● 05.10.17

● Links 10/5/2017: Mesa 17.1, Git 2.13, Qt Creator 4.3 RC1, MINIX 3.4 RC6

Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Remember blogging? Hell, remember magazine publishing? Shouldn’t be hard. You’re reading some now.

• Both are still around, but they’re obsolete—at least relatively. Two cases in point: my blog and Linux Journal.

• Back when blogging was a thing, in the early 2000s, about 20,000 people subscribed to RSS feeds of my original blog (1999–2007, still mothballed here). At its peak, I posted many times per day and had a strong sense of connection with my readership.

• Same went, by the way, for my postings in Linux Journal, on our website and on one of our own blogs, called IT Garage—lots of readers, lots of engagement.

• Most early bloggers were journalists by profession or avocation—good writers, basically. Some blogs turned into online pubs. BoingBoing, TechCrunch and TPM all started as blogs.

• But blogging began to wane after Twitter and Facebook showed up in 2006. After that journalism also waned, as “content generation” became the way to fill online publications. Participating in “social media” also became a requisite function for journalists still hoping to stay active online (if not also employed)

Server/OpenStack

• OpenStack started off as a cloud technology project and has evolved steadily over the last few years. In a marathon two and a half hour set of keynotes on the first day of the OpenStack Summit here, the OpenStack Foundation and the vendors and companies that use it talked about how they are using the cloud.

• The open-source OpenStack cloud platform is now being used to help train the next generation of cyber-warriors. At the OpenStack Summit here May 8, officers from the U.S. Army Cyber School explained how they are using OpenStack to train soldiers to fight in the cyber-domain.

• Major Julianna Rodriguez, director, and Chris Apsey, deputy director of the Cyber Technical College at the U.S. Army Cyber School, detailed their activities in a keynote as well as a late-day deep-dive technical session titled “Saving Millions and Achieving Education Freedom Through OpenStack. “

• Infamous government hacker Edward Snowden believes open source is a fundamentally better way to use technology compared to proprietary technology that he believes disempowers users.

• Snowden was interviewed at the open source cloud computing project OpenStack Summit in Boston via video from a non-descript location and spoke about his personal use of open source technology. In 2013 Snowden, then a government contractor, leaked classified information about government surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, which brought him worldwide fame.

• Using public cloud and proprietary software represents a “silent vulnerability” to millions of users around the world, according to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• Snowden appeared remotely via a video link at the OpenStack Summit here May 9 in a question-and-answer keynote with OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier. Snowden said the average user is unaware of how the internet works.

• “For most people, the internet is magic,” he said.

• According to Snowden, it’s not good enough to let people mindlessly build internet and cloud services, which is where OpenStack plays an important role. He noted that while there are for-profit alternatives in the cloud space like Amazon that do a decent job, they are fundamentally disempowering.

• Edward Snowden, the fugitive whistleblower and former NSA contractor who revealed the organization’s global hacking powers in 2013, may seem like an unlikely guest at OpenStack Summit in Boston, but his message was on target. Snowden spoke about how the public cloud and proprietary software disempower people and pry open their privacy.

• OpenStack has long billed itself as an integration engine enabling organizations to plug into different technologies. At the OpenStack Summit here, Mark Collier, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, explained and demonstrated in a keynote address why it’s important to embrace composable and cloud native infrastructure.

• In the early days of OpenStack, much of the media coverage seemed fixated on whether or not the project would be able to “win” the cloud computing marketplace, and which company would “win” OpenStack, as if the future of technology is a zero-sum game. The keynotes at this week’s OpenStack Summit highlight just how narrow view this is.

• What has emerged isn’t a need for a one-size-fits-all generic cloud, but instead, many competing needs across nearly every industry you can think of, for which cloud helps provide part of the answer.

Kernel Space

• There are a number of Btrfs fixes/clean-ups for the Linux 4.12 kernel.

• Btrfs on 4.12 doesn’t have any big new features or major performance boosts, but it does notably have RAID5 and RAID6 fixes that are needed as outlined in that earlier article. So those wanting to run Btrfs on a RAID 5/6 array will definitely want to be using Linux 4.12+ once stable.

• The ARM folks have requested that the TEE subsystem and OP-TEE drivers be included in Linux 4.12, the Trusted Execution Environment.

• The Trusted Execution Environment is is about communicating with a trusted OS running in a secure environment, separate from the Linux kernel itself. Of course, any time “trusted” computing is brought up in Linux/open-source there are a fair number of concerned individuals, especially in light of the recent major vulnerability in Intel AMT.

