● 04.21.17

● Links 21/4/2017: Qt Creator 4.2.2, ROSA Desktop Fresh R9

Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Some PCs are assembled in the U.S., but not many. This includes those from Lenovo, the China-based firm that runs a factory in North Carolina. Apple operates a Mac Pro assembly plant in Austin, but makes many of its other products overseas.

• Lenovo and Apple may have an edge in selling PCs to the U.S., under President Donald Trump’s recently signed “Hire American, Buy American” executive order signed this week, say analysts.

• All PCs are made with components sourced globally, but vendors that assemble products in the U.S. may gain preference. Trump’s executive order doesn’t spell out how “buying American” will work for IT suppliers — if it happens at all.

Server

• Docker is great; I’ve had a lot of fun simplifying deployments by containerizing, and I look forward to exploring how we can use Swarm to make our deployments more robust and fault-tolerant.

Kernel Space

• Open source continues to encourage and drive innovation globally, and Doky’s offerings are a perfect example of the positive loop created by open source projects leading to new products. Similar to how Linux forever changed the operating system landscape, Doky sees itself as a major catalyst for open source based software that users can access, use and collaborate with their favorite apps easily and in truly seamless and integrated way as never possible before.

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.10.12 kernel.

• All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.

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

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

• If all goes according to plan, the Linux 4.11 kernel will be officially released this weekend and therefore the Linux 4.12 merge window will immediately open for two weeks. There is a lot on our radar for Linux 4.12.

• Among the likely material we’ve been tracking for Linux 4.12 features are listed below.

Graphics Stack

• We are just a few weeks out from the release of Mesa 17.1 as the latest quarterly update to this important component to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack. With “Mesa 17.1″ already having been mentioned in 102 Phoronix articles to date, here’s a look at some of the most exciting changes and new features with Mesa 17.1.

Applications

Proprietary

• Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, and CentOS has been among the distributions blocked if their names appear in the HTTP user-agent string, but fortunately this bogus/outdated check has been eliminated. GNOME developer Jiri Eischmann has pointed out that those with up-to-date versions of Chrome or Firefox on other non-Ubuntu Linux distributions should now have fine out-of-the-box access to Netflix via its HTML5 video player.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine Staging 2.6 open-source software has landed for GNU/Linux gamers, based on the Wine 2.6 development release, bringing various improvements and bug fixes.

Games

• Saints Row 2 [Steam Link] is currently free to grab it on Steam for a limit time, so act quick if you don’t own it yet. The other Saints Row titles are on sale as well.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• A ton of code hit the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries’ (EFL) Git tree yesterday with the latest feature activity.

• The development cycle of the Debian-based Elive 3.0 GNU/Linux distribution continues, and a new Beta milestone was launched today, April 21, 2017, for early adopters and public beta testers.

• Coming three weeks after the previous Beta release, Elive 2.9.0 Beta is here to finally implement the promised Persistence feature, which lets users save their personal files, extra apps that they might install, login credentials, and various configuration files during a live session.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The spring has arrived, so we took our brooms and swept the bugs from under the carpets and out of the door.

• We meticulously noted down all the classes, orders, families, species, and other details of what we found and removed, which you can look up in our spring cleaning log.

• The KDE Project was proud to announce the official release and general availability of KDE Applications 17.04, the latest and most advanced stable version of the popular, open-source software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktops.

• KDE Applications 17.04 has been in development for the past one and a half months, during which it received a Beta and an RC (Release Candidate) builds that brought various performance optimizations and new features to the KAlgebra mathematical graph calculator, Kdenlive video editor, Dolphin file manager, Ark archiver, and Minuet music educational software.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Unless you’ve lost all network connections over the past couple of weeks, you know the big news: Canonical announced it was dropping Ubuntu Unity and returning to its GNOME roots. Whether you think this is good or bad news, it’s happening. When the official Ubuntu 18.04 is released, it will be all GNOME. For those that have been happily using Unity for years, will this translate to a lesser experience and a learning curve for the new Ubuntu desktop?

