● 04.12.17

● Links 12/4/2017: Snap Lands in Fedora, OpenBSD 6.1 Released

Posted in Site News at 7:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Seven years ago, Canonical moved the Ubuntu Linux desktop from the Gnome 3.x interface to its own Unity front-end. By the release of Ubuntu 11.10, Unity had become Ubuntu’s default desktop. Even in these early days, Unity was meant to be more. The dream was for Unity to become a universal interface for PCs, smartphones, and tablets. It was a dream destined not to come true.

• Those that did not already pre-order the Pinebook Linux laptop, but would still like to get their hands on the new hardware will be pleased to know it is now shipping from just $89.

• To recap the Pinebook Linux laptop is fitted with a 64-bit Allwinner A64 ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC storage and supports connectivity via both 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

Server

• A better title for the original article would be: Nginx runs on 33% of top websites, supplementing Apache deployments.

• This is one of those rare occasions where 1 + 1 != 2. Nginx can have 33% market share and Apache can have 85% market share, because they’re often combined on the same stack. Things don’t have to add up to 100%.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• The stock kernel of Ubuntu 17.04 is doing away with Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) support for a number of ancient graphics processors.

• A user initially filed a bug report over his VIA S3 UniChrome Pro no longer having DRM support. He commented, “This will make me and other Ubuntu 17.04 users with Via hardware sad (I’m guessing there’s at least five of us). Makes for an annoying Ubuntu experience when browsing the web at nearly slide-show speeds while trying to find the correct drivers for our Nvidia and AMD cards.”

• It is no secret that I think there’s value to the Mir project and I’d like it to be a valued contribution to the free software landscape.

• I’ve written elsewhere about my efforts to make it easy to use Mir for making desktop, phone and “Internet of Things” shells, I won’t repeat that here beyond saying “have a look”.

• It is important to me that Mir is GPL. That makes it a contribution to a “commons” that I care about.

• While Canonical is expected to maintain Mir for IoT use-cases, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is expected to use the GNOME desktop on Wayland. The community forks so far of Unity 8 also appear to want to switch to Wayland eventually rather than Mir. In trying to maintain relevance for Mir, longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths is asking whether the community would be interested in native Wayland client support in Mir.

• While NVIDIA’s GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards have since been succeeded by Kepler, Maxwell, and now Pascal, the Fermi hardware is still receiving some love from open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) developers in taking baby steps towards working re-clocking support.

• Eric Anholt’s work on the VC4 Raspberry Pi driver stack continues with his most recent activities being the start of DMA-BUF fencing support and continuing efforts around using the Meson build system in the X.Org world.

• While writing DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers were once a rather daunting task and not really considered much by ARM/embedded developers, over the past few years DRM has evolved a lot as it’s picked up new drivers — especially for today’s many ARM SoCs — and its core infrastructure has improved with picking up many new helpers and other improvements that lower the barrier of entry for DRM development.

• It’s already been seven years since Unigine Corp rolled out the Unigine Heaven tech demo and four years since Unigine Valley while in that time while we have seen thousands of Linux game ports emerge, but few can match the visual intensity of these tech demos. In looking to set a new standard for jaw-dropping graphics and preparing to torture current Pascal and Polaris graphics cards as well as future Volta and Vega hardware, Unigine Corp today is releasing Unigine Superposition 1.0. Unigine Superposition is one godly GPU benchmark and is a beauty to watch.

• Samuel Pitoiset, one of the developers on Valve’s open-source Linux driver team focused on better Radeon support, has posted a set of 26 patches for changes needed to support ARB_bindless_texture and is in the process of getting this feature working for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

• The two thousand lines of new code is enough that RadeonSI is working with Linux OpenGL games using bindless textures, like DiRT Rally and other Feral game ports, when paired with RadeonSI Gallium3D patches yet to be posted for review. The ARB_bindless_texture support isn’t causing any Piglit regressions issues.

• Open-source AMD developers have been discussing in recent days how to better deal with the experimental support of GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” (and GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands”) support in AMDGPU and making it easier to enable while ensuring the Radeon DRM driver with its mature GCN 1.0/1.1 support doesn’t interfere.

• Intel Graphics Installer let you get driver updates directly from Intel for best performance, Intel is known for developing quality drivers for Linux operating system. It is an open source application that provides Linux users with a straightforward way to install the latest video drivers for their Intel graphics cards in any Linux-based operating system, source code with gpg of installer is available to configure-compile-install in any Linux distribution.

Applications

• ​Telegram is a messenger designed to overcome the limitations of other messengers like WhatsApp or similar ones. It is different and better than other messengers on more than one level.

• Taskwarrior is a Free, Open Source, and powerful command line task manager that manages our TODO list in the well organized format, which automatically improve our productive. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.

• HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, DVD ripper, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is a versatile, easy-to-use tool for converting DVDs and other videos into H.264, MPEG-4, or OGG formatted media. It’s particularly useful for making videos that are compatible with portable video devices such as the Apple iPod/iPhone.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Having run the Superposition benchmark, I can confirm that it’s indeed a very demanding test. You can run the program in either a benchmark mode that automatically runs through a series of tests or engage it in game mode. In game mode you are free to play around with the physics, objects and lighting and get a real feel about what exactly is being rendered. Either way, it all looks pretty darn good. At the end of the benchmark, the program spits out a score which you can use to compare your results with other people.

• A presentation was done about Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [Steam] coming to China, where they revealed Source 2 was coming along with a new UI.

• Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition [Beamdog Store, GOG, Steam] is another revamp of an old classic given new life by Beamdog, a game where death is not the end. You will end up becoming friends with death and get to know it rather well.

• Cosmic Star Heroine [Official Site], an indie 2D RPG about saving the galaxy has delayed the Linux version. Another in a long list, sadly. The game released today, with no official announcement that I could find about Linux not being there.