• Last week was the main ACPI / power management updates for Linux 4.12 while Intel’s Rafael Wysocki has now submitted a second set of feature updates for this next version of the Linux kernel.

• There are a number of IOMMU optimizations queued for Linux 4.12.

• Joerg Roedel submitted the IOMMU kernel updates today for Linux 4.12. Among the changes for this important component to modern systems include code optimizations to the Intel VT-d driver, IOMMU core header optimizations, Samsung Exynos IOMMU optimizations, and ARM/SMMU optimizations.

• Linux kernel developer and maintainer Jiri Slaby announced today the release and immediate availability of what it would appear to be the last maintenance update to the Linux 3.12 kernel series.

• Linux kernel 3.12.74 is out and it looks to be the last in the series, according to its maintainer, who urges all those using the Linux 3.12 kernel branch on their GNU/Linux distributions to start considering moving to a newer LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel, such as Linux 3.16, Linux 4.1, Linux 4.4, or Linux4.9.

• However, if you choose to remain on this branch at least update to Linux kernel 3.12.74, which changes a total of 78 files, with 834 insertions and 524 deletions, according to the appended shortlog. Improvements are all over the places, for various architectures, drivers, filesystems, security, and the networking stack.

• We are excited to announce that SNAS.io, a project that provides network routing topologies for software-defined applications, is joining The Linux Foundation’s Networking and Orchestration umbrella. SNAS.io tackles the challenging problem of tracking and analyzing network routing topology data in real time for those who are using BGP as a control protocol, internet service providers, large enterprises, and enterprise data center networks using EVPN.

Graphics Stack

• Olof Johansson has sent in his large set of pull requests for the ARM SoC/platform updates slated for the in-development Linux 4.12 kernel.

• NVIDIA has released a new short-lived Linux binary driver update that jumps it ahead to the 381 release series.

• Available today is the NVIDIA 381.22 Linux driver as the newest GeForce/Quadro/Tesla proprietary Linux graphics driver. This first 381 Linux driver update mostly consists of bug-fixes but also has new Vulkan extensions that previously were just part of their “Vulkan beta” driver.

• Nvidia released today a new short-lived graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems on all supported architectures, bringing various bug fixes, better Vulkan support, and some other improvements.

• Probably the most fundamental change of the Nvidia 381.22 graphics driver is support for a bunch of new Vulkan extensions, thus adding an extra layer of support for Vulkan, which in these days is more and more used in popular games. However, this was only implemented for the Linux driver.

• NVIDIA have released their 381.22 driver which comes with plenty of fixes, newer Vulkan support and more.

• NVIDIA’s gaming software, GeForce Experience, now has support for OpenGL and Vulkan.

• GeForce Experience is NVIDIA’s software often paired with their Windows driver for managing game updates, analyzing GPU/CPU metrics, game setting optimizations, and recently the focus on being able to record your video game sessions as well as take screenshots with NVIDIA Ansel. Experience also allows game streaming to SHIELD devices with NVIDIA GameStream.

• Mesa 17.1.0 is now officially available as the Q2’2017 update to this important piece to the open-source 3D Linux graphics driver stack.

• Mesa 17.1 ships with many ANV and RADV Vulkan driver fixes, the OpenGL shader cache is in place and enabled by default for RadeonSI, some work on OpenGL AZDO extensions, Ivy Bridge OpenGL 4.2 support up from GL 3.3, initial Radeon RX Vega support, some performance optimizations, and a wealth of other changes.

• A two-year-old patch for the X.Org Server from a NVIDIA developer has finally landed.

• The xfree86: Improved autoconfig drivers matching is now in xorg-server Git. This 100+ line patch implements a new auto configuration driver matching algorithm. The benefit is the driver matching code is made easier and also doesn’t end up adding duplicate drivers on the case of multiple GPUs.

• AMD’s CodeXL utility that’s open-source under the GPUOpen umbrella for graphics profiling/debugging is up to version 2.3.

• CodeXL 2.3 adds support on Linux systems for operating with the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver. Other prominent features include Radeon Polaris GPU support as well as support for AMD Ryzen processors with the addition of supporting its performance counters, etc.

• While there are still a few days left until the Linux 4.12 merge window closes and the 4.12 release candidates for the next two months, the Qualcomm-backed CodeAurora already has lined up some new code for the reverse-engineered, community-driven Freedreno MSM DRM driver for Adreno hardware.