• GUADEC 2017 is just over three months away, which is a very long time in the future and leaves lots of time to organise everything (at least that’s what I keep telling myself).

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• The development team behind the ROSA GNU/Linux operating system announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the KDE and KDE Plasma flavors of ROSA Desktop Fresh R9.

• ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 is the first release in more than two years to rebase the RPM-based operating system derived from Mandriva to a newer 2016.1 platform. It comes with both the KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments, while the GNOME 3, MATE, and LXQt variants should be out in the coming months.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Last week I came across pam_python, a PAM module that lets you write PAM modules in Python. It seems interesting to play in this direction, but I had to install it manually. It seems that there was no official packages for openSUSE until now…

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat announced Wednesday general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.1, the latest release of the company’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform. Providing an open source infrastructure and centralized management solution for virtualized servers and workstations and built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 delivers expanded automation capabilities through integration with Ansible by Red Hat while new networking and storage capabilities offer a stable, flexible foundation for IT innovation.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd. The release 1.0 RC marks an important milestone towards the sustainability and the continuation of Devuan as a universal base distribution. Since the Exodus declaration in 2014, infrastructure has been put in place to support Devuan’s mission to offer users control over their system. Devuan Jessie provides continuity as a safe upgrade path from Debian 7 (Wheezy) and a flawless switch from Debian 8 (Jessie) that ensures the right to Init Freedom and avoids entanglement.

• The first release candidate is now available for Devuan, the fork of Debian that rids the system of systemd.

• Just one day after the launch of the Tails 2.12 maintenance release to the Tails 2.x stable series of the amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux, the development is pleased to announce the release of the fourth Beta of Tails 3.0.

• Coming exactly one month after the third Beta milestone, Tails 3.0 Beta 4 is here with all the latest and most important security updates and bug fixes ported from the repositories of the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system. It also includes all the changes implemented in the Tails 2.12 release.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The Ubuntu 17.10 release date is set for October 19, 2017. Ubuntu 17.10 will use the GNOME desktop instead of Unity, the first release to do so since 2011.

• In addition to the Ubuntu 17.10 codename of Artful Aardvark coming out this week, the release schedule for this next Ubuntu Linux development cycle has also been published.

• The next short term Ubuntu release, i.e., Ubuntu 17.10, is codenamed Artful Aardvark. While Canonical boss Mark Shuttleworth is yet to make an official announcement, the Artful repos are now in existence. In an earlier announcement, Canonical has made it clear that Ubuntu 17.10 will comes with Wayland display server by default.

• It’s probably the last thing hardcore Ubuntu fans want to know, but it looks like the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 operating system was codenamed Artful Aardvark, and a preliminary release schedule is already online.

• It would be awkward for Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth to announce the codename of Ubuntu 17.10 considering what happened lately with the layoffs, etcetera, so some of our readers spotted the release schedule of the upcoming Ubuntu Linux release on the official wiki.

Devices/Embedded

• X-ES launched a RHEL-compatible “X-ES Enterprise Linux” distro optimized for its x86 COMs and SBCs starting with its recent Xeon/Broadwell VPX and VME SBCs.

• Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES), which has supported its embedded boards with Gentoo Linux, will now offer a Red Hat flavored X-ES Enterprise Linux (XEL) board support package option as the default, with Gentoo still available as an alternative. XEL will be offered for all x86-based X-ES “embedded processing modules,” which would appear to include its Intel Bay Trail based XPedite8150 and Xpedite8152 COMs, among others. Tthe first four “featured products” with XEL are VPX and VME compliant SBCs aimed at high-end networking (see farther below).

• DietPi caught my eye some time ago, but I really started to become acquainted with it when I reviewed the Orange Pi Zero recently. It more than deserves a good review of its own, which is what this post provides.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• A good, cheap smartphone. That’s been the MO of the Moto G series since the very beginning — a phone that doesn’t cost the earth, but also doesn’t come with a bunch of nasty compromises. This year, the line is led by the Moto G5 Plus — and it might just be the best inexpensive Android phone you can buy.