• The Raspberry Pi is famous for introducing kids to open source software and programming. The Pi is an affordable, practical introduction to professional-grade computing, disguised as hackable fun. An application that’s done the most to get young children started in programming has been Mitch Resnick’s Scratch (which fortunately was forked by the Pi Foundation when Scratch 2 switched to the non-open Adobe Air), but an inevitable question is what someone should graduate to after they’ve outgrown drag-and-drop programming.

• After a drag-and-drop intro like Scratch, there are many candidates for the next level of programming. There’s the excellent PyGame, there’s a Java subset called Processing, the powerful Godot engine, and many others. The trick is to find a framework that is easy enough to ease the transition from the instant gratification of drag-and-drop, but complex enough to accurately represent what professional programmers actually do all day.

• Yooka-Laylee is the 3D platformer throwback to games like Banjo-Kazooie that was funded thanks to Kickstarter back in 2015. It’s actually made by some of the original team from game developer Rare, who created some really great games.

• I can confirm that it does seem to work fine on Linux and I haven’t encountered any obvious issues so far. I tested it with the Steam Controller with the SC Controller driver/UI and apart from the mouse pointer staying on the screen it felt really great.

• Topware have been going over their games and giving them Wine-ports where possible. Septerra Core & Jack Orlando are two titles that were previously given this treatment on Steam, but now GOG too.

• Good news for fans of 2D action and adventure games, as the developers of Hollow Knight [Steam, GOG] have announced it will officially launch for Linux tomorrow.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The classical desktop, consisting of a menu, panel, and a workspace, has been obsolete for years. What was adequate in the days of twenty megabyte hard drives now leaves users with the choice of either having a workspace inconveniently crowded with launchers, or starting applications entirely from the menu. In answer to this awkward set of choices, KDE’s Plasma offers several alternatives: folder views, filters, and Activities. These alternatives represent different ways of reducing the number of icons on the workspace, so that for any given task, you have only the launchers relevant to what you are currently working on.

• In two weeks I’ll be in Augsburg at the 16th Augsburger Linux-Infotag.

• Here you’ll have a chance to meet in person, have a look at the latest and greatest Plasma Desktop and see what’s coming up for Plasma 5.10 and other future goodies!

• My name is Marcos Ebrahim. I’m an Egyptian artist and illustrator specialized in children’s book art, having 5 years experience with children’s animation episodes as computer graphics artist. I have just finished my first whole book as children’s illustrator on a freelance basis that will be on the market at Amazon soon. I’m also working on my own children’s book project as author and illustrator.

• Continuing my series about how input works in KWin/Wayland I want to discuss a brand new feature we implemented for Plasma 5.10. This year we had a developer sprint in Stuttgart and discussed what kind of touchpad and touch screen gestures we want to support and how to implement it. Now the result of this discussion got merged into our master branch and we are currently discussing which actions to use by default.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In this episode of the Lunduke Hour, I talk with GNOME Foundation Director, Cosimo Cecchi. We talk about the future of GNOME, how badly I want a GNOME-powered tablet, and how the recent Ubuntu announcement of moving to GNOME impacts the project.

• Since there are many icon packs available for Linux desktops but it feels good when new icon set joins this family. Lila-HD icons are designed from scratch for Linux and Unix-like operating systems and licensed under the CREATIVE COMMONS Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Basically there are two variants in this set orange which is main and blue which is secondary, you can choose whatever suites your desktop theme. It is well designed and crafted icons theme which gives a glossy look and makes it more appealing but not all icons looks glossy. There are fairly plenty of icons available for applications and contains most of the necessary icons, since this icon theme is in active development so be prepare to see some missing icons or bugs but you can report issues to creator and get them fixed, there is one thing I found need to be added icons for dark panel. It works in most of the Linux desktops such as Unity, KDE, Gnome, Mate, Xfce, Lxde and so. Macbuntu theme used in the following screenshots. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool to change themes/icons.

• GNOME Project’s Florian Müllner announced today, April 11, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance updates for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.

• The GNOME development team is hard at work these days to release GNOME Shell 3.24.1, which should land tomorrow, April 12, with various small improvements and bug fixes for many of the desktop’s core components and applications, including, of course, the GNOME Shell interface and Mutter window manager.

• GNOME Shell 3.24.1 comes with various fixes for some of the issues discovered since the release of GNOME 3.24. These include the ability to restrict menus to screen height on HiDPI displays, loading of portals that require a new window, as well as a DND over window previews in the Overview mode.

• GNOME Project’s Florian Müllner announced today, April 11, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance updates for the GNOME Shell and Mutter components of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.

Distributions

• The developers of the independently developed KaOS GNU/Linux distribution were proud to announce today the release and general availability of the KaOS 2017.04 ISO snapshot for the month of April 2017.

New Releases

• Anyone searching for a super small Linux Distro might be interested to know that this week Tiny Core version 8.0 has been released and takes up just 16 MB of space and will boot on most computers in just a couple of seconds.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Open Build Service from SuSE is web service building deb/rpm packages. It has recently been added to Debian, so finally there is relatively easy way to set up PPA style repositories in Debian. Relative as in “there is a learning curve, but nowhere near the complexity of replicating Debian’s internal infrastructure”. OBS will give you both repositories and build infrastructure with a clickety web UI and command line client (osc) to manage. See Hectors blog for quickstart instructions.

Red Hat Family

• Terry Fage from the Koozali SME Server development team announced today, April 11, 2017, the availability of the second Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Koozali SME Server 9.2 operating system.

• Being the leading GNU/Linux distribution for small and medium-sized enterprises, Koozalui SME Server is available for free and distributed under the GPL license. Koozali SME Server 9.2 has been in development for the past two months, and it aims to bring all the latest security updates and technologies to the stable series.

