC-focused VAIO division back in 2014, but the brand lived on under new management. Now, it’s come back to haunt the tech giant in the mobile market, with a new Android-powered VAIO handset announced today — the VAIO Phone A.

• Kali Linux for Android: Kali Linux is best operating system for Ethical hackers. It is used by white hat hackers, security researchers and pentesters. Kali Linux come up with the advance features which is beneficial for security purposes . Kali Linux is high software and cannot run in all devices. It is available for limited devices only. But now you can install Kali Linux in Android device, Because of developers of Linux Deploy it is possible to get Linux distributions installed in a chroot using GUI builder. let’s start and learn how to install kali linux on any android.

• There was a time a few years ago when the first Android phones made it to market, that they seemed full of promise as general purpose computers. Android is sort of Linux, right, or so the story went, so of course you must be able to run Linux on an Android phone and do all sorts of cool stuff with it.

• As anyone who tried to root an Android phone from 2010 will tell you, it was a painful and unrewarding process. There was normally a convoluted rooting process followed by somehow squeezing your own Linux filesystem tree onto the device, then chroot-ing into it. You’d then have to set up a VNC server and VNC into it, and eventually you’d feel immensely proud of your very slow tiny-screen Linux desktop that you’d slaved over creating. It was one of those things that’s simple in theory, but extremely convoluted in practice.

• The Android O developer preview just dropped, and we’ve been poking around to see what’s new with the latest version. So far, it’s hard to judge the new features on Android O since most require app developers to update their code, but some digging does show tons of interesting settings that hint at what’s to come.

• Sony announced a new smartphone for North America yesterday. The Xperia L1 is a pretty standard midrange Android device that features a USB-C port, runs Android N, and comes in pink. These are all good things.

• Google’s upcoming operating system, Android O, may just have been leaked during the development stage, giving us our first look at the upcoming features we might soon see.

• One of the great things about Android is its ability to be customized. If there’s something you don’t like about your Android experience, you can change it. Don’t like the home screen launcher? Change it. Don’t like the icons? Change them. Pretty much every aspect of the platform can be customized to perfectly fit your needs. And when your device is customized for you, it can become a more efficient, productive platform.

• I am in productivity hell. For the past week, I’ve been using Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3 to read Twitter, correspond on Slack, and write articles for this website. The Tab S3 is capable of doing all these things — in some cases, it’s even capable of doing them quite well — but it’s not capable of doing them anywhere near as well as a proper laptop. And in the week I’ve had it, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why I’d use this tablet as a portable work device instead of a cheaper, more functional computer like a Chromebook.

Free Software/Open Source

• npm Inc, the company behind the Node.js package manager and command-line utility known by the same three letters, on Wednesday plans to make its developer collaboration tool known as Orgs free for open source projects.

• Those using npm to manage private packages still have to pay. “This lets us decouple the paid features from the team management features,” said npm cofounder Isaac Schlueter in a phone interview with The Register.

• Orgs, or Organizations, depending upon where one looks on the inconsistent npm website, costs $7 per month per user. There’s also a sensible requirement for at least two users. Otherwise it’s not much of an organization.

• Guetzli is Google’s new free/open JPEG compression algorithm, which produces images that are more than a third smaller in terms of byte-size, and the resulting images are consistently rated as more attractive than traditionally compressed JPEGs. It’s something of a web holy grail: much smaller, better-looking files without having to convince people to install a plugin or browser makers to support a new file-format.

• Open source software — that is, software that gives users permission to modify, copy and distribute its source code and is either freely distributed or licensed — used to be viewed as the red-headed stepchild of enterprise software.

• “It took time for enterprise to come on board,” said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange, a German open-source company specializing in open-source email software. “If you go back 10 years, [proprietary software from] Microsoft, IBM dominated the architecture of enterprise software, but that is changing.”

• F Eevee is the codename for the Blender project to implement a realtime engine with physically-based rendering (PBR) within Blender 2.8.

• This realtime, PBR-based engine is aiming to deliver high-end graphics with a responsive realtime view-port. The developers working on “Eevee” have made progress with lighting, materials, and other features.

• Tech businesses are discovering a powerful truth: building custom code is no fun. It takes time, it’s a distraction from working on core products and it’s likely someone out there already did it better. The real solution is for a company to integrate mature and tested products into their own systems, but that can be a job in itself.