Free Software/Open Source

• Help us collect community knowledge by blogging about the weekly community management theme. Blog posts are due the following Thursday after each new theme is announced. Next week’s challenge is Difficult Conversations.

• Check out ways to recruit new community members in week #1 blogging challenge.

• Any time a representative of car sharing service Uber Technology Inc. shows up at an analytics conference, his or her session is always packed.

• People crowd into the room for two reasons. First, Uber does a lot of interesting things with advanced analytics, and getting a peak under the hood at how it all works can inspire new projects at other enterprises.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Tor Project announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second and probably the last scheduled point release of the Tor Browser 6.5 stable series of the anonymous web browser based on Mozilla Firefox.

• Tor Browser 6.5.2 is out for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows, and it looks like it incorporates all the important security updates that Mozilla implemented in the Firefox 45.9.0 ESR (Extended Support Release), along with HTTPS-Everywhere 5.2.14 and NoScript 5.0.2.

• Mozilla released its Firefox 53 update on April 19, introducing a new browser engine and patching 39 vulnerabilities in the open-source web browser.

• The new browser engine technology in Firefox 53 is known as Project Quantum and is a multipart effort to accelerate and improve the web browsing experience for users. The Project Quantum component included in Firefox 53 is known as the Quantum Compositor; it is designed to help reduce the number of browser crashes due to graphics issues.

Databases

• This year at the Percona Live open source database conference, I will present a talk on the latest replication features in MySQL 8.0.

• It was a huge amount of work to get the MySQL Group Replication plugin out with MySQL 5.7.17. Group Replication is a new plugin that gives the user some nice replication properties by resorting to group communication and state machine replication. This makes the system able to protect data against split brain situations, enables fault-tolerance and high availability, and provides coordination between servers committing transactions that change the data.

• In addition to Group Replication, the team has also invested quite a bit on core replication features. Some of these features were already released, and others will be released at some point in time in a MySQL Development Milestone Release (DMR).

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

Programming/Development

• These days, Node.js is under the hood of everything from the web, the Internet of Things and desktop applications to microservice architectures. Node’s 15 million-plus downloads per month, and more than a billion package downloads per week, render it the world’s biggest open source platform.

• The Node.js Foundation was started in 2015, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation, to support Node’s ongoing growth and evolution. The foundation represents an open governance of the Node ecosystem, with a steadily growing roster of members from every cohort, from Fortune 500 companies to sole proprietor freelancers.

• Today, we’re excited to announce that Trace, our Node.js monitoring & debugging tool is now free for open-source projects.

• I wish we had a formally verified compiler for Haskell, or at least for GHC’s intermediate language Core. Now formalizing that part of GHC itself seems to be far out of reach, with the many phases the code goes through (Core to STG to CMM to Assembly or LLVM) and optimizations happening at all of these phases and the many complicated details to the highly tuned GHC runtime (pointer tagging, support for concurrency and garbage collection).

Leftovers

Science

• I am sure that some will dismiss this as a retread of techno-utopianism, but I think it’s important for people to be focusing on more broadly understanding these changes. That doesn’t mean ignoring or downplaying the disruption for those whose lives it will certainly impact, but so much of the discussion has felt like people throwing up their arms helplessly. There will be opportunities for new types of work, but part of that is having more people thinking through these possibilities and building new companies and services that recognize this future. Even if you can’t predict exactly what kinds of new jobs there will be (or even if you’re convinced that no new jobs will be coming), it’s at the very least a useful thought exercise to start thinking through some possibilities to better reflect where things are going, and Kasparov’s essay is a good start.

• Engineer Harry Huskey, who helped build many of the first ever computers, has died aged 101.

• Dr Huskey was a key member of the team that built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (Eniac) which first ran in February 1946.

• Eniac is widely considered to be one of the first electronic, general purpose, programmable computers.

• Dr Huskey also helped complete work on the Ace – the Automatic Computing Engine – designed by Alan Turing.