Finance

Fedora

• “The year of Linux on the desktop” is an old running joke. This has resulted in many “The year of X on the Y” spin off jokes. One of these that’s close to my heart is “The year of the arm64 server”. ARM has long dominated the embedded space and the next market they intend to capture is the server space. As some people will be more than happy to tell you, moving from the embedded space to the enterprise class server space has involved some growing pains (and the occasional meme). Most of the bickering^Wdiscussion comes from the fact that the embedded world has different requirements than the server world. Trying to support all requirements in a single tree often means making a choice for one versus the other.

• [...]

• Fedora is a production system and it does need to be optimized. There’s been fantastic work recently to support more single board computers like the Raspberry Pi in Fedora. Thanks to single image efforts, the same kernel can boot on both a Raspberry Pi and an enterprise class ARM server. Booting doesn’t mean work well though. Single Board Computers can come with as little as 512MB of RAM. Enterprise servers have significantly more.

• Hello all. Bi-weekly update from the Factory 2 team on our work here. We have three videos this sprint.

• Two are related to the module-build-service: both on submitting builds. We have some new client tooling to show which should make manual submission and monitoring of module-builds much simpler. The second is a demo of an early prototype of our continuous rebuild system.

• The Fedora community is much more than just a distribution of Linux. We are a vibrant large community encompassing many different viewpoints, goals, and ideas.

• Opensource.com is running a blogging challenge to collect information about how communities function and grow. These conversations are very important to Fedora on a regular basis. By participating, you become part of the worldwide spread of open source and the ideas behind it.

• The Fedora Council met for an in-person FAD for three days from 26-28 March in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Almost the entire Council was able to attend. Josh Boyer, Brian Exelbierd, Robert Mayr, Matthew Miller, and Langdon White, were present, and unfortunately, Jan Kuřik and María Leandro could not make it. We chose Grand Rapids to accommodate one of the two members with travel challenges and to reduce overall travel costs for the rest of us.

• As part as our mission to get snaps running everywhere, we are pleased to announce that support for snaps has now officially landed in Fedora, starting with Fedora 24 and up.

• While Unity 8 and Mir may be on their way out, Canonical continues backing Snappy and the involved developers have got Snap support integrated into Fedora 24 and newer.

• As of earlier this month, the snapd packages landed for Fedora 24/25/26. Canonical’s David Callé has now written a blog post about the Snappy state in Fedora.

• Despite his efforts to contact the Netflix customer support and explain the issue, they appear to be clueless how to solve the problem. So after some more research, Jiri Eischmann discovered that Netflix doesn’t allow custom User-Agents on its video streaming platform on Linux, which means that not only Fedora users are affected but also those who use openSUSE, Debian, or even CentOS.

• Jiri Eischmann also discovered that Firefox 52 on Ubuntu was not blocked by Netflix, but some users in the comments said it didn’t work for them, so the only fix right now to this annoying issue is to not use a custom User-Agent for Firefox if you want to watch Netflix shows. Simply use an add-on that lets you easily change the User-Agent to only display Linux, not a specific distro to fix the problem. Does Netflix work well on your distro?

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• On 5 April 2017, Canonical – the UK-based company that develops Ubuntu – has announced its intentions to shift away from the focus of convergence across different platforms in favor of a cloud- and IoT-centric approach. Within that announcement, they have also said something a bit more controversial: they are abandoning the Unity desktop in favor of GNOME for the 18.04 iteration of the Linux distribution.

• For those using other desktop environments like XFCE, LXDE, and MATE, this is basically a “meh” ordeal. The turmoil comes for those who have been bred under the Unity banner, both with and without previous experience using the GNOME environment. What does this mean for Canonical’s long-term strategy, and how does this work for Ubuntu’s comfortable position as one of the most popular Linux distributions?

• Canonical’s Michael Vogt is pleased to announce today, April 11, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the Snapd 2.24 Snappy daemon for Ubuntu Linux and other supported GNU/Linux distributions.

• If you want to make GNOME Shell look like Unity using Dash to Dock, here’s how to change the app launcher icon to the Unity BFB icon.

Devices/Embedded

• The $30 Orange Pi Prime combines a quad Cortex-A53 Allwinner H5 SoC with 2GB RAM, wireless, MIPI-CSI, GbE, and a 40-pin expansion header.

• Another Orange Pi has shaken loose from Shenzhen Xunlong’s highly productive Orange Pi tree in the form of an Orange Pi Prime that matches up nicely with the Raspberry Pi 3. There were already a half dozen distinct Orange Pi models by our year-end Linux hacker SBC roundup, and in only about three months, that tally has almost doubled if you include every new variant. Within a few years, the company’s engineers will no doubt have tested out every possible combination of size, RAM, I/O, and hacker board layout possible with an Allwinner processor.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• A video posted by Anbox’s creator, Canonical’s Simon Fels, shows Anbox running Android apps alongside desktop apps. Image: Simon Fels/YouTube.

• We’ve been informed by UBports’ Marius Gripsgård about the public availability of a new project called Anbox, which promises to let users run Android applications on top of their existing GNU/Linux distribution.

• While currently supported only on Ubuntu, Anbox is described by its creator as a container-based approach to boot a complete and fully working Android operating system on a regular GNU/Linux distro. The project makes use of the LXC (Linux Containers) technologies to allow users to run any Android application.

• Meet Anbox, a novel new way to run Android apps on the Linux desktop. “Anbox puts the Android operating system into a container, abstracts hardware access and integrates core system services into a GNU Linux system.

• Want to run Android apps on a PC? Developers have been offering emulators like BlueStacks and Genymotion for years. But for the most part those applications set up a virtual machine that isolates your entire Android experience from the rest of your operating system.

• Anbox is a new open source system that lets you run Android apps on a PC natively, as if they were desktop applications. There’s no emulation required.

• There are new smartphones hitting the market constantly, but which is the best to pick up when you’re trying to save a buck or two? We’re expecting some great new releases over the coming months, but for now, let’s go over the best affordable Android smartphones you can go pick up today…

• A new survey has found the majority of pay-TV providers have Android on their technology roadmaps, but only half are willing to pay a premium for the privledge.

• A survey by Ovum on behalf of security firm Irdeto found 72% of respondents are considering Android implementations as a part of their set-top box (STB) strategies. 50% of respondents see Android as being important for their goals within the next five years.

Free Software/Open Source

• This is a good time for open-source communication systems.

• The decentralized, free software, Twitter-esque social network Mastodon seems to be doing rather well. And now Wire, the end-to-end encrypted instant messaging platform, is releasing the source code for its server.

• The source for the Wire client was already available. But now the company is releasing the server source code, as well—up on GitHub and licensed under the AGPL.

• This is astoundingly good news. As I’ve written about previously, Wire is a platform I’ve been quite happy with (I even interviewed the CTO of Wire). One of the downsides? The lack of publicly available source code for the server. That shortcoming is being remedied.

• My complaint about the growing use of chat services like Slack, HipChat, and so on, for communication by open source projects is that these services are not open. As I see it there are two issues:

• Slack, et al, are paid services with closed memberships. Sure, there are lots of little apps running on Heroku dyno’s that automate the “send me an invite” process, but fundamentally these are closed systems.

• This means that the content inside those systems is closed. I cannot link to a discussion in a Slack channel in a tweet. I cannot refer to it in an issue report, and I cannot cite it in a presentation. Knowledge is silo’d to those who have the time and ability to participate in chat services in real time. Slack, et al, are based on synchronous communication, which discriminate against those who do not or can not take part of the conversation in real time. For example, real time chat discriminates against those who aren’t in the same time zone–you can’t participate fully in an open source project if all the discussion happens while you’re asleep.

• Even if you are in the same time zone, real time chat assumes a privilege that you have the spare time–or an employer who doesn’t mind you being constantly distracted–to be virtually present in a chat room. Online chat clients are resource hogs, and presume the availability of a fast computer and ample, always on, internet connection, again raising the bar for participation.

• Google unveiled to the outside world its peering edge architecture — Espresso.

• At the Open Networking Summit (ONS), Google Fellow Amin Vahdat said Espresso is the fourth pillar of Google’s software-defined networking (SDN) strategy. Its purpose is to bring SDN to the public Internet.

• Many software developers have their own side projects, which are often open source projects. When those open source hobbies grow too big, how do developers manage them?

• All open business and projects face this problem: If they grow too big, more members are necessary for carrying the collective load. Their strategies for scaling are important.

• One popular open source community recently faced this problem. And the way that community surmounted it teaches us something about the art of scaling an open organization.

• Jonas Öberg has recently blogged about Using Proprietary Software for Freedom. He argues that it can be acceptable to use proprietary software to further free and open source software ambitions if that is indeed the purpose. Jonas’ blog suggests that each time proprietary software is used, the relative risk and reward should be considered and there may be situations where the reward is big enough and the risk low enough that proprietary software can be used.

• [...]

• In our professional context, most software developers come across proprietary software every day in the networks operated by our employers and their clients. Sometimes we have the opportunity to influence the future of these systems. There are many cases where telling the client to go cold-turkey on their proprietary software would simply lead to the client choosing to get advice from somebody else. The free software engineer who looks at the situation strategically may find that it is possible to continue using the proprietary software as part of a staged migration, gradually helping the user to reduce their exposure over a period of months or even a few years. This may be one of the scenarios where Jonas is sanctioning the use of proprietary software.

Events

• The one major stroke in that direction was the merger of Open Orchestrator and ECOMP open source into ONAP, something its head honcho, Chris Rice of AT&T, attributes to Linux Foundation leadership and direction. There were also strong indications in the OPNFV Project Danube release of coordination among groups.

• Executive directors from top open source projects in cloud computing, blockchain, Internet of Things, and software-defined networking will keynote next month at Open Source Summit Japan, The Linux Foundation has announced. The full agenda, now available on the event website, also features a panel of Linux kernel developers and The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.

• LinuxCon, ContainerCon and CloudOpen have combined under one umbrella name in 2017 – Open Source Summit. More than 600 open source professionals, developers and operators will gather May 31-June 2 in Tokyo to collaborate, share information, and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more.

• Automotive Linux Summit gathers together the most innovative minds from automotive expertise and open-source excellence to drive the future of embedded devices in the automotive arena

• Open Source Days is an annual conference held in Copenhagen, this time held from the 17th March to the 18th March. Since my successful trip with members of Open Source Aalborg we are keeping a close eye on free software happening in and around Denmark. For all of us, this was the first time we went to the Open Source Days conference.

CMS

• There is a huge variety of Content Management Systems (CMS) available in the market – all of which seem to have similar offerings that include an assortment of useful and effective features to enable content and asset management. With such similarities between systems, how does one go about choosing the right system? How is it possible to differentiate the robust and reliable solutions from the underperforming ones?

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Microsoft announced plans today to acquire Deis, a startup company that offers open source tools and training to facilitate Kubernetes use.

• In the end, though, the government ended up signing its current cloud and on-premise software licensing deal with Microsoft, rather than shifting to open source.

BSD

• This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 6.1. For a comprehensive list, see the changelog leading to 6.1.

• The OpenBSD 6.1 operating system was officially announced today, April 11, 2017, by developer Theo de Raadt. It’s a major release that adds support for new platforms, new hardware, and lots of up-to-date components.

• We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 6.1. This is our 42nd release. We remain proud of OpenBSD’s record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.