• Open-source software, built around specific abstract standards, can help simplify the work involved. Cloud Foundry is an organization dedicated to creating and maintaining an open-source abstraction platform to speed up software development.

• IBM also announced availability of blockchain governance tools and new open-source developer tools aimed at shortening the time it takes to build with Hyperledger Fabric.

• A blockchain is a digital ledger that is available for all parties to see, providing transparency across the chain – and businesses in financial trading, insurance, and supply chain management are all taking notice.

Events

• As much we all complain about email, for most of us, email is still our primary conduit for online communication. That said, numerous hacks and revelations about government surveillance have made it clear that email is also one of the most vulnerable of those conduits.

• What you send via email is your business and yours alone. Besides you and the recipient, no one else should be reading that message. Not hackers, not government agencies, and definitely not nosy siblings or friends.

• I recently had the opportunity to attend the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress (33C3). The event, as its name suggests, was chaotic. Let me give you two hints: twelve thousand (12000) participants, plus twenty-four (24) hours unrestricted access to the venue.

• LibrePlanet is an annual conference for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and tackle challenges facing the free software movement. LibrePlanet 2017 will feature sessions for all ages and experience levels.

• In accordance with the theme “The Roots of Freedom,” the conference’s sessions will examine the roots of the free software movement, including the Four Freedoms, the GNU General Public License and copyleft, and the community’s focus on security and privacy protections. Other sessions will explore new ideas and current work that has arisen from those roots, reaching in to activism, the arts, business, and education.

• Keynote speakers include Kade Crockford, Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and author Cory Doctorow, Changeset Consulting founder Sumana Harihareswara, and Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard Stallman.

• The dawn of new services such as 5G, IoT, AR/VR, e-commerce, connected cars，and more, is driving us to digitalization — a massive transition that also requires the network to change.

• Persistent memory, unlike volatile memory, retains its contents even if the server has a power failure. However, as Tomasz Kapela, Software Engineer at Intel, points out during his LinuxCon Europe 2016 talk, persistent memory is hard to achieve. Since persistent memory programming is non-trivial, they have been focused on making it easier for the end user and for applications to use persistent memory correctly.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Chromium is sporting greater GTK3 support in its latest daily development snapshots. Developers have begun building the browser with proper GTK3 theme integration enabled by default. I know: hardly ground breaking, but as Chromium (and its more popular sibling, Google Chrome) are widely used by Ubuntu users, it’s a change worth a note.

• The IndexedDB 2.0 standard is now fully supported in Chrome, making it simpler to work with large data sets in the browser. IDB 2.0 features new schema management, bulk action methods, and more standardized handling of failures.

• Google developers are busy today not only with the Android O Developer Preview but the Chrome team has delivered the first public beta for the upcoming Chrome 58.0.

• The Chrome 58 beta adds full support for IndexedDB 2.0, improvements to iframe navigation by adding a new sandbox keyword to control iframe top navigation behavior, immersive full-screen support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), and various other developer changes.

Mozilla

• So it looks like after Vulkan for desktop and mobile, the web may be getting a low-level API for interactions with the GPU. They are calling it Obsidian right now (temporary name) and they state it’s not a specification just yet, as they are looking to gather feedback.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Last week, LibreOffice released version 5.3.1. This seems to be an incremental release over 5.3 and doesn’t seem to change the new user interface in any noticeable way.

• This is both good and bad news for me. As you know, I have been experimenting with LibreOffice 5.3 since LibreOffice updated the user interface. Version 5.3 introduced the “MUFFIN” interface. MUFFIN stands for My User Friendly Flexible INterface. Because someone clearly wanted that acronym to spell “MUFFIN.” The new interface is still experimental, so you’ll need to activate it through Settings→Advanced. When you restart LibreOffice, you can use the View menu to change modes.

Programming/Development

• A bugfix release of the anytime package arrived at CRAN earlier today. This is tenth release since the inaugural version late last summer, and the second (bugfix / feature) release this year.

• Today we are releasing GitLab 9.0, 18 months after releasing 8.0. We’ve made significant advances to GitLab during this period, shipping a version every single month on the 22nd. Let’s quickly recap how far we’ve come since 8.0, and see those features dovetailing into today’s 9.0 release. Or jump ahead to 9.0 features.

• A number of packages on CRAN use Suggests: casually.