• The placards are made, the speeches prepared. On Saturday, crowds in their thousands are expected at 500 marches in more than 35 countries to remind the world, and its many politicians, that society cannot thrive without science. It will be the largest show of solidarity for science the globe has ever seen.

• Arranged to coincide with Earth Day, the anniversary of the modern environmental movement, organisers hope that the mobilisation of so many can help restore science to what they consider to be its rightful place. But despite healthy support for the events – more than 100 professional societies and organisations have endorsed them – marches alone will not be enough, according to researchers who study protest movements.

Health/Nutrition

• Hepatitis-related mortality is on the rise, despite the existence of an efficient vaccine for hepatitis B and a cure for hepatitis C, according to the World Health Organization hepatitis report 2017 published today. One of the issues is that a majority of people are unaware of their condition due to limited access to affordable hepatitis testing. The price of the hepatitis C medicines has decreased in low-income countries, but still remains a barrier in upper-middle income and high-income countries, the WHO said.

• The Medicines Patent Pool has received a licence to develop ravidasvir, a new treatment for hepatitis C.

• The new licence is in partnership with Pharco Pharmaceuticals in Egypt, and expands upon the licence issued in March 2016 by Presidio, the original developer of ravidasvir, and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi).

Security

• The Internet is based on protocols that assume content is secure. A new, more realistic model is needed.

• Twenty-eight years ago, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system to link text documents across a computer network. It changed the way the world communicates and does business. From its humble beginnings, the Internet has become a complex, dynamic, and heterogeneous environment.

• Today, the Internet revolution’s main instrument, the Web browser, exposes users to unbounded malicious content and has become unmanageable.

• How did browsers become such a liability? Because they’re based on an ancient set of communication rules, protocols that assume connections are secure and content is safe. The openness and utility of the protocols led to enormous innovation. But today, with all its sophistication, the Web is still based on protocols that weren’t designed for security or enterprise-class management.

• A couple months ago, one of the oldest encrypted, ephemeral messaging apps, Wickr, decided to open up its cryptographic code for the world. By allowing hackers and developers to examine their crypto code, it reasoned, it could earn a veritable security merit badge. And the approach had already boosted the appeal of another secure-messaging app, Signal.

• At least on the surface, Wickr’s open-source move appears to be paying off. Scott Stender, vice president of cryptography at NCC Group, a British company that specializes in helping clients manage cybersecurity risks, says it influenced his company’s decision to use Wickr, which incorporates end-to-end encryption, to keep its internal communications private.

• So over the last few years you probably remember seeing white hat hackers demonstrate how easily most modern smart cars can be hacked, often with frightening results. Cybersecurity researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have made consistent headlines in particular by highlighting how they were able to manipulate and disable a Jeep Cherokee running Fiat Chrysler’s UConnect platform. Initially, the duo documented how they were able to control the vehicle’s internal systems — or kill it’s engine entirely — from an IP address up to 10 miles away.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Obama waged a war on whistleblowers during his eight-year run. Sure, it was done under a sunny facade of “transparency,” but the former president set the gold standard for whistleblower prosecutions, performing more than every other president until then… combined.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Amidst backlash and subscription cancellations for hiring extreme climate science denier, Bret Stephens, the New York Times offered a stunning defense: There are “millions of people who agree with him.”

• With that ‘logic’, the Times could hire as a columnist former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke — or a flat earther or someone who thinks vaccines pose a health hazard. After all, millions agree with them.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The technology blog Techdirt asked a federal judge in Massachusetts on Thursday to dismiss a libel suit brought by the self-described inventor of email, saying that its posts calling the man a fraud and liar were opinions, not facts.

• A Long Island judge is swiftly making a (terrible) name for himself with a (terrible) ruling in a defamation lawsuit. The ruling making Acting Supreme Court Justice John Galasso look like an unconstitutional idiot has nearly nothing to do with the defamation claims, but rather his granting of the plaintiff’s unconstitutional wish to have unflattering “memories” of himself pre-erased before the underlying lawsuit even gets going.