• As in our previous releases, 6.1 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system

Public Services/Government

• General Camillo Sileo explains why the Italian army decided to migrate to open source and how it’s done

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Irrigation-management technologies have been around for some time, but only as proprietary systems, meaning that a farmer using such a system is locked into his supplier. Usually this means high cost, recurring fees, and use of older technology, since there’s no incentive for the supplier to innovate. Most commercially available systems are only economically feasible for large farms, leaving smaller growers without options to improve their water use.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Hardware Freedom Day is a yearly celebration of Open Hardware. Initiated in 2012 by the same organization behind Software Freedom Day it aims at educating the worldwide public about the benefits of using and promoting open hardware.

• Smart engineering students at Brigham Young University have devised an open source solution that extends the joy of bicycle riding to some who otherwise would not experience that joy. Watch this heartwarming story in this short video.

Programming/Development

• The boss’s boss looks out across the server farm and sees data—petabytes and petabytes of data. That leads to one conclusion: There must be a signal in that noise. There must be intelligent life in that numerical world—a strategy to monetize all those hard disks filling up with numbers.

• That job falls on your desk, and you must now find a way to poke around the digital rat’s nest and find a gem to hand the boss.

• Python and Ruby are among some of the most popular programming languages for developing websites, web-based apps, and web services.

• In many ways, the two languages have a lot in common. Visually they are quite similar, and both provide programmers with high-level, object-oriented coding, an interactive shell, standard libraries, and persistence support. However, Python and Ruby are worlds apart in their approach to solving problems because their syntax and philosophies vary greatly, primarily because of their respective histories.

• Which one to implement for web development requires some thought because all languages have strengths and weaknesses and your decision will have consequences.

• Pocl’s goal is to become a performance portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL standard. In addition to producing an easily portable open-source OpenCL implementation, another major goal of this project is improving performance portability of OpenCL programs with the kernel compiler and the task runtime, reducing the need for target-dependent manual optimizations.

Leftovers

Security

• Yesterday, our colleagues from Symantec published their analysis of Longhorn, an advanced threat actor that can be easily compared with Regin, ProjectSauron, Equation or Duqu2 in terms of its complexity.

• Longhorn, which we internally refer to as “The Lamberts”, first came to the attention of the ITSec community in 2014, when our colleagues from FireEye discovered an attack using a zero day vulnerability (CVE-2014-4148). The attack leveraged malware we called ‘BlackLambert’, which was used to target a high profile organization in Europe.

• Since at least 2008, The Lamberts have used multiple sophisticated attack tools against high-profile victims. Their arsenal includes network-driven backdoors, several generations of modular backdoors, harvesting tools, and wipers. Versions for both Windows and OSX are known at this time, with the latest samples created in 2016.

• According to a blog post from IT security company Palo Alto Networks, a new variant of the IoT/Linux botnet Tsunami, which it calls Amnesia, targets an unpatched remote code execution vulnerability that was publicly disclosed over a year ago in DVR devices manufactured by TVT Digital and branded by over 70 vendors worldwide.

• In my last article, I talked about the classic, complicated approach to server hardening you typically will find in many hardening documents and countered it with some specific, simple hardening steps that are much more effective and take a only few minutes. While discussing how best to harden SSH and sudo can be useful, in a real infrastructure, you also have any number of other services you rely on and also want to harden.

• So instead of choosing specific databases, application servers or web servers, in this follow-up article, I’m going to extend the topic of simple hardening past specific services and talk about more general approaches to hardening that you can apply to software you already have running as well as to your infrastructure as a whole. I start with some general security best practices, then talk about some things to avoid and finally finish up with looking at some areas where sysadmin and security best practices combine.

• Now that the sulky Shadow Brokers gang has leaked its archive of stolen NSA exploits, security experts are trawling Uncle Sam’s classified attack code – and the results aren’t good for anyone using Oracle’s Solaris.

• Matthew Hickey, cofounder of British security shop Hacker House, has been going through the dumped files, which once belonged to the spy agency’s Equation Group and are now handily mirrored on GitHub. Hickey today identified two key programs – EXTREMEPARR and EBBISLAND – that can escalate a logged-in user’s privileges to root, and obtain root access remotely over the network, on Solaris boxes running versions 6 to 10 on x86 and Sparc, and possibly also the latest build, version 11.

• Levashov is currently listed as #7 in the the world’s Top 10 Worst Spammers list maintained by anti-spam group Spamhaus.

• Cybercrooks are actively exploiting an unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerability to distribute the Dridex banking trojan, claim researchers.

• Booby-trapped emails designed to spread the cyber-pathogen have been sent to hundreds of thousands of recipients across numerous organisations, according to email security firm Proofpoint.

• The switch to document exploits by the hackers represents a change of tactics by a group that previously leaned heavily on malicious macros to distribute their wares.

• A zero-day code-execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office is one of three critical flaws under active attack in the wild [...]

• Microsoft today buried among minor bug fixes patches for critical security flaws that can be exploited by attackers to hijack vulnerable computers.

• In a massive shakeup of its monthly Patch Tuesday updates, the Windows giant has done away with its easy-to-understand lists of security fixes published on TechNet – and instead scattered details of changes across a new portal: Microsoft’s Security Update Guide.

• In this blog post we’ll continue our journey into gaining remote kernel code execution, by means of Wi-Fi communication alone. Having previously developed a remote code execution exploit giving us control over Broadcom’s Wi-Fi SoC, we are now left with the task of exploiting this vantage point in order to further elevate our privileges into the kernel.

Defence/Aggression

• The leader of the ruling National Congress Party in Sudan, Rabie Abdelati, has defended his country’s decision to allow the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to open an office in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

• Companies in the EU and China have been caught offering to commit fraud to launder sales of mass surveillance weapons to Al Jazeera reporters posing as representatives of autocratic regimes under sanction for gross human rights abuses; these weapons would allow their users to target and round up political dissidents for arbitrary detention, torture and murder.