• Sometimes it seems that things have gone relatively quiet on the year-2038 front. But time keeps moving forward, and the point in early 2038 when 32-bit time_t values can no longer represent times correctly is now less than 21 years away. That may seem like a long time, but the relatively long life cycle of many embedded systems means that some systems deployed today will still be in service when that deadline hits. One of the developers leading the effort to address this problem is Arnd Bergmann; at Linaro Connect 2017 he gave an update on where that work stands.

• That work, he said, is proceeding on three separate fronts, the first of which is the kernel itself. He has been working for the last five years to try to prepare the kernel for 2038. Much of that work involves converting 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit values, even on 32-bit systems. Some 32-bit timestamps also show up in the user-space API, which complicates the issue considerably. There is a plan for the enhancement of the user-space API with 2038-clean versions of the problematic system calls, but it has not yet gotten upstream. One recent exception is the statx() system call, which was merged for 4.11; statx() will serve as the year-2038-capable version of the stat() family of calls. There are quite a few other system calls still needing 2038-clean replacements, though.

Leftovers

• Google’s Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler explained in a blog post how the company will revamp its advertising policies to give companies more control over where their ads appear on YouTube and the Google Display Network. Schindler also signals a new epoch for Google and YouTube, one in which the company will focus more effort on preventing hate speech on its online video platform.

• Accessibility has been an afterthought in development for far too long. The result has been costly retrofitting, the risk of inaccessible solutions, and unhappy users.

• We are where we are because developers often ignore accessibility in hopes that it will resolve on its own.

• But solutions should be accessible by all—including the blind, deaf, those with cognitive disabilities and more. This is especially important considering the 1 billion people (including the aging population) with disabilities, the proliferation of new technology, and new industry standards. Further, it’s more than just the right thing to do. It is required by any organization working with the U.S. government, and increasingly, those in the private sector too.

Science

• Open source projects are helping drive artificial intelligence advancements, and we can expect to hear much more about how AI impacts our lives as the technologies mature. Have you considered how AI is changing the world around you already? Let’s take a look at our increasingly artificially enhanced universe and consider the bold predictions about our AI-influenced future.

Health/Nutrition

• The report from a meeting of a World Health Organization informal advisory group on challenges of medicines pricing and organising a Fair Pricing Forum this spring has been made public. The report shows the analysis and assertions of the diverse group, as well as questions and plans to take forward.

• The Uttaranchal High Court in Uttarakhand state ruled Monday that the two rivers be accorded the status of living human entities, meaning that if anyone harms or pollutes the rivers, the law would view it as no different from harming a person.

Security

• The Trump administration has announced that it will impose new metrics on federal agencies related to cybersecurity. Agencies and departments will be required to comply with the framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and report back to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the White House.

• Homeland security advisor Thomas Bossert stated that the President’s budget will include an increase in federal funding to combat cyber threats, and that the administration’s priorities vis-à-vis cybersecurity are to modernize and centralize the existing system. To this end, the Administration intends to partner with business, including Silicon Valley, and state and local governments, on cybersecurity.

• The operator of a website that accepts subscriber logins only over unencrypted HTTP pages has taken to Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug-reporting service to complain that the Firefox browser is warning that the page isn’t suitable for the transmission of passwords.

• “Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International, is not wanted and was put there without our permission,” a person with the user name dgeorge wrote here (the link was made private shortly after this post went live). “Please remove it immediately. We have our own security system, and it has never been breached in more than 15 years. Your notice is causing concern by our subscribers and is detrimental to our business.”

• Cisco’s security team has discovered that hundreds of its networking devices contain a vulnerability that could allow attackers to remotely executive malicious code and take control of the affected device.

• “We are committed to responsible disclosure, protecting our customers, and building the strongest security architecture and products that are designed through our Trustworthy Systems initiatives,” said a Cisco spokesperson in an email to CRN regarding the vulnerability.

• Some channel partners of the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant are already advising customers on how to bypass the critical security flaw. Here are 10 important items that Cisco channel partners should know about the security vulnerability.

• One of the key advantages of Open sauce software is that it is supposed to be easier to spot and fix software flaws, however Linux has had a local privilege escalation flaw for 11 years and no-one has noticed.

• The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-6074, is over 11 years old and was likely introduced in 2005 when the Linux kernel gained support for the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP). It was discovered last week and was patched by the kernel developers on Friday.

• However, despite these improvements in code cleanness and security technologies, it hasn’t quite proven itself when faced with experienced hackers at contests such as Pwn2Own. At last year’s edition of Pwn2Own, Edge proved to be a little better than Internet Explorer and Safari, but it still ended up getting hacked twice, while Chrome was only partially hacked once.