• Juicing your SEO? Don’t like what turns up during vanity Googling? There are a few right ways to solve this problem and apparently about a million wrong ones.

• Doing the wrong thing could easily make things worse. Bogus DMCA notices tend to result in Streisandings, which leads to even more negative comments and contents clogging up your search results. Bogus legal threats issued by stupid lawyers or using stupid, compliant lawyers’ letterhead tend to have the same result.

• You could get more imaginative and start filing bogus defamation lawsuits to fraudulently obtain court orders for delisting. Again, once you’ve been rousted, the best case scenario is some more Streisanding and negative ROI. At worst, you’re looking at paying legal fees and/or possibly facing sanctions for defrauding the court.

• However, there is a precedent of student life ordering us to not publish content, so it would not be true to say that there is no oversight, no censorship. In our 2016 April Fools’ issue, student life ordered us not to publish two satirical articles, one that joked that Jewell students travelled to Colorado for Spring Break to buy marijuana and bring it back, and one that poked fun at “meninists,” which refers to a group that advocates for male rights.

• A measure that would protect student journalists from censorship hit a roadblock in the state legislature.

• House Majority Leader John Allen pulled the bill from consideration after more than an hour of debate.

• The measure would declare that student editors – not administrators – are responsible for determining the content of school-sponsored media.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Most of us carry smartphones and watch web-enabled TVs without much thought. But the revelations found in Wikileaks’ “Vault 7” release warn that we should consider the sinister capabilities that such devices could lend to those who might abuse them.

• In her first appearance representing the American public before the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2015, Amy Jeffress argued that the FBI is violating the Fourth Amendment by giving agents “virtually unrestricted” access to data from one of the NSA’s largest surveillance programs, which includes an untold amount of communications involving innocent Americans.

• The NSA harvests data from major Internet companies like Facebook, Google and Apple without a warrant, because it is ostensibly “targeting” only foreigners. But the surveillance program sweeps up a large number of Americans’ communications as well. Then vast amounts of data from the program, including the Americans’ communications, are entered into a master database that a Justice Department lawyer at the 2015 hearing described as the “FBI’s ‘Google’ of its lawfully acquired information.”

• The ACLU today released more than a dozen new documents concerning the government’s warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans. They were obtained from several intelligence agencies in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and relate to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that the government relies on to conduct its PRISM and Upstream spying programs.

• Today, April 21st 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the User Guide for CIA’s “Weeping Angel” tool – an implant designed for Samsung F Series Smart Televisions. Based on the “Extending” tool from MI5/BTSS, the implant is designed to record audio from the built-in microphone and egress or store the data.

• The classification marks of the User Guide document hint that is was originally written by the MI5/BTSS and later shared with the CIA. Both agencies collaborated on the further development of the malware and coordinated their work in Joint Development Workshops.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• I soon discovered that my photo had been picked up by a few other Instagram accounts before Marie Claire, the main one being Bumble and bumble, a company owned by Estée Lauder. The other accounts, including Bumble and bumble, at least had the decency and respect to credit me as well as the hair stylist when reusing my photo. Sadly the model wasn’t credited, which upset me quite a bit.

• We’ve been saying this for years, but IP addresses are not good enough evidence on which to base copyright infringement lawsuits. At some level, everyone already knows this to be true. You can tell that’s the case because the typical pretenders stating otherwise are the copyright trolls with a business model that relies on gathering large numbers of supposedly infringing IP addresses, mailing out settlement demands to the supposed pirates that own the accounts of those IP addresses, and then collecting very real money from some percentage of the recipients. On top of that, even these trolls will often claim that the onus is on the account holder of an internet connection to police their own pipe, which is a delightful end-around to the common concept of punishing true infringers as opposed to innocent third parties.

• There are places with legal systems that have had enough of this practice and we can now add Singapore’s to the list. The High Court in Singapore recently threw out requests from several copyright trolls made to ISPs there to produce account information for IP addresses they claim were used to infringe on two movies, Fathers & Daughters and Queen Of The Desert.

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