• Vast efforts to portray Donald Trump as Vladimir Putin’s flunky have given Trump huge incentives to prove otherwise. Last Thursday, he began the process in a big way by ordering a missile attack on Russia’s close ally Syria. In the aftermath of the attack, the cheerleading from U.S. mass media was close to unanimous, and the assault won lots of praise on Capitol Hill. Finally, the protracted and fervent depictions of Trump as a Kremlin tool were getting some tangible results.

• At this point, the anti-Russia bandwagon has gained so much momentum that a national frenzy is boosting the odds of unfathomable catastrophe. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are in confrontation mode.

• It’s urgent to tell ourselves and each other: Wake up!

• In March 2017, Mintpress News reported on a declassified CIA report that exposes that, contrary to popular belief, the US government has had plans to initiate regime change in Syria as far back as the 1980s.

• After slapping Donald Trump around for several months to make him surrender his hopes for a more cooperative relationship with Russia, the neocons and their liberal-interventionist allies are now telling the battered President what he must do next: escalate war in the Middle East and ratchet up tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.

• The mainstream U.S. media now reports as “flat-fact” the Syrian government’s guilt in the April 4 chemical weapons incident, but the real facts are less clear and some point in the opposite direction, says Rick Sterling.

• The German team confirmed one of its players has been injured following the explosions 10km from the Signal Iduna Park stadium in Dortmund, North-Rhine Westphalia in east Germany.

• The player is Spanish defender and father-of-one Marc Bartra, who has been taken to hospital after sustaining injuries to his hand and arm, the team added.

• He is thought to have suffered cuts to his hands from shattered glass after the bus’ windows splintered – despite the glass being bullet-proof.

• Two hours after the initial explosion a suspicious package was found at the team’s hotel, just before they were due to arrive back there.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Julian Assange is a political prisoner. He has never been charged with a crime. Everyone who recognizes his name should know this, and if they don’t it is only because the largest media outlets have misreported or not reported the basic facts of his detention. This in itself is a searing indictment of the media that Assange and WikiLeaks have struggled to reform. It also puts to shame all of the Western governments, political leaders, and journalists who claim to care about human rights and civil liberties but remain silent ― or worse ― about one of the world’s most famous prisoners of conscience.

• On his last night in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a powerful farewell speech to the nation — words so important that he’d spent a year and a half preparing them. “Ike” famously warned the nation to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

• Much of Eisenhower’s speech could form part of the mission statement of WikiLeaks today. We publish truths regarding overreaches and abuses conducted in secret by the powerful.

• Our most recent disclosures describe the CIA’s multibillion-dollar cyberwarfare program, in which the agency created dangerous cyberweapons, targeted private companies’ consumer products and then lost control of its cyber-arsenal. Our source(s) said they hoped to initiate a principled public debate about the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• “The oil industry gets incredible subsidies, and people don’t realize that they don’t do all this and get rich on their own,” Olsen said. “The government is subsidizing the oil industry too, oil and gas, pipelines, all of that. Customers are paying for that. They’re not just doing it out of the goodness of their heart to keep fuel in our tanks so that we can drive our cars and maintain our way of life. They’re subsidized too.”

• Museum’s 80 solar panels on the roof are expected to save approximately $8,000 per year.

Finance

• In other words, where politicians and people have decided that Europe should behave like and feel like a single country with people going where they please, a few telco operators have been remarkably successful in preventing this in practice for half a billion people. You have not had freedom of movement without it hitting your wallet hard, and therefore not in practice.

• “I talk about the horror scenario of going to a candidate’s webpage and depending on who you were you get a different message and that is just marketing 101 for the political websites out there. So we need to rethink the way we have built society on top of the web.”

• “Costs are costs, even if you’re a monopoly” — so the fact that Uber loses (a lot) of money on every single ride won’t magically go away if the company manages to kill its competition by subsidizing riders with its investors’ money. Uber will need to find better economics somehow, and right now, that seems to involve two sleazy and improbable tactics:

• 1. Tricking customers into carpools rather than solo rides, [...]

• 2 Bullying legislatures into killing public transit [...]

• The whole thing feels like a gimmick – an awkward, insincere, clumsy gimmick at that. And given that sponsored Snapchat lenses are expensive to commission, I can’t help but feel the money McDonalds spent could be better used to, IDK, pay its employees a living wage?

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Project Censored director, professor Mickey Huff, recently gave a keynote presentation for the 3rd Annual Social Justice Week events at Sonoma State University. His talk was on “Critical Media Literacy Education: The Antidote to ‘Fake’ News, Propaganda, and Censorship in a Post-Truth World.”

• The NLD has begun tackling the hard challenges of reforming one of the poorest countries in the world. Inevitably, the miracle narrative of Daw Suu’s ascent from political prisoner to State Counsellor (a bespoke position that makes her de facto President) has come under strain. These challenges are uniquely complex. We can understand why by comparing Myanmar with the distilled experience of the fifty or so countries that have made their own democratic transition over the past forty years. While each country is different, all transitions resemble one another. By studying them we can draw wider conclusions about their characteristic paths, dynamics and outcomes, and the ways that specific national experiences vary.

• Advertisements from seemingly independent advocacy groups are swamping Beltway newspapers with dire warning that recent proposals to lower drug prices will lead to dangerous consequences. In the last week alone, the ads have appeared in the Washington Post, Washington Times, Roll Call, The Hill, and Politico.

• The groups placing the ads have no obvious connection to pharmaceutical companies. For instance, the American Conservative Union (ACU), one of the organizations taking out an ad, describes itself as devoted to promoting “liberty, personal responsibility, traditional values, and strong national defense.”

• But unbeknownst to readers, the organizations have undisclosed financial ties to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the umbrella lobbying group that represents the biggest names in the drug industry, including Merck, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Purdue Pharma, and Eli Lilly.

• A Republican Super PAC has paid for a television ad attacking Democrat Jon Ossoff — one of the leading candidates in an April 18 special election to fill the House seat for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District — for producing video content for Al Jazeera.

• The ad assails Al Jazeera as a “mouthpiece for terrorists,” and features imagery of deceased al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, with the clear insinuation that Ossof’s past work for Al Jazeera puts him in league with terrorists.

• Ironically, the Super PAC, called the Congressional Leadership Fund, is chaired by former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman — a registered lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, home of 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers and one of the countries most responsible for exporting extremism.

• Attorney General Jeff Sessions will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards and has suspended an expanded review of FBI testimony across several techniques that have come under question, saying a new strategy will be set by an in-house team of law enforcement advisers.

• Trump’s DOJ — led by Jeff Sessions — is rolling the clock back… on everything. Sessions has problems with the country’s interest in decriminalizing personal marijuana use. Weed has been a big moneymaker for the FBI and DOJ, and no one likes losing paying customers — especially not the private prisons that bad drug laws have kept full of taxpayer-supported “guests.”

• He also wants to roll back the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to the good old days. You know, before it actually existed and/or did anything about unconstitutional policing. Even though crime rates in most cities are still at historical lows, Trump and Sessions believe the country is under siege by violent criminals, who must be dealt with in the harshest, most expensive way.

• Now, there’s this: Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post reports the DOJ will be reversing course on the junk science it so often refers to as “forensic science.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Pictures are powerful. What we see (and what we don’t) shapes our worldview. So who’s controlling the filter? How do media outlets decide what to show, and what to blur out? And how do you know if what you’re seeing is real?

• What is particularly baffling is that it seems some of the allegedly deleted tweets did not directly mention the incident with the forcibly removed passenger.

• The Central Board of Film Certification in India under is commonly referred to as the Censor Board. A quick glance at some of its heavily debated recent decisions will elucidate why. While primary role of the CBFC is to provide certification for different categories of films, it is also entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring that films do transgress one of the express restrictions of free speech in India. This has meant that from time to time, the CBFC has withheld permission for the screening of films or requested specific cuts and changes to the story. More recently, this has become commonplace rather than the exception.

• Google’s plan to apply an algorithmic fact-checking tool to its Google News service could lead to censorship, the German Pirate Party told Sputnik Deutschland.

• Its chairman Patrick Schiffer told Sputnik Deutschland that while the party welcomes the principle of Google’s fact check, there are concerns about the way in which this is being implemented.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Despite claiming earlier this year that they were going silent, the Shadow Brokers hacking group that leaked cyber tools stolen from the US National Security Agency resurfaced on Saturday, publishing the password to an encrypted collection of files that appear to contain even more exploits and operational details.

• And it’s about to get much worse.

• In January, new rules went into effect allowing third-party wellness companies to share much more medical data with employers. And a bill currently moving through Congress would make it legal for employers to force workers to share their entire DNA sequence, taking employee scrutiny to a previously-illegal level — while also allowing companies to punish workers who don’t comply.

• When China boldly seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea last December and initially refused to give it back, the incident ignited a weeklong political standoff and conjured memories of a similar event more than 15 years ago.

• In April 2001, just months before the 9/11 attacks gripped the nation, a U.S. Navy spy plane flying a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet that veered aggressively close. The mid-air collision killed the Chinese pilot, crippled the Navy plane, and forced it to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield, touching off a tense international showdown for nearly two weeks while China refused to release the two-dozen American crew members and damaged aircraft.

• The sea drone captured in December was a research vessel, not a spy craft, according to the Pentagon, so its seizure didn’t risk compromising secret military technology. That wasn’t the case with the spy plane, which carried a trove of surveillance equipment and classified signals intelligence data.

• AT&T has successfully completed a field trial of open source, multi-supplier white box switches, according to a recent blog on the company’s site. The trial, conducted March 28, tested implementation of the white box switch carrying customer traffic between Washington, DC, and San Francisco. The platforms provided telemetry into AT&T’s ECOMP platform for monitoring purposes.

• The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a programme to develop technologies capable of automatically aggregating and mapping pieces of information derived from multiple media sources into a common representation or storyline.

• From that storyline, the technology developed under the Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives (AIDA) programme should be capable of generating hypotheses about the “true nature and implications of events, situations, and trends of interest”, according to a DARPA announcement, which outlined that proposed research should enable “revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems” and exclude “evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice”.

• The US National Security Agency (NSA) operators have hacked into Pakistani mobile networks and have been spying on hundreds of IP addresses in the country, WikiLeaks has claimed.

• islamabad, Apr 11 The US National Security Agency (NSA) operators have hacked into pakistani mobile networks and have been spying on hundreds of IP addresses in the country, WikiLeaks has claimed.

• France’s presidential election season has kicked in. The supposed “moderate” of the bunch — Emmanuel Macron — has managed to gain considerable support in the last several months. Some of this has sprung from our own recent election. Earlier this year, the candidate took digs at Trump’s anti-climate change stance, stating France would welcome dejected US scientists with open arms.

• He also said this, taking a shot at Trump’s planned border wall.

• [...]

• This sounds like the French counterpart to the “adult conversations” FBI Director James Comey wants to have with tech companies about encryption. Of course, in Comey’s case, the “conversation” doesn’t necessarily even have to include tech companies. He’s fine with legislation or All Writs Orders or whatever for the time being — anything that doesn’t involve actually speaking to anyone who understands encryption.