• Things seem to have gotten worse, rather than better, for Edge. At this year’s Pwn2Own, Microsoft’s browser was hacked no less than five times.

• And for every hack perpetrated against Edge, there was a corresponding attack against the Windows 10 kernel, indicating that it has a way to go in terms of security, according to Tom’s Hardware.

• The 90-day deadline is the same that Google’s own Project Zero security group provides to companies when it uncovers flaws in their software. If a company has failed to patch its software accordingly, Project Zero publishes details of the flaw whether the vendor likes it or not.

Defence/Aggression

• Given that the congratulatory letter was issued by a senior teacher in India’s leading madrasa—Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow— it clearly reflected a sharp turnaround in the attitude and approach of the Lucknow-based clergy towards the emergence of a global Islamic caliphate. However, in his letter, Nadwi was only a spokesperson of the petro-dollar-funded Wahabi seminaries in India.

• In February, both countries extended a bilateral pact, dealing with reducing the risk of nuclear weapon-related accidents including a war, for a period of five years. India hand Pakistan have fought three full-fledged wars besides the 1999 Kargil hostilities.

• The former New Zealand defence minister has admitted for the first time that civilians were killed during a bungled raid by New Zealand SAS troops in Afghanistan in 2010.

• For years, New Zealand politicians and military commanders denied this, claiming that the people killed were insurgents responsible for an earlier attack on the troops.

• Today’s comments by the former minister, Wayne Mapp, come less than 24 hours after the launch of an explosive new book Hit and Run by investigative reporters Jon Stephenson and Nicky Hager.

• The book claims the controversial operation killed six civilians and wounded 15.

• This morning, an apparently innocuous AP article eventually led me to the question, “Why would Google take sides in Syria’s civil war?”

• The article announced that Google was getting involved in protecting “news organizations and election-related sites” from cyberattacks and hacking though Jigsaw, a research arm of Google and Alphabet Inc.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• In 1981, the CIA took exception with newspapers reporting that Frank Sturgis was a former CIA employee. Herbet Hetu, the Agency’s then-Director of Public Affairs, had such a problem with the reporting that he wrote to the editors of several newspapers to try to issue a correction. The first letter, dated January 6, 1981, was sent to the editor of The Washington Star objecting to an article that had been published that day.

• The US government says it wants to keep some of the now-public documents out of court because they contain classified material, suggesting that they could be authentic.

• Last week, the US government may have confirmed the authenticity of a number of CIA documents concerning the agency’s hacking operations, but not in the way you might expect.

• Judging by a recent court filing, at least some of the CIA files Wikileaks published earlier this month are genuine, because the government pushed back against having them admitted in court due to the documents’ classified content.

• “The government is not able to declare non-government records as classified, unless they are taking ownership of the records themselves,” Bradley P. Moss, a national security attorney, told Motherboard in an email.

Finance

• EU chiefs have warned airlines including easyJet, Ryanair and British Airways that they will need to relocate their headquarters and sell off shares to European nationals if they want to continue flying routes within continental Europe after Brexit.

• Tribunal in NAFTA arbitration between Eli Lilly and the Canadian government has found the application of the promise doctrine did not involve a fundamental change in the country’s patent law, in a keenly-anticipated decision

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Shaun King, a senior justice writer and activist, simply called the news “disturbing”

• An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election.

• The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists.

• But the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) told VOA that CrowdStrike erroneously used IISS data as proof of the intrusion. IISS disavowed any connection to the CrowdStrike report. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense also has claimed combat losses and hacking never happened.

• The challenges to CrowdStrike’s credibility are significant because the firm was the first to link last year’s hacks of Democratic Party computers to Russian actors, and because CrowdStrike co-founder Dimiti Alperovitch has trumpeted its Ukraine report as more evidence of Russian election tampering.

• Five people employed by members of the House of Representatives remain under criminal investigation for unauthorized access to Congressional computers. Former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz employed at least one of those under investigation.

• The criminal investigation into the five, which includes three brothers and a wife of one of the men, started late last year, as reported by Politico in February. The group is being investigated by US Capitol Police over allegations that they removed equipment from over 20 members’ offices, as well as having run a procurement scheme to buy equipment and then overcharge the House.