Applications

• RedShift is a utility that we have previously featured here at the Fedora Magazine. It is a small utility that automatically tweaks the color temperature towards the red end of the spectrum after dark. Blue light — which is typically emitted by a monitor — is shown to negatively impact sleep patterns if you are exposed to it after dark. Night Light is a new feature arriving in Fedora 26 Workstation — thanks to it being introduced in GNOME 3.24. Night Light provides the functionality of RedShift without having to install a separate utility or extension.

• We all have at least one or maybe even a handful of programs we seemingly just can’t live without. You know, that program that you instantly go looking for as soon as you’ve installed your new shiny OS (or Linux distribution, more specifically in our case). For me, personally it’s the Vim text editor.

• I decided to narrow this down to Free and Open Source Software specifically, as while it’s probably not necessary given our audience, it’s always possible someone would jump up and say something like ‘Adobe Illustrator’ is their most essential tool! Which is fine in itself, some people do depend on such tools for their occupation or hobbies.

• The open source Git project has just released Git 2.13.0, with features and bugfixes from over 65 contributors. Before we dig into the new features, we have a brief security announcement.

• Git 2.13 is now available as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source version control system.

• The Git project, through Jeff King, happily announced today the release and immediate availability of the Git 2.13 open source project management system for all supported platforms.

• As expected, Git 2.13 is a major update that adds numerous improvements, new features, and countless bug fixes from more than 65 contributors. It’s now considered the new stable branch and it’s a recommended update for all users on all platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. However, this version comes with a security announcement about a vulnerability in “git shell.”

• “For those running their own Git hosting server, Git 2.13 fixes a vulnerability in the git shell program in which an untrusted Git user can potentially run shell commands on a remote host. This only affects you if you’re running a hosting server and have specifically configured git shell. If none of that makes sense to you, you’re probably fine,” said Jeff King, Open Source Software Developer at GitHub.

Proprietary

• The development of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.10 web browser continues at fast pace, and today we see the availability of a new snapshot, versioned 1.10.838.7, which implements more new features, but also fixes several regressions.

• Coming only one week after the previous snapshot, which added a new way to sort downloads, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.10.838.7 is the third in this development cycle, and it attempts to implement a new functionality that promises to allow users to control the behavior of new tabs directly from extensions. It will be located under Settings -> Tabs -> New Tab Page -> Control by Extension.

• Vivaldi, which was created by Opera’s co-founder and former CEO, continues along its own path, focusing on privacy, security, and interesting enhancements to tabbed browsing. Vivaldi hit version 1.9 last week and now lets you “plant trees as you surf.”

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• I’ve tested it and as they mentioned in the announcement forum post, it is an early work in progress. Cars have no sound, sometimes other textures go on top of the car which looks weird and there are other issues. Even so, it’s still awesome to finally be able to play around with vehicles to move around the map quicker.

• On their teaser radar is the above image with the wording “Spice Clove”, which as usual I have no idea. I do love a good guessing game though and Feral do usually port good games.

• If you’re in the mood for something new, the Humble tinyBuild Bundle might be just what you need this week.

• There’s a total of eight Linux-native games along with a DLC for one of them, some of them are really quite good too.

• There is a sea of game engines available on the internet. Some specialize in 2D, some 3D. The languages vary. Some are Java based, Javascript, C#, C++, or perhaps their own special scripting language. The licenses vary. Some are free to use but pay on sales. Some are completely free to do anything you like with.

• Valve continues maturing their SteamVR Linux support.

• Valve pushed out a Steam update on Monday and besides a number of Steam Controller improvements, for Linux gamers making use of the SteamVR dashboard there is now desktop view support.

• With not many hours to spare, Hellpoint, a dark future action RPG that will fully support Linux has been funded on Kickstarter. They’ve hit CA$ 53,043 with 14 hours left!

• Following a few months of no updates and general silence from developers of the space RTS, a GOL reader asked us to look into the current state of the game. We got a reply and it’s positive.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre was happy to announce today the official availability of the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.3 RC1.

• Since the Beta release we have kept ourselves busy fixing bugs, so please take this last opportunity to test and give us feedback. Take a look at the Beta release blog post or the more detailed change log for an overview of what has changed in 4.3.

• KDE’s José Manuel Santamaría Lema is informing the Kubuntu Linux community today about the upcoming availability of a multitude of updates for various KDE technologies in the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• It’s a known fact that Kubuntu developers are always working hard to bring you all the latest goodies as soon as they are released upstream, and it looks like Kubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) users will be treated with the KDE Plasma 5.9.5 desktop environment, which is the last in the series as KDE Plasma 5.10 is coming at the end of May.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• While work on the major GTK+ 4 series advances at a slow pace, the GTK+ 3.22 stable branch is still being updated, and today we see the launch of yet another bugfix release, the thirteenth in the series.

• GTK+ 3.22.13 is a maintenance release that adds a month’s worth of fixes and updated translations from various contributors. The bug fixes are typically small but significant and include a memory leak fix for the Wayland display server when exporting handle, a memory leak fix for linkbutton, and a quartz backend segfault fix, which was a regression from last month’s point release, GTK+ 3.22.12.

• WebKitGTK+, the open-source and full-featured port of the WebKit rendering engine to the GTK+ GUI toolkit used to build modern applications for the GNOME desktop environment was updated today to version 2.16.2.

• WebKitGTK+ 2.16.2 is just a small bugfix release that only resolves some of the issues users reported since the first maintenance update of the WebKitGTK+ 2.16 stable series. The most prominent change being improved user agent quirks to add compatibility for Google’s new login page and YouTube.

Distributions

Reviews

• The Live run of Solus was stable, fast and smooth. I especially liked the crispness of the fonts, windows and of all the elements.

• At the same time, if you want to use Solus Budgie as a production OS, I’d recommend you to think twice. The main show-stopper for me would be the unknown format for supported packages. It locks down the number of available applications to whatever is available in official repositories, and there are already some gaps. Of course, there are some doubtful decisions on default set of applications and default desktop items, but that’s easy to fix.

• I hope that Solus will develop further and this is not my last visit to that part of the Linux world. I hope the team will not run out of patience and resources.

New Releases

• Solus Project’s Joshua Strobl is reporting today in a new installation of the This Week In Solus (TWiS) newsletter on the latest work done by him and project leader Ikey Doherty for their beloved and very popular Solus operating system.

• Last week – like many others before it – was extremely busy for the development team behind Solus, an independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution. The team finally managed to migrate the project’s Git repositories and patch management system to the Diffusion and Differential apps of their Phabricator dev tracker tool.

• This move has many implications for the ever-growing community and package maintainers, and you can read all about it in This Week In Solus Install #44, which brings many other good news for the regular Solus user as scanning and Bluetooth A2DP audio support has been greatly improved thanks to donators and patrons.

Arch Family

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Today at the OpenStack Summit 2017 in Boston, MA, SUSE, aside from celebrating its 25th anniversary, announced its new open source software solution that makes it simple to monitor and manage the health and performance of enterprise OpenStack cloud environments and workloads, SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring. In other SUSE related news, Trilio Data, announced that its TrilioVault is Ready Certified for SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

• Five students will spend this summer putting their coding skills into practice for openSUSE and other projects during this year’s Google Summer of Code.

• The international program that matches mentors and students funded 1,315 student projects this year for 201 open source organizations, who will benefit from the active involvement from these new developers.

• “We are excited to be selected as a mentoring organization and to mentor these talented, young GSoC students,” said Christian Bruckmayer, one of the openSUSE mentors. “This year’s projects focus on enhancing the capabilities of our open source tools, so that the benefits are shared amongst the open-source ecosystem.”

Red Hat Family

• Tim Yeaton, EVP and CMO, Red Hat Leigh Day, VP, Corporate Communications, Red Hat Nick Hopman, senior director, Emerging Technology Practices in US Sales, Red Hat Josh Patterson, director, Field Engineering, Skymind

• These executives discussed the open source movement and how it relates to Red Hat endeavors, producing some interesting insights worth sharing.

• Nick Hopman stated the technological and delivery model for open source technology is an “overnight success that started in the eighties.” The concept has roots in the university system where open source licenses promoted sharing. “Over the last ten years we’ve seen a metamorphosis. Every major technology that enterprises are likely to bet on – cloud, artificial intelligence, mobility – has a lot of its current innovation happening upstream in the open source community,” he stated. “The small university-centric collaboration model is now a fountain of innovation.”

• Red Hat Inc. has famously bucked the well-known Silicon Valley trend of tech companies that go from fast burn to fast burn-out.

• Red Hat is a company that does many things right, including promoting women in tech. Learn about the two winners of this year’s Women in Open Source Award, announced at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston last week.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

• The Debian-based Grml GNU/Linux distribution designed for system administrators is once again in development after taking a long break of approximately two and a half years.

• Dubbed “Freedatensuppe,” the next major release of the operating system is versioned Grml 2017.05, and a first Release Candidate (RC) build is now available for public testing. Development of Grml 2017.05 is currently based on the Debian Testing branch, which will soon become Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Cockpit, the open-source project providing a pleasant web-based administrative interface to Linux systems and developed significantly by Red Hat / Fedora developers, is now officially available in Ubuntu and Debian.

• Cockpit is now available in Debian unstable as well as Ubuntu 17.04 and 17.10 repositories. Details on Cockpit coming to Ubuntu/Debian were shared today on Martin Pitt’s blog, a prominent Debian/Ubuntu developer. There is also work on getting the Cockpit packages added to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS backports, but as of writing that has yet to be completed.

Flavours and Variants

• A group of Britisch IT health care specialists have tailored the Ubuntu Linux distribution for use by the UK’s national health service (NHS) on its workstations. The alpha version of NHSbuntu was unveiled at the South West CIO Forum on 27 April.

Devices/Embedded

• Portwell’s “RS4U” industrial computers feature a standard set of Portwell APIs. The first four models support Intel Apollo Lake, Skylake, and Haswell CPUs.

• VersaLogic’s Linux-ready, sandwich-style “Liger” offers 7th Gen Core CPUs, ruggedization features, and mini-PCIe, SPI/SPX, and PC/104-Plus expansion.

• Competing Linux-for-routers distributions OpenWRT and LEDE will soon vote on a proposal to heal the schism between the two.

• OpenWRT is often used as firmware for small routers, largely SOHO WiFi kit. But in March 2016 a group of developers decided they didn’t like the directions OpenWRT was taking and forked the project by creating the Linux Embedded Development Environment – LEDE – project. LEDE developers said they wanted to create a distribution that was more transparent and democratic than OpenWRT, followed a more predictable release schedule and produced stable code.

• Google and AIY Projects last week launched an open source do-it-yourself artificial intelligence Voice Kit for Raspberry Pi hobbyists.

• The AIY Voice Kit includes hardware for audio capture and playback, connectors for the dual mike daughterboard and speaker, GPIO pins to connect low-voltage components such as micro servos and sensors, and an optional barrel connector for a dedicated power supply.

• The Voice Kit can use cloud services such as the recently released Google Assistant SDK, which is enabled by default, or it can use the Cloud Speech API or run completely on-device.

• After informing us last month about the release of Raspberry WebKiosk 6.0 for Raspberry Pi single-board computers, Binary Emotions is informing us today about the availability of Raspberry Digital Signage 9.0.

• I don’t recommend trying to use the Raspberry Pi Zero W as a GUI desktop alternative. It works, but it is slow. I mean, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but for an extra $25, you could get a Raspberry Pi 3 that has double the RAM and more horsepower to give you a better and more responsive experience than the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Phones

Tizen

• It seems like the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2017, which is taking place next week, could be of more Interest than we thought. We have already Informed you about the Exclusive Tizen developer device giveaway and also additional Information about the conference. Now, the guys over at Sammobile are speculating that Samsung’s new fitness tracker, possibly called the Gear Fit Pro, could be unveiled at the event.

• Samsung sidelined Android Wear in 2015, despite the fact that some Android Wear users granted Samsung a hiatus in Google’s wearables platform and anticipated “a return to form” in 2016. In 2016, though, Samsung didn’t change course, with a Samsung executive claiming that the company would proceed with Tizen and part ways with Android Wear due to its battery efficiency and its presence on a wide range of Samsung devices such as TVs and smartphones, for example.

Android

• An enthusiast has compiled Google’s infant Fuchsia OS and put the toddler through its paces.

• The open-source OS is an open secret – anyone can download the platform from Github, and one enthusiast at Hotfix, a repair shop in Texas, has done just that.

Free Software/Open Source

• Being an Austinite, I enjoyed having DockerCon local, and I co-authored a guide to visiting Austin in the hopes that attendees would enjoy having DockerCon in Austin as well.

• During DockerCon 2017, a few major announcements were made, including the Moby Project.

• Verizon this week said it would begin offering x86-based servers with OpenStack software aimed at customers looking to support all manner of advanced cloud, software defined networking and network functions virtualization-based enterprises.

• ContaMiner is a web-based, open-source program developed by a unique interdisciplinary team in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. This program is already saving time for international researchers.

• “How much can you understand and repair a car if you don’t have a detailed picture of what is going on under the hood?” said KAUST Associate Professor Stefan Arold. “Proteins are life’s workhorses: their function and dysfunction both create life and end it. Each protein’s amino acid sequence folds into a particular 3-D structure that is required to support its function. If you want to understand, affect or engineer a protein’s function, you need to know its 3-D structure,” he explained.

• The release of MINIX 3.4 is inching closer with the availability now of its sixth release candidate.

• MINIX 3.4 will be the first update since MINIX 3.3 in 2014. We’ve been seeing release candidates now of MINIX 3.4 for the past year but it appears the final release is getting closer. MINIX for the uninitiated is a Unix-like microkernel-based OS started by Andrew Tanenbaum.

• MapD Technologies, a GPU-powered analytics company, has released their Core database to the open source community under the Apache 2 license, seeding a new generation of data applications. By open sourcing the MapD Core database and associated visualization libraries, they are making their analytics platform available to everyone.

• Since starting work on MapD more than five years ago while taking a database course at MIT, I had always dreamed of making the project open source. It is thus with great pleasure to announce that today our company is open sourcing the MapD Core database and associated visualization libraries, effective immediately.

• How pervasive is open source in today’s businesses? According to the 2016 Future of Open Source Survey from Black Duck and North Bridge, a mere three percent of respondents say they don’t use any open source tools or platforms.

• Leveraging open source has also become a key avenue for fostering new ideas and technologies. Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Open Source Software (2016) notes that organizations are using open source today not just for cost savings, but increasingly for innovation. With this in mind, major companies and industries are quickly building out their open source programs, and the open source community is responding.

Events

• We all know that the technology industry has been going through a period of incredible change. Rashesh Jethi, Head of Research & Development at Amadeus, began his keynote at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) with a story about how when his grandfather went to university in India, the 760-mile journey took three days and involved a camel, a ship, and a train. Contrast this to Jethi’s 2700 mile journey to ONS in 6 hours where he checked into the flight from his watch. The rapid evolution of technology is continuing to redefine the travel industry and how we approach travel.

• This weekend was LinuxFest Northwest 2017, and as usual I was down in Bellingham to attend it. Had a good time, again as usual. Luckily I got to do my talk first thing and get it out of the way. I’d post a link to the recording, but there doesn’t seem to be one – I’ll check with the organizers if it got lost or sometihng. In the mean time, here’s the slide deck. It was a general talk on Fedora’s past, present and future.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The investigations on Thunderbird’s future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.

Databases

• The European Investment Bank (EIB), the non-profit lending institution of the European Union, will provide EUR 25 million in funding to the eponymous Finnish company behind the MariaDB open-source database system. MariaDB will use the money to expand its customer base in Europe, America and Asia, and to hire more developers in Helsinki.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The Document Foundation announced a few moments ago the release of the seventh and last scheduled point release for the LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A Phoronix reader pointed out a performance regression fix now available for GCC 6 and GCC 7 that could help some rather trivial C code perform much better.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Aleph Objects, best-known for developing the LulzBot brand of 3D printers, has announced the launch and availability of a certified Open Source Hardware 3D printing filament at RAPID+TCT.

Programming/Development

• A Java modularity specification failed to pass in a vote by Java executive committee members, leaving the future of the technology in question. The issue could hold up the planned July 27 release of Java 9, which is slated to include modularity.

• Balloting on Java Specification Request 376 was completed on Monday. The modular plan for Java, intended to make it easier to scale the platform, has been opposed by companies, including Red Hat and IBM. Red Hat, in particular, questioned many parts of the plan, including raising issues about potential application compatibility problems.

• Oracle’s chief Java architect has criticised Red Hat and IBM for the companies opposition to make Java 9 modular.

• The Java Platform Module System (JPMS) a core component of Project Jigsaw, the most likely candidate for modularity in Java 9, has received opposition from both IBM and Red Hat.

• IBM have hinted that they may vote against the changes whilst Red Hat initially agreed to the coming changes. Since then Oracle Chief Java Architect Mike Reinhold has come out and said that Red Hat worked consistently to undermine any coming changes.

• This is the second installment in my two-part series on terminal applications with great command-line UIs. In the first article, I discussed features that make a command-line application a pure joy to use. In part two, I’ll look at how to implement those features in Python with the help of a few libraries. By the end of this article, readers should have a good understanding of how to use Prompt Toolkit, Click (Command Line Interface Creation Kit), Pygments, and Fuzzy Finder to implement an easy-to-use REPL.

• Jay Nick is a retired electrical engineer who volunteers at local schools in his community by using art as a creative way to introduce students to mathematics and coding. Reflecting on the frustrations that his own children experienced in college programming classes, he decided to use his own experience with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) to create an approach to coding that combines principles of mathematics and art.

• Microsoft has made a change to its forthcoming ASP.NET Core 2.0 web framework so that it is now incompatible with the Windows-only .NET Framework, causing confusion and annoyance for some .NET developers.

Leftovers

• One of the first challenges an open source project faces is how to communicate among contributors. There are a plethora of options: forums, chat channels, issues, mailing lists, pull requests, and more. How do we choose which is the right medium to use and how do we do it right?

• Sadly and all too often, projects shy away from making a disciplined decision and instead opt for “all of the above.” This results in a fragmented community: Some people sit in Slack/Mattermost/IRC, some use the forum, some use mailing lists, some live in issues, and few read all of them.

Hardware

• It is no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have advanced radically over the last decade, yet somewhere between better algorithms and faster processors lies the increasingly important task of engineering systems for maximum performance—and producing better results.

• The problem for now, says Nidhi Chappell, director of machine learning in the Datacenter Group at Intel, is that “AI experts spend far too much time preprocessing code and data, iterating on models and parameters, waiting for training to converge, and experimenting with deployment models. Each step along the way is either too labor-and/or compute-intensive.”

Health/Nutrition

• Amos and Miller argue that the disjunction between the US and European requirements for diagnostic patent eligibility hinder global patent harmonisation. While the EU does place limits on diagnostic patents, it does not prohibit them outright. Amos and Miller explain that a rejection on the same grounds of Mayo in the EU would amount to a rejection based upon lack of ‘industrial applicability’. While 30 of the patents studied had objections in the EU based upon questions of novelty, inventiveness or clarity, none had objections which corresponded to a US Mayo rejection.

• The authors acknowledge that it is not possible to completely attribute the abandonment of a patent to the receipt of a Mayo objection, but argue that the case does appear to have special importance in the fate of US diagnostic patents. They point out that prior to the decision, the US permitted more diagnostic patents than the European Patent Office in a sampling of 20 applications.

• The 18th round of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement negotiations is taking place this week in Manila, Philippines. Health activists warn that Japan and South Korea are pushing for measures that go beyond international trade rules on intellectual property, including extending patent terms and data exclusivity in countries such as India, a primary source of cheaper generic medicines.

• Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) in its response is urging Japan and South Korea to withdraw their proposals as it considers them as being harmful. The proposed measures would lead to a delay in generic competition and strongly increase the prices of medicines for patients all over the world, MSF said.

Security

• There is no question that the web browser will be the piece of software with the largest and the most exposed attack surface on your Linux workstation. It is a tool written specifically to download and execute untrusted, frequently hostile code.

• It attempts to shield you from this danger by employing multiple mechanisms such as sandboxes and code sanitization, but they have all been previously defeated on multiple occasions. System administrators should learn to approach browsing websites as the most insecure activity you’ll engage in on any given day.

• Miscreants can turn the tables on Microsoft and use its own antivirus engine against Windows users – by abusing it to install malware on vulnerable machines.

• A particularly nasty security flaw exists in Redmond’s anti-malware software, which is packaged and marketed in various forms: Windows Defender, Windows Intune Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection, Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint, Microsoft Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection. All are, at this moment, at risk. It is switched on by default in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and Windows Server 2012.

• It is possible for hackers to craft files that are booby-trapped with malicious code, and this nasty payload is executed inadvertently and automatically by the scanner while inspecting the data. The injected code runs with administrative privileges, allowing it to gain full control of the system, install spyware, steal files, and so on.

• In other words, while Microsoft’s scanner is searching a downloaded file for malware, it can be tricked into running and installing the very sort of software nasty it’s supposed to catch and kill.

• I’m no world-class hacker/penetration tester, but I’ve been able to break into any organization I’ve been (legally) hired to do so in an hour or less, except for one place that took me three hours. That was on my second engagement with the customer after it had implemented many of the protections I had recommended during my first visit.

• As previously reported, the zero-day exploit allowed attackers to issue commands that remotely execute malicious code on 318 models of Cisco switches. The attack code was published in early March by WikiLeaks as part of its Vault7 series of leaks, which the site is billing as the largest publication of intelligence documents ever.

• The bug resides in the Cisco Cluster Management Protocol (CMP), which uses the telnet protocol to deliver signals and commands on internal networks. It stems from a failure to restrict telnet options to local communications and the incorrect processing of malformed CMP-only telnet options.

• It’s no secret that most people are rubbish at choosing passwords — it’s something that’s proved time and time again when the annual list of common passwords is released. To help overcome the problem, and hopefully increase the security of people’s accounts, a team of researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago have created an open source password meter that provides advice about how to strengthen a password.

• Despite the fact that cybercriminals stole more than 3 billion user credentials in 2016, users don’t seem to be getting savvier about their password usage. The good news is that how we think about password security is changing as other authentication methods become more popular.

• A technician hurriedly slings his backpack over his shoulders, straps on his M9 pistol, and bolts out of the transport with his squad of commandos in a hail of gunfire. As soon as his team reaches the compound, he whips out a laptop and starts deploying a rootkit to the target server, bullets whizzing overhead all the while.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• A video produced by Stanford as part of its government funded research into psychic phenomena alleged to show Uri Geller performing various psychic and extrasensory feats. While some in the Agency were “humbled” by the film, others were quick to declare it ordinary trickery from a con artist using techniques from stage magic and mentalism. Eventually, James Randi joined the discussion with his book about Uri Geller, only to find one of the scientists involved pushing back.

• Much ink has been spilled on President Trump’s “bigly” disdain for the media, including his Stalinist moniker for the press: “enemy of the people.”

• Not enough, however, has been written about smaller efforts afoot at the Department of Justice and FBI that would, in a much more direct sense, imperil basic press freedoms in the United States.

• These efforts came up last week in testimony by FBI Director James Comey. Though much of the coverage focused on comments about the Clinton investigation, he touched on two other discrete issues that deserve scrutiny.

• The first is WikiLeaks — specifically reports that the DOJ is considering filing charges under the Espionage Act against the radical transparency site for releasing classified information.

• James Comey may have just been fired by President Donald Trump from his position as FBI Director, but he already has a new job offer from a surprising source: WikiLeaks. Shortly after he was fired, Julian Assange tweeted that he would be happy to offer Comey a new job if he wanted to continue to properly investigate the U.S. government from WikiLeaks’ D.C. office.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Spain has lost its first international arbitration process over cuts to renewable energy subsidies. The International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has rendered an award in favor of the British-based Eiser Infrastructure Limited and its affiliate Energia Solar Luxembourg, stating that the Spanish government violated Article 10 of the Energy Charter Treaty, thus depriving the company – a fund with ties to ABN Amro – of fair and equitable treatment.

• Two-thirds of Canada’s electricity supply now comes from renewable sources such as hydro and wind power, the National Energy Board said in a report released Tuesday.

• Renewable energy production jumped 17 per cent between 2005 and 2015. The portion of all electricity in Canada generated by renewables is now 66 per cent, up from 60 per cent a decade earlier.

• “I think people don’t understand just how much of our generation is the renewables,” said NEB chief economist Shelley Milutinovic. “Probably very few people would know Canada produces the second most hydro in the world.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• After President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, questions immediately arose about the President’s motivations for his dismissal — and for the recent firings of two other then-President Barack Obama-appointees who were in the middle of conducting investigations linked to Trump.

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Comey’s firing was part of a “deeply troubling pattern from the Trump administration,” that appears to be linked to two other high-profile dismissals.

• Certainly Trump has committed high crimes and misdemeanours. That started before the campaign of 2016. Now, he’s doing it from the Oval Office. On the list so far: sexual harassment, bullying, racial discrimination, multiple breaches of the Constitution, and treason, facilitating Putin’s influence to affect the USAian government. The only higher power is Congress. I would bet every Democrat would support impeachment.

• Since FBI Director James Comey has become a kind of arbiter of the political discourse – to say his pronouncements have been decisive would not, I think, be an overstatement – his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee was much anticipated. As Hillary Clinton and her supporters continue to re-litigate the presidential election, blaming him for her defeat, how he would defend his decision to reveal that the FBI was investigating her private email server, and the possible unauthorized release of classified information, was the focus of much interest. And yet the really interesting aspects of his testimony had to do with two questions that, in a free society, would not normally be the domain of law enforcement: 1) What should be the nature of our relations with a foreign country, i.e. Russia? And 2) what is a legitimate journalistic enterprise?

• So… not quite sure what to make of this yet, but according to the NY Times, just a little while ago, Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey (of course, just after our podcast came out talking about how Comey seemed to be hopeful the Trump administration would approve his encryption backdoor plans).

• FBI Director James Comey was fired Tuesday by President Donald Trump over his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal. A search has begun to replace Comey, who was appointed to the position by President Barack Obama in 2013.

• “The FBI is one of our nation’s most cherished and respected institutions, and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” President Trump said in a statement. Comey’s removal was recommended by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Censorship/Free Speech

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• In the EU, outdated copyright law is threatening the health of the Internet.

• The EU’s current copyright framework — developed for a time before the Internet — can stymie innovation, preventing entrepreneurs from building on existing data or code. It can stifle creativity, making it technically illegal to create, share and remix memes and other online culture and content. And it can limit the materials that educators and nonprofits like Wikipedia depend on for teaching and learning.

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