• It’s tougher to get a read on Macron’s desires and intentions. He hasn’t spent months hammering away this issue or claiming terrorists are staying ahead of law enforcement by using Whatsapp or iPhones or spiral-bound notebooks. But what he’s suggesting is rather breathtaking: an EU-wide undermining of encryption. If tech companies are offering encryption, they’re going to have craft backdoors or start holding onto users’ encryption keys. The other alternative would be to pull themselves out of the European market, which seems like the least likely route they will take.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Dawa “describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad,” explains Varadarajan, per Hirsi Ali…

• Lance Reyna was assaulted in a school bathroom in 2010. Reyna — who is transgender and gay — was a student at Houston Community College when an attacker held a knife to his throat, called him a ‘queer’ in a falsetto voice, then kicked and beat him and left him on the bathroom floor.

• In Austin the following year, it didn’t take long for Akbar Amin-Akbari to sense that the man who climbed into his cab shortly after midnight was drunk and angry. But Amin-Akbari drove on, and minutes later, with the cab going 65 mph on I-35, the man suddenly grabbed him by the hair, yanking out a fistful and violently pulling his head toward the backseat. “I’m a white boy. I’m going to kill you sand nigger,” the passenger yelled.

• More recently, John Gaspari was walking home from a bar in Houston at around 3 a.m. on Valentine’s Day 2015. He was three blocks from home when a car suddenly swerved onto the sidewalk, trying to run him over. Three men jumped out of the car and shouted, “Get the fag!” They tackled, punched and kicked Gaspari. Then one of them pumped two bullets into him and left him unconscious on the side of the road.

• West African migrants are being bought and sold openly in modern-day slave markets in Libya, survivors have told a UN agency helping them return home.

• Trafficked people passing through Libya have previously reported violence, extortion and slave labour. But the new testimony from the International Organization for Migration suggests that the trade in human beings has become so normalised that people are being traded in public.

• How is it possible that in a western European country torture not only happens but isn’t even criminalized?

• Last Friday marked the 2nd anniversary of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruling in favour of Arnaldo Cestaro, one of the demonstrators who were brutally beaten by Italian police when they stormed the occupied Diaz-Pertini school during the 2001 G8 in Genoa. He was tortured, said the Court, and the Italian criminal system proved incapable both of preventing and of adequately punishing it.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For years we’ve noted how more than twenty states have passed laws — often quite literally written by ISP lobbyists — that prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks (either alone, or with a private partner). Even in instances where, as is often the case, the incumbent broadband provider refuses to upgrade them. ISP lobbyists (and the lawmakers that love them) usually try to defend these protectionist laws by first demonizing municipal broadband as some kind of vile socialist cabal, then pretending new state laws are necessary to protect local communities from themselves.

• In reality, municipal broadband is an organic, grassroots reaction to broadband market failure. And buying laws that restrict local communities’ rights to decide local infrastructure matters for themselves is little more than regulatory capture. Like net neutrality and privacy rights, municipal broadband actually has broad, bipartisan support — and most municipal broadband networks are built in Conservative markets with local voter support. But by framing the issue in a partisan way (government run amok!), ISP lobbyists have been able to sow dissent and stall progress that could challenge their status quo.

• But this plan will not only fail to provide effective broadband privacy protections, it will come at the cost of eliminating the FCC’s net neutrality rules that prohibit ISPs like Comcast and AT&T from picking winners and losers on the internet. And there’s a real chance the FTC actually won’t be able to regulate ISPs at all.

• The FCC net neutrality rules in place today also impose some limitations on zero-rating (i.e. data cap exemptions) and network interconnection payments, and they require ISPs to make more specific public disclosures about prices, fees, and data caps. Based on early descriptions of Pai’s plan, it doesn’t appear that the zero-rating, interconnection, and billing disclosure provisions would be included in ISPs’ promises.

DRM

• With two days to go until the close of the World Wide Web Consortium members’ poll on finalising DRM and publishing it as an official web standard, the UK Open Rights Group is asking Britons to write to the Consortium and its founder, Tim Berners-Lee, to advocate for a much-needed, modest compromise that would protect the open web from the world’s bizarre, awful, overreaching DRM laws.

• Around the world, DRM is protected by “anti-circumvention” rules that indiscriminately ban bypassing digital locks, even for legitimate purposes, such as adapting technology to help people with disabilities participate in the web.

• Since the beginning of the Web—the age of dial-up Internet connections—the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has kept the Web’s technical standards tuned in a careful balance that enables innovation while respecting users’ rights.

• On April 13th, that will change. User-hostile DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) technology will become an official part of the Web. Unless we can stop it.

Intellectual Monopolies

Trademarks

• When it comes to bastions of hope in the video game industry on intellectual property matters, we’ve been happy to laud CD Projekt Red (CDPR) for getting most things right most of time. The company’s stance on keeping its games DRM-free while being immensely successful has been a breath of fresh air, while its tendency towards bucking the DLC trend in gaming by not nickel-and-diming its fanbase for every last little thing. These are generally good folks, in other words, which is why it’s a little disheartening to see how the company is handling the backlash over its attempt to trademark the term “Cyberpunk” in the EU.

Copyrights

• Determining whether a certain, unauthorised use of a work is shielded from liability by means of an exception is not an easy exercise. Things may get even more complicated if the applicable law is that of a country, eg the UK and all the other EU Member States, that does not have an open-ended fair use-style exception but rather requires one to, first, identify what exception might be applicable to the case at hand and, secondly, verify that all the relevant conditions for the application of that particular exception are satisfied.

• Give an inch and they will take a mile, as the saying goes. This mantra applies quite nicely to the recent spate of site-blocking efforts that have taken place around the world. Once content owners, chiefly Hollywood and music groups based in America, manage to slightly open the door to having entire sites blocked by order of government, they then barge through and expand the scope of the site-blocking exponentially.

• And the groups doing this barging don’t even bother to hide their plans. In Ireland, one can see this in the recent news of the Motion Picture Association submitting an order to have several websites blocked by ISPs there.

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