• House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week Capitol Police are receiving additional help for the investigation. “I won’t speak to the nature of their investigation, but they’re getting the kind of technical assistance they need to do that, this is under an active criminal investigation, their capabilities are pretty strong but they’re also able to go and get the kind of help they need from other sources,” Ryan said.

• US President Donald Trump’s one-time campaign chairman secretly worked for a Russian billionaire to assist President Vladimir Putin, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reports.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Another “ag gag” law is in the works in Arkansas. These bills are brought under the pretense of safety — both for the person supposedly breaking them, as well as for the employees of the entity “trespassed” upon. The unspoken aim of these laws is to prevent whistleblowing, and they often spring into existence after someone has exposed horrible practices at local businesses — in most cases, the mistreatment of animals. The other consequence of most of these laws — unintended or not — is to deter employees from speaking up about questionable business practices, as there often is no exception carved out for employees of the companies protected by these laws.

• Kaleigh Rogers of Vice reports another ag gag bill has passed the Arkansas state House and is on its way to a Senate vote. And once again, the bill’s wording would deter whistleblowing and make journalistic efforts a civil violation.

• Twitter said Tuesday it suspended 376,890 accounts in the second half of 2016 for “promotion of terrorism,” an increase of 60 percent over the prior six-month period.

• The latest suspensions bring the total number of blocked accounts to 636,248 from August 2015, when Twitter stepped up efforts to curb “violent extremism,” the company announced as part of its latest transparency report.

• By now, most UK Internet users have gotten used to pirate sites being blocked by their ISPs. Internet providers have been ordered to block a wide variety of torrent, direct download and streaming portals that offer copyright-infringing content. The full list uf URLs, which includes several reverse proxies, has now swelled to more than 3,800 according to one of the ISPs involved.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Adobe and Microsoft have announced new product integrations along with the XDM (Experience Data Model) language for interchanging behavioural and marketing data between platforms.

• Microsoft has a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) offering, Dynamics 365, but is weak in marketing automation, while Adobe lacks a CRM product to compete with Salesforce, so it makes sense for the two companies to integrate.

• A new piece announced at the Adobe Summit under way in Las Vegas is that Adobe Campaign – which manages cross-channel campaigns across web, mobile, email and print – is integrated with Dynamics 365.

• On January 18, 2017, the CIA declassified and released new internal Central Intelligence Agency Activities: Procedures Approved by the Attorney General Pursuant to Executive Order 12333, approved by the Attorney General under Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333. These new guidelines will be known as Agency Regulation (AR) 2-1 when they take effect on March 18, 2017. They will replace AR 2-2, including Annexes A and B, which were originally issued in 1987, most recently revised in 2012, and released to the public in 2015. The new CIA guidelines were part of a larger effort by the Obama administration, commenced before 2013 and completed two days before President Trump’s inauguration, to update Intelligence Community (IC) guidelines.

• An appeals court has denied the appeal of a person who is jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt files. The man has not been charged with anything, but was ordered to hand over the unencrypted contents on police assertion of what the contents were. When this can result in lifetime imprisonment under “contempt of court”, the United States has effectively outlawed file-level encryption – without even going through Congress.

Civil Rights/Policing

• For many years, we’ve written about the craziness of the so-called “border search exception” to the 4th Amendment, in which the US government has insisted that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply at the border, and thus it’s allowed to search people at the border. The initial reasoning was — more or less — that at the border, you’re not yet in the country, and thus the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply yet. But that’s expanded over time — especially in the digital age. Perhaps, back when people just had clothes/books/whatever in their luggage, you could understand the rationale for allowing a search, but today, when people carry laptops and handheld electronic devices that basically store their whole lives, the situation is a lot scarier. Unfortunately, (with just a few small exceptions) the courts have simply taken the historical ability to search luggage at the border and expanded it to cover electronic devices. Then, things got even more ridiculous, when Homeland Security decided that anywhere that’s within 100 miles of the border could be “close enough” to count as a “border search,” making the “border search exception” apply. That’s… messed up.

• Of an estimated six million Indian migrants in the six Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Oman, domestic workers are among the most exploited, campaigners say.

• “Housemaids are treated like cattle here. This woman didn’t even know where she was when I asked her location. She kept crying to be saved. India should ban sending housemaids to the Gulf,” Sriniwas said.

• His sentence was extended to ten years imprisonment and 1,000 lashes in 2015.

• On Monday, dozens of tourists from Malaysia came by bus to visit the Lamteh Mosque in Banda Aceh to witness a dozen people getting publicly caned for crimes ranging from gambling to ikhtilat (the intermingling of men and women who are not married).

• Among the tourists was a Malaysian State Senator from Klanten, Dato Dr Johari bin Mat, who said that he respected Aceh implementation of Islamic law and use of public canin to ensure security and public order.

• The devices were listed as: laptops, tablets, e-readers, cameras, portable DVD players, electronic game units larger than a smartphone and travel printers/scanners.

• When police stood as mute spectators in Lucknow, a girl decided to take law in her hands and ensured that she teaches her molesters a lesson.

• A group of girls were allegedly eve-teased by a bike-borne gang in Gautam Palli area on Sunday night. However, the police standing there didn’t come to their rescue, that is when the girls from the group snatched the baton from the cops and thrashed the men on bike.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• To understand what it’s about, let’s step back a little.

• Since 2002, the regulation of telecommunication has been based on a group of European directives called “the telecom package”. The second revision of this package (the first was in 2009) began in September 2016 with the publication by the European Commission of a draft bill for a European Code of Electronic Communication. This massive bill of more than a hundred articles aims to recast and reform the current telecom package. It is now being negotiated at the Council of the European Union, and a report just had been published at the European Parliament. This report published by the MEP Pilar del Castillo (ES – EPP) will be discussed in the coming months.

• Today I ended reading an interesting article by the 4th spanish ISP regarding IPv6 and CGNAT. The article is in spanish, but I will translate the most important statements here.

• Having a spanish Internet operator to talk about this subjet is itself good news. We have been lacking any news regarding IPv6 in our country for years. I mean, no news from private operators. Public networks like the one where I develop my daily job has been offering native IPv6 since almost a decade…

DRM

• Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform “unauthorized” repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

• The World Wide Web Consortium has announced that its members have until April 19 to weigh in on whether the organization should publish Encrypted Media Extensions, its DRM standard for web video, despite the fact that this would give corporations the new right to sue people who engaged in legal activity, from security researchers who revealed defects in browsers to accessibility workers who adapted video for disabled people to scrappy new companies who come up with legal ways to get more use out of your property.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Italian online IP resource Marchi & Brevetti has just reported a very interesting and recent decision of the Criminal Section of the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) regarding the crime of counterfeiting within Article 474 of the Italian Criminal Code.

Trademarks

• The innovative advertisements of famous trademarks we come across remind us of the image they have created in our minds and the quality of the respective products or services they reflect. Millions are spent by the owners of such marks to build their reputation and maintain their popularity in this competitive globalised world.

Copyrights

• Back in 2012, a federal court ruled US websites were “places of public accommodation.” The ruling (overturned on appeal) came in a lawsuit brought against Netflix by the National Association of the Deaf. It seems like an obvious conclusion — more people get their information, news, and entertainment from the web than other sources. But the ruling had plenty of adverse consequences, especially for smaller, less profitable purveyors of online content.

• In a new Copyright decision, the Supreme Court has modified the doctrine of separability that allows for copyright of works of authorship associated with useful articles.

• The US Copyright Act, §101 states that “pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features” of the “design of a useful article” can be protected by copyright as artistic works if those features “can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.”

• The Supreme Court has held that the designs in a cheerleading uniform satisfy the test for copyright protection in its Star Athletica v Varsity Brands ruling. Observers say the decision provides a standard test to be applied to the separability analysis

• Techdirt has just written about ResearchGate, which claims to offer access to 100 million academic papers. However, as we wrote, there’s an issue about whether a significant proportion of those articles are in fact unauthorized copies, for example uploaded by the authors but in contravention of the agreement they signed with publishers. The same legal issues plague the well-known Sci-Hub site, which may deter some from using it. But as further evidence of how the demand for access to millions of academic papers still locked away is driving technical innovation, there’s a new option, called Unpaywall, which is available as a pre-release add-on for Chrome (Firefox is promised later), and is free. It aims to provide access to every paper that’s freely available to read in an authorized version.

• As the ratification by the European Union of an international treaty creating an exception to copyright for visually impaired people nears, a leaked text shows that the directive implementing the treaty in the EU might come with safeguards limiting the scope of the treaty, allegedly pushed by the publishing industry.

• The leaked document (from the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU to the Permanent Representatives Committee), seen by Intellectual Property Watch, is the latest draft proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and the Council. The directive would be on “certain permitted uses of works and other subject-matter protected by copyright and related rights for the benefit of persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled and amending Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.”

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