● 06.10.17

● Links 10/6/2017: New Wine Release, Qt 5.9 Packages in KDE Neon

Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux is, without a doubt, one of the single most flexible operating system platforms on the planet. With the flagship open source ecosystem, there is almost nothing you cannot do. What makes Linux so flexible? The answer to that question will depend on your needs. Suffice it to say, the list of answers is significant and starts from the kernel and works it way out to the desktop environment. This flexibility was built into the operating system from the beginning, borrowing quite a lot of features from UNIX. One such feature is links.

Desktop

• For most people running Linux on a laptop, chances are they had to go through the ritual of wiping Windows and installing the Linux OS. It’s a time-honored tradition in the Linux world, but things are slowly changing, with Linux now coming preinstalled on some very nice portables. Case in point: the ultralight System76 Galago Pro, a laptop that pleasantly surprised me more than once.

• One question that comes up a lot in discussion is whether Linux is genuinely a faster OS when compared to Windows. Most of the questions direct us to the time it takes for the OSes to boot up and in that parameter, yes, Linux is noticeable faster than Windows. Why then, does it fail the speed test when compared along other parameters ?

• I had to replace my daughter’s desktop computer because it fried during an intense storm. Fortunately, I could rescue the two hard drives and, thus, I did not buy a new hd with the new system. One disk was a storage unit; the other one dual-booted with PicarOS and Mageia 6 Sta2. Normally, it would have been a matter of stuffing the HDs and telling the BIOS to pick the one with the OSs. The new PC, however, came with UEFI.

• Thanks to the Fedora and GNOME project, I was able to learn what Linux means, both, technically and philosophically. I was prepared for system administration by the Linux Foundation and throughout the years I got Linux experiences and dirty hands in companies such as GMD and IBM to finally get my Red Hat Certificate. Nowadays, thanks to BacktracAcademy I teach online for free, more than 841 students around the world!

Server

• Container technology is pretty much hogging the limelight in recent times. During the paradigm shift from virtualization to container technology, many enterprises have been swayed to deploy container-based cloud software. Though containerization isn’t new as a concept, the rise of Docker has brought containerization into focus in the IT industry. Docker is a big name in this landscape as it simplifies application deployment process in a cost-effective manner. This makes Docker one of the interesting products in the container technology realm.

• Seven years ago, Oracle wanted to be a Linux power. So, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and the company cloned Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) into Oracle Linux. Then, Oracle, after Ellison first dismissed the cloud, decided it would be a cloud power.

• Neither move has worked out that well. Now that managing containers has become a de rigeur for serious cloud companies, Oracle is partnering with CoreOS to do the heavy open-source lifting.

• Some genuinely exciting news piqued my interest at this year’s DockerCon, that being the new operating system (OS) LinuxKit, which was announced and is immediately on offer from the undisputed heavyweight container company, Docker. The container giant has announced a flexible, extensible operating system where system services run inside containers for portability. You might be surprised to hear that even includes the Docker runtime daemon itself.

• In this article, I’ll take a quick look at what’s promised in LinuxKit, how to try it out for yourself, and look also at ever-shrinking, optimized containers.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

Benchmarks

• Today marks the highly anticipated debut of Dawn of War III for Linux (and macOS) ported by Feral Interactive. Here are a number of OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards running Ubuntu Linux with this game.

Applications

• ​This is a set of tools designed for technical/advanced users who wish to know more about their hardware and related components for servicing. This tool comes with various commands namely lsvpd, lscfg, lsmcode, lsvio & vpdupdate. Let’s proceed below to know more about them.

• Standard Notes is an encrypted note taking app available for free on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. And yup, in case you were wondering, it’s also totally open source.

• A snap of Kodi, the hugely popular open-source media center software, is available for testing. Announcing the snap package on the Kodi forum, Kodi team member ‘DaVu‘ explains that with “more snap packages are available for Ubuntu-based systems” they are “happy to provide a Kodi snap package as well.”

• Wireshark, the world’s most popular open-source, free and cross-platform network protocol analyzer, has been updated recently to version 2.2.7 and it’s now available for download on Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

• Coming almost two months after the release of Wireshark 2.2.6, this new maintenance update is here to patch read overflow vulnerabilities in the DOF and DHCP dissectors, infinite loop issues in the Bazaar, SoulSeek, DNS, and DICOM dissectors, as well as a memory exhaustion bug in the openSAFETY dissector.

Proprietary

• The Linux version of the company’s popular office software suite is compatible with Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Knoppix, and other platforms, supporting both 32 and 64 bit computing environments. Regular updates are made possible with input from the open source community.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• The Wine development release 2.10 is now available.

• Wine 2.10 is now available as the project’s latest bi-weekly release.

• As we noted last week, more Android code has been landing in upstream Wine and with today’s Wine 2.10 release there is the initial Android graphics driver.

• Coming two weeks after the release of Wine 2.9, which improved support for many Windows games and apps, including The Witcher 3 and Need for Speed: The Run, Wine 2.10 launches with even more improvements and new features.

• Prominent new features of the Wine 2.10 development release include the implementation of an initial version of the Android graphics driver, dictionary support in WebServices, multiple improvements to Direct2D, user interface improvements in RegEdit, as well as some OLE clipboard cache fixes.

Games

• According to Phoronix, Alex Smith of Feral Interactive has just published a few changes to the open source Intel graphics driver, which allows their upcoming Dawn of War III port for Linux to render correctly on Vulkan. This means that the open-source Intel driver should support the game on day one, although drawing correctly and drawing efficiently could be two very different things — or maybe not, we’ll see.

• Feral Interactive is proud to announce today, June 8, 2017, the availability of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III real-time strategy game for Linux, SteamOS, and macOS operating systems.

• The UK-based video games publisher teased Linux and Mac users with the port of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III since mid-May when the company announced that it would offer support for both Vulkan (on Linux and SteamOS) and Metal (on macOS) graphics APIs for next-gen gameplay.

• This good-looking Unreal Engine 4 title currently in Early Access might be getting a Linux version before it’s released.

• Solving mysteries, traveling to faraway lands and making a name for yourself is all in a good day’s work in this adventure game that combines strategy elements with plenty of charm. I gave the game and its expansion a look and have a few thoughts on it.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of the second maintenance update to the KDE Applications 17.04 stable series of the software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

• Coming almost a month after the release of the first point release in the series, KDE Applications 17.04.2 is here today to fix more than 15 bugs that have been reported by users or discovered by the development team in various of the included apps and components, such as Kdenlive, Dolphin, Gwenview, Ark, and KDE PIM.

• We held off on Qt 5.8 because of problems with the Wayland support between it and KWin. Qt 5.9 seems a little more promising but we don’t want to change something so fundamental to KDE’s software without checking for issues so it’s still in the hidden testing repo for now. Try it out on KDE neon Developer Unstable edition to see what breaks.

• KDE and Qt 5.8 didn’t jive so smoothly, but the KDE Neon crew seem positive about Qt 5.9 and have moved forth in making it available in testing to Neon Developer Unstable users.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A new version of the GNOME Tweak Tool is available for testing in Ubuntu 17.10 — and it includes some nifty new options!

• We need two things to make this happen, source where to find the information and an object to present it in. One place to get the infromation is throught the documentation that is already accesable throught GNOME Builder in the right panel. The URIs to the individual documentation pages and their keywords (such as the name of the methods) are already imported thanks to Devhelp. For a simple way to then get a text on hover is using the GtkToolTip.

• A translucent top bar and new window maximizing effects will be on show in GNOME Shell 3.26 when it’s released later this year. Detailing the (admittedly minor) tweaks in a blog post today, GNOME’s Matthias Clasen also explains why GNOME Shell has a solid black topper by default.

• GNOME, the Fedora Workstation default environment, has a well known Alt+Tab feature to switch apps. This control groups windows for a single app together. For example, multiple terminal windows appear as a single terminal app. The Alt+` (backtick or backquote) shortcut switches between those windows in a single app. But a helpful GNOME extension, Alternate Tab, changes this behavior.

Distributions

Reviews

• Ubuntu Budgie is modern and refreshing. This is my first experience with the Budgie desktop and so far, I must say I am impressed. Once again, the demise of the Unity desktop means Budgie just might be the one for me. It provides me with the beauty and elegance I have come to expect from the elementary OS, the stability, and security of Ubuntu and the modernity of a desktop environment. In a few iterations, I believe Ubuntu Budgie is going to be a household distro of choice for many people. Ubuntu 18.04 will default back to GNOME, but what will you be using? Are you considering Ubuntu Budgie or any other flavor? Share your thoughts and comments with us in the section below. Thanks for reading.

New Releases

• Just one week after unveiling the final release of Alpine Linux 3.6 as a major update bringing lots of exciting new technologies and functionality, Natanael Copa announced the availability of the first point release, versioned 3.6.1.

• The monthly stable update of the OpenELEC embedded Linux entertainment operating system for Raspberry Pi and other supported single-board computers has arrived, and it is now available for download or update.

• We are pleased to announce the release of MX-16.1.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• ROSA Labs is pleased to announce the availability of an LXQt edition of the recently released ROSA R9 GNU/Linux operating system, which can run on older computers with only 512 MB of RAM.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• openSUSE Projet’s Douglas DeMaio reports today on the latest software updates and technologies that were brought to users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system by a total of four snapshots released this month.

• The care and thoroughness of making GNU Compiler Collection 7 the default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed produced a gradual decrease in snapshots over the past month, but it looks like snapshots of the rolling release are beginning to pick up the pace.

• The four snapshots released this week aligns much to closer to upstream development and releases of GNOME, KDE, QEMU and Mesa top the list of this week’s new packages in Tumbleweed.

Red Hat Family

• Open source company Red Hat released Tuesday Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3, based on Ceph 10.2 (Jewel) that introduces a new Network File System (NFS) interface, offers compatibility with the Hadoop S3A filesystem client, and adds support for deployment in containerized environments. Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3 increases the versatility of Ceph for object storage by broadening protocol support so that the users can connect more effectively to and between traditional and modern workloads.

Finance

Fedora

• Ben Williams of the Fedora Respins-SIG project is back with his announcement about new sets of updated Fedora 25 Linux Live ISO respins, which bring all the latest security and software updates, as well as a new kernel.

Debian Family

• I have updated my Calibre Debian repository to include packages of the upcoming version 3, currently version 2.99.10. As with the previous packages, I kept RAR support in to allow me to read comic books.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• A video demo of Ubuntu running on the 7-inch GPD Pocket laptop has appeared online, months after the project smashed its crowdfunding goal.

• That’s a quote from the 6th Doctor in British Sci-Fi series Doctor Who, and it sounds a rather fitting for the transition Ubuntu is moving through.

• After some wait, GNOME desktop environment has found its place as the default desktop in Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark daily builds. The current experience is mainly vanilla and one should expect to see some more custom inputs from Ubuntu desktop team in near future. As this is an early development build, you should also be ready for some bugs while trying the Linux distro.

• A new TurtleBot3 rev of the open source, Ubuntu/ROS-based robot kit is available in “Burger” and “Waffle” models with an RPi 3 or Intel Joule, respectively.

• The “world’s most popular open source robot for education and research” has received a major upgrade with two modular TurtleBot3 models from Open Robitics that run Linux and Robot Operating System (ROS) on a Raspberry Pi 3 (“Burger”) SBC or Intel Joule COM (“Waffle”). The dual-wheel Turtlebot 3 is smaller, cheaper, simpler, and more powerful than the discontinued TurtleBot 1 and still available, Clearpath Robotics built TurtleBot 2. The latter runs on a Linux- and Intel Core i3-4010U based HP netbook instead of a compute board.

• Should Ubuntu 17.10 ship with more GNOME apps by default? Planning for the next Ubuntu release is now underway, as is debate on the default app selection.

• In the same report published by Canonical’s Will Cooke about the company’s decision to switch to GNOME’s display manager (GDM) as default login manager for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 operating system, it was revealed that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users will soon be able to run the latest GNOME apps as Snaps.

• In a recent report, Canonical’s Will Cooke reveals the fact that the Ubuntu Desktop team is currently considering replacing the LightDM login manager with GDM (GNOME Display Manager) in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release.

• You might have noticed some rumors earlier this week about Ubuntu 17.10 ditching its beloved LightDM login manager for GNOME’s GDM display manager, especially now that the daily build ISO images are shipping with the GNOME desktop environment by default instead of Unity, but it’s now official and confirmed by Canonical, who said that they don’t have time to make LightDM work with GNOME.

• Today I came across Ubunsys, an advanced system utility for Ubuntu 17.04, and I think power users among you may find it useful. Ubunsys, which is under active development and not yet considered stable, exposes various advanced security, package management and system settings in a straightforward wizard-style UI.

• In April, Canonical’s longtime CEO Jane Silber announced she was stepping down and that Mark Shuttleworth would be returning to the role as CEO.

• At that time she announced Mark would be re-taking the role as the CEO in July and she would move to the Canonical Board of Directors.

• The transition is happening. The directorship has transitioned from Jane Silber to Neil French. Anzwix alerted to us that Silber is no longer a director as of this week. Replacing her as a director of Canonical UK Limited / Canonical Group Limited is Neil French.

Flavours and Variants

• Lubuntu maintainer and LXQt developer Simon Quigley is reporting on some of the upcoming highlights of the Lubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release later this year on October 19, 2017.

• The Linux Mint team has released the beta version of Linux Mint 18.2, the upcoming Long Term Release which will remain supported until 2021. This release ships with Linux kernel 4.8 and Ubuntu 16.04 base. The other big changes are a switch to LightDM login manager and improvements in Blueberry utility.

• A new version of Bodhi Linux, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, is available for download. Bodhi Linux 4.2 is the second minor update in the 4.x series and, accordingly, has a relatively minor change-log to match. What’s Bodhi Linux?

Devices/Embedded

• NutsBoard.org’s upcoming 3.5-inch, i.MX6-based “Pistachio” SBC follows its recently released TI AM3352 based “Almond” COM, Walnut carrier, and mini-PC.

• Shortly after Taiwan-based startup NutsBoard.org shipped a TI Sitara AM3352 based, 68 x 38mm Almond computer-on-module, the company went to Computex last week to show off an upcoming Pistachio SBC built around the NXP i.MX6. We’ll start with the Pistachio, and then cover the Almond. We also examine the Almond’s “Walnut” carrier board and Walnut based “Walnut-PC-Almond” mini-PC, both of which feature four Fast Ethernet ports and a GbE port. All these products are available in optional -40 to 85°C models.

• TI’s Linux-driven, Cortex-A8 “Sitara AMIC110” SoC with PRU-ICSS is designed for multiprotocol industrial Ethernet and fieldbus communications.

• Texas Instruments has announced the AMIC110, the first in a series of Sitara AMIC SoCs designed to “help developers convert existing non-networked designs such as motor drives to networked systems by adding industrial Ethernet.” The SoC’s single-core, 300MHz Cortex-A8 core is joined by a programmable real-time unit (PRU-ICSS), much like the one found on TI’s Sitara AM437x. A Linux SDK is available along with multiple development boards.

• It’s a Linux world, and the rest of computing is just living in it – often literally, thanks to containerization. IoT, in all of its manifold forms, is no exception, and the Linux Foundation lists these seven projects as the key players in the march of connected open-source systems. Here’s a quick rundown.

• Aaeon’s rugged, Linux-ready OMNI-5000 AIO panel PCs include Celeron J1900 based 12.1- and 15-inch models and a Skylake-based, 21.5-inch system.

• BlackBerry Ltd on Monday downplayed news that Toyota Motor would embrace rival software for its future car consoles, saying it was more concentrated on the faster-growing market for autonomous owning technology.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• Collabora’s Robert Foss is reporting on a new NXP i.MX6 buffer modifier implementation on Android and Mesa, which allows Android to run on the i.MX6 platform without needing any proprietary blobs.

• Support for buffer modifiers was added in two both Mesa and gbm_gralloc. While gbm_gralloc is now capable of using the “GBM_BO_IMPORT_FD_MODIFIER” GBM API call, which has been designed to import a buffer object and accompany various information, such as the one about the modifier used by the respective buffer object, Mesa received buffer modifier support in GBM and several of the buffer allocation functions.

• TriggerTrap may be shutting its doors, but chances are, users might still be able to use their devices even on operating systems that have yet to be launched, thanks to the company’s move to share the app as open code.

• After TriggerTrap announced their closure earlier this year, users were left wondering if future operating system updates would leave the device that gives cameras smartphone-connected features incompatible. On Wednesday, CEO Haje Jan Kamps shared the open source code for both the iOS and Android TriggerTrap app on Github.

• If there’s one thing I admire about Android phones, it’s the variety of models available at all price points.

• A few weeks ago, I crowned the Samsung Galaxy S8 the new king of Android phones – the best one yet. But what if your budget doesn’t allow for a $750 phone?

• Lucky for us, there is a good selection of phones that cost a lot less, and the one I’ve been carrying for the last week, the Motorola Moto G5 Plus, is well worth your consideration.

• The Moto G5 Plus ($230, amazon.com) is unlocked for all carriers. That’s a rarity among cheaper Android phones.

• If you’re in the market for a phone that costs $650 to $700, there’s no shortage of options. Even if you exclude the aging Pixel, there’s the LG G6, Galaxy S8, and the upcoming Essential phone. And the OnePlus 5, which is also rumored to sport an 835 chip, is just around the corner.

• But the U11 has something that none of those other phones have. Edge Sense may be a gimmick, but it’s a fun one, and you’d don’t have to sacrifice much of anything to get it. Take it away, and the U11 still has the best processor, a top-notch camera, and a nice design, even if it doesn’t quite have the edge-to-edge appeal of the Galaxy S8. At $650 unlocked—or $696 ($29 over $24 months) if you buy it through the only official carrier, Sprint—the U11 is definitely a good buy for a phone with such specs.

Free Software/Open Source

• Global Witness, an NGO focusing on the politics and human consequences of environmental problems and natural resources, has made its digital storytelling tool Longform available as open source software. Longform was specifically developed with the organisation’s audience and objectives in mind: it works seamlessly on mobile devices, and supports a text-only modus for people in low-bandwidth regions.

• The Semantic Web, a term coined by World Wide Web (WWW) inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, refers to the concept that all the information in all the websites on the internet should be able to interoperate and communicate. That vision, of a web of knowledge that supplies information to anyone who wants it, is continuing to emerge and grow.

• In the first generation of the WWW, Web 1.0, most people were consumers of content, and if you had a web presence it was comprised of a series of static pages conveyed in HTML. Websites had guest books and HTML forms, powered by Perl and other server-side scripting languages, that people could fill out. While HTML provides structure and syntax to the web, it doesn’t provide meaning; therefore Web 1.0 couldn’t inject meaning into the vast resources of the WWW.

• That shiny new developer job is going to involve a lot of rusty old codeOpen source keeps growing from strength to strength despite the vast majority of developers not bothering to document how any of it works. That’s one big conclusion from GitHub’s 2017 survey, in which 93% of respondents gnashed their teeth over shoddy documentation but also admitted to doing virtually nothing to improve the situation. Indeed, while many may nod their heads when Apache Storm founder Nathan Marz intoned that “Documentation is essential” to a successful open source project, few bother to pitch in.

• And yet…open source marches on, with no signs of slowing anytime soon. If documentation matters so much, why hasn’t open source adoption been impeded by its alleged crappiness?

• Several more prominent members of the communications industry have joined the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project, which is leading a swelling parade toward a harmonized approach to software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV).

• Scientists used to come to Gregory Kurtzer of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) IT department a lot, asking for a better way to use software containers in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. After a while he got tired of saying, “Sorry, not possible.” So he invented a solution and named it Singularity.

• Within a few months of its release last year, Singularity took off. Computing-heavy scientific institutions worldwide—from Stanford University to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to various sites on the European Grid e-Infrastructure—flocked to the software. Singularity was also recently recognized by HPCwire editors as one of five new technologies to watch.

• These are gloomy days for hardware legacy companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which saw vanishing sales last quarter. But is there a happier, if untold, story unfolding in open-source compute projects?

• Most leaders in large organizations are more than capable of running successful open systems—so why aren’t they doing it?

• The open source arena continues to rapidly converge with the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Not only are technology industry titans contributing meaningful tools to the community, but international players and billionaires are making contributions. Meanwhile, some of our smartest people are also laser-focused on keeping AI development open and safe.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Strong government policies and leadership are key to making the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.

• To advance this work from the front lines, some of the world’s experts on these issues joined government service. These dedicated public servants have made major progress in recent years on issues like net neutrality, open data and the digital economy.

• But as governments transition and government leaders move on, we risk losing momentum or even backsliding on progress made. To sustain that momentum and invest in those leaders, today the Mozilla Foundation officially launches a new Tech Policy Fellowship. The program is designed to give individuals with deep expertise in government and Internet policy the support and structure they need to continue their Internet health work.

• The fellows, who hail from around the globe, will spend the next year working independently on a range of tech policy issues. They will collaborate closely with Mozilla’s policy and advocacy teams, as well as the broader Mozilla network and other key organizations in tech policy. Each fellow will bring their expertise to important topics currently at issue in the United States and around the world.

• The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.18.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

• Version 1.18 of the Rust programming language implementation is now available.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The software development community working on LibreOffice have greatly scaled up their bug-hunting efforts, using automated software test tools made available by Google. Beneficiaries include the many European public administrations that use up-to-date versions of this suite of office productivity tools.

CMS

• Version 4.8 of WordPress, named “Evans” in honor of jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.8 add more ways for you to express yourself and represent your brand.

BSD

• At this point it’s probably best to explain a bit what slaacd(8) is supposed to solve.

Programming/Development

• GitHub this week released the results of its survey on open source software development, practices and worldwide communities. GitHub partnered with researchers from academic institutions, industry organizations and the open source community to collect responses from more than 6,000 participants.

• The results show the importance of open source documentation and reveal some of the problems missing or poorly done documentation can have on users and project adoption.

• Besides the above plot, which can be difficult to parse even at full size, we offer the following numerical rankings. As will be observed, this run produced several ties which are reflected below (they are listed out here alphabetically rather than consolidated as ties because the latter approach led to misunderstandings). Note that this is actually a list of the Top 21 languages, not Top 20, because of said ties.

• 1 JavaScript 2 Java 3 Python 4 PHP 5 C# 6 C++ 7 CSS 8 Ruby 9 C 10 Objective-C 11 Swift 12 Shell 12 Scala 14 R 15 Go 15 Perl 17 TypeScript 18 PowerShell 19 Haskell 20 CoffeeScript 20 Lua 20 Matlab

Leftovers

• Officials posted a notice of the planned end of service on June 9 on its Docs.com site. In that note, Microsoft attributed overlap between SlideShare, which is part of LinkedIn, and OneDrive with Docs.com as the reasons for the December 2017 closing. Microsoft bought LinkedIn last year.

• Microsoft is advising users to migrate and/or delete content they shared on Docs.com as soon as possible.

• In 2015, Microsoft revamped its Docs.com site to become a new “Internet destination” where users could publish for public consumption their Office documents, including Sways. Along with Sways, users can post Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Office Mix documents and/or collections that will be discoverable by search engines to the Docs.com site. Microsoft originally introduced Docs.com as part of a collaboration with Facebook in 2010. Microsoft Docs was a project to try to get Facebook users to use Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.

Hardware

• U.S. smartphone chipmaker Qualcomm said on Friday it was confident it would addressed EU antitrust concerns about its $38-billion bid for NXP Semiconductors, after EU regulators started an investigation into the deal.

Health/Nutrition

• 5. Nobody Has Bothered to Fix Flint’s Water Yet

• A new study released today by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University in Boston shows harmful types of PFCs, known as PFOA or PFOS, can be found in drinking water systems in 27 U.S. states and in the tap water supplies of 15 million people.

Security

• the network traffic that AMT uses is handled entirely within AMT itself. That traffic never gets passed up to the operating system’s own IP stack and, as such, is invisible to the operating system’s own firewall or other network monitoring software.

• Fit-PC, the maker of the computer, explains the vulnerability by saying, “In case an affected model is exposed to malicious software running inside the operating system, the malicious software is able to read or write to Flash memory storing BIOS and Intel ME firmware and may corrupt or alter them.”

• Cyber security concerns rank high on the list when corporates and private equity firms consider mergers and acquisitions of software companies, according to a survey conducted by the legal firm West Monroe Partners and Mergermarket, an intelligence tool used for tracking mergers and acquisitions.

• Fireball is a new and notorious malware in town which is targeting Windows and macOS devices. Developed by a Chinese marketing company Rafotech, Fireball takes control of the user’s web browser and generates fake advertisement clicks. It also features the power to make any changes to the web browser and install more harmful malware. The users are advised to look for suspicious elements and add-ons in their browsers.

• Sometimes the focus of security is on the infrastructure that takes up the most space. The systems in the racks, on the desktop and on the budget. But, it’s important to protect every item in your sprawling network – especially the Unix/Linux servers.

• Raspberry Pi users may need to consider applying a recent Raspbian OS update to their devices, particularly if they are currently configured to allow external SSH connections.

• The WannaCry ransomware, which struck thousands of Windows systems across the world, hit the National Health Service (NHS) and its network the hardest. And, after receiving criticism for not having an updated and secure system, the NHS could be considering replacing all Windows systems with Ubuntu, a Linux-based OS considered one of the safest by cyber experts.

• Dr Dean Jenkins, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians who is also the editor-at-large of BMJ Case Reports, writes in his blog that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is seriously impressed by Ubuntu and plans to pass on the idea of using it to the NHS tech department. The NHS has been awaiting a system upgrade and Hunt is reportedly interested in having Ubuntu as the choice of OS in its mainframe systems.

Defence/Aggression

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• This week, the U.S. Justice Department charged a young woman named Reality Leigh Winner for allegedly removing classified material and mailing it to The Intercept, the news outlet that published leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2014.

• The 25-year-old was a contractor working for a company contracted to the NSA. She is accused of printing out classified documents linking the GRU — the Russian military intelligence unit — to cyber attacks on U.S. voting software.

• he arrest this week of NSA contractor Reality Winner on Espionage Act charges of providing national defense information to The Intercept is the clearest evidence to date that President Donald Trump intends to continue former president Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers and transparency. It also calls into question the professionalism of The Intercept’s journalists, as well as the professional integrity of reporters Richard Esposito and Matthew Cole.

• The problem is that Comey’s description of his use of an FBI computer to create memoranda to file suggests that these are arguably government documents. Comey admitted that he thought he raised the issue with his staff and recognized that they might be needed by the Department or Congress. They read like a type of field 302 form, which are core investigatory documents.

• The admission of leaking the memos is problematic given the overall controversy involving leakers undermining the Administration. Indeed, it creates a curious scene of a former director leaking material against the President after the President repeatedly asked him to crack down on leakers.

• In response to the media reports, attributed to a WikiLeaks cable dating back to 2011, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) vehemently denies that its database has ever been shared with any country or entity.

• In a statement, a spokesman of NADRA said NADRA has very strong internal security control mechanisms that prevent any individual from permitting to or causing to share the database.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• First it was a strong handshake. Now it is a policy rebuke. France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, is relentless in his efforts to one-up his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

• Last week, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement. Today, France’s president announced that he will push the country to go beyond its commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions under the agreement, which was signed in 2015.

• “There is momentum and France wants to seize it. President Trump’s decision gives us the opportunity to accelerate these decisions and policies,” a source in Macron’s office told Reuters.

Finance

• Brexit might now not happen, Ukip has said.

• Paul Nuttall, the party’s leader, says that the exit poll has put Britain’s exit from the European Union in “jeopardy”.

• His party is projected to win no seats at all in the election.

• “If the exit poll is true then Theresa May has put Brexit in jeopardy,” he wrote on Twitter. “I said at the start this election was wrong. Hubris.”

• The prospect of a hung Parliament would throw serious doubt over Brexit negotiations, due to begin in earnest in just 10 days.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• It should also be noted that, according to Comey, never once in their nine conversations did Trump express concern or curiosity about the scope or nature of Russia’s involvement in hacking {sic} Democratic organizations during the 2016 elections.

• As America’s standing in the world crumbles, many people will no doubt recall how Republican politicians regularly claimed during the previous administration that the country was no longer respected under the leadership of President Barack Obama. As with most Republican positions, this was flat-out delusional, and polling revealed that the country’s global image steadily improved under Obama after having fallen to historic lows during George W. Bush’s presidency.

• And just like that, the world turned upside down.

• Just a few short weeks ago Theresa May set out to grind her divided opposition into dust with a snap election whose express purpose was to deliver a crushing majority. Few would have bet against her doing so. Even three weeks ago, when her 20-point lead started to narrow, she still gave every impression of cruising towards a comfortable victory. Hours before the exit poll, gloomy Labour MPs were still predicting a bloodbath. Gossip about putative leadership candidates’ campaigns was starting to spread. Resignations were expected.

• Well, forget all that. If tonight’s exit poll forecasting no overall Conservative majority is right – and the crucial cautionary note is that in 2015 its predecessor did underestimate the scale of David Cameron’s victory – then tonight is Jeremy Corbyn’s night, and May could yet become the shortest-lived British prime minister in half a century.

• At best she can expect to be returned as prime minister on a slender majority, facing the full wrath of a party that was confidently expecting nothing less than a demolition of Corbyn, and a free pass to do as it liked. At worst, she will have thrown away her predecessor’s hard-won majority for nothing – one imagines crockery is currently being thrown with some violence chez Cameron – and won’t even have the lifeline of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats to fall back on, since Tim Farron has made clear he isn’t going down that road again.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to call an early election in a bid to strengthen her grip on power appeared early Friday to have spectacularly backfired, with her Conservative Party at risk of losing its parliamentary majority, according to exit poll and partial official results.

• Former FBI Director James Comey testified that he asked a friend, a law professor at Columbia University, to leak details of his dinner with the President to The New York Times, including the claim that the President asked Comey to drop the investigation into former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials.

• Comey kept meticulous memos of all of his interactions with Trump, and he gave that memo to a friend to pass it along to the Times in order to spark a special investigation.

• Pictures from as early as December last year show a Saudi Arabian football team observing a minute’s silence ahead of a game – so why couldn’t they show the same respect on Thursday night?

• Saudi Arabia’s national team have come under fire for refusing to take part in a minute’s silence for victims of Saturday night’s terrorist attack on London Bridge, ahead of kick-off against Australia in a World Cup qualifier.

• Labor Party candidate Jeremy Corbyn said Thursday that results from the United Kingdom’s election are evidence British Prime Minister Theresa May should step down.

• “The prime minister called the election because she wanted a mandate,” he said, according to The Guardian.

• “Well the mandate she’s got is lost Conservative [Party] seats, lost votes, lost support and lost confidence. I would have thought that is enough for her to go actually.”

• Jeremy Corbyn is now favourite to become the next prime minister.

• The Labour leader is now more likely to lead the country than Theresa May, according to Betfair Exchange.

• People backing Mr Corbyn for leader will win £2.48 for every pound they put on. Those backing Ms May will win £2.58 – suggesting that it is slightly less unlikely.

• Jeremy Corbyn has once again defied the expectations of opponents and pollsters with a Labour result that may not necessarily put him in Downing Street, but could deliver a hung parliament rather than the anticipated cull of his MPs.

• The man who began his campaign to be Labour leader as a 100-1 outsider, and was routinely derided as unelectable, was on the verge of increasing the number of Labour seats, a prospect seen by many as unthinkable when the election was called on 18 April.

• As a series of Conservative target seats stayed resolutely in Labour hands, followed by a string of gains for his party, pre-election speculation about what scale of losses would necessitate a Corbyn exit was replaced by exultant talk of a new style of politics.

• If, as the exit poll predicts, the UK election denies Theresa May her majority it is an extraordinary victory for her opponent Jeremy Corbyn.

• The Labour leader started this campaign with a deficit in the polls of around 20 points, and his chances written off by most experts, political commentators and the press. Even many of his own MPs — some of whom tried to unseat him last summer — didn’t think he had it in him to be Prime Minister.

• The result is not yet final and it still looks like May’s Conservatives will still have the most seats, meaning they will be able to start talks to form a coalition. But the fact that Corbyn is expected to have robbed May of her overall majority is a significant endorsement from voters for his brand of left-wing, populist politics. The fact that he has defied all expectations and caused a major electoral shock will draw comparisons with Donald Trump’s surprise victory.

• Bruised Theresa May has thanked Conservative party staff for their hard work at party HQ, after a disastrous election result left her short of a majority in the House of Commons.

• It came as the PM faced calls for her resignation from her own MPs, with former minister Anna Soubry describing her campaign as “disastrous” and “appalling”.

• But Tory sources suggest Mrs May did not address resignation in her speech to party staff, instead concentrating on “getting on with the job.”

• Rumours have been swirling overnight that Theresa May’s campaign in marginal seats could have backfired and that the Conservatives may have lost in many of the constituencies she visited. Now that results in 95% of the seats have been reported, the picture is becoming clearer.

• The Guardian’s analysis of the election campaign trail shows Theresa May made 70 stops throughout the UK and spent more than half her time in Labour constituencies. May’s campaign visited 47 marginal seats, where the majority was less than 15% in the 2015 election.

• The results have been called for 43 of the constituencies May visited and of those only 16 were won by the Conservatives.

• Of those seats nine were retained by the Conservatives and five were lost by Labour to the Conservatives. Labour and Labour Co-operative has retained 20 of the marginal seats where May campaigned, taken two from the Conservatives and one seat from the SNP.

• The snap election has resulted in a hung parliament, leaving Theresa May’s future uncertain, and the social policies of Jeremy Corbyn validated.

• British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative party limped forward to a victory, maintaining their status as the largest party, but failing to secure the absolute majority that many expected May to have in the bag. A hung parliament is looking likely, meaning the the future of the government still hangs in the balance, complicating Conservative plans for Brexit.

• Melania Trump and her son Barron are officially moving to the White House next week. According to Politico, the First Lady will arrive in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 14, and Barron will start school at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, later this fall.

• The British public “saw through the lies of the Murdoch machine” that tried to “frighten” people into voting for the Tories, Labour’s deputy leader has said.

• Addressing his constituents at the count for his West Bromwich East seat, Mr Watson tore into Theresa May, branding her campaign one of the most “negative, defensive, and pessimistic” in British history.

• He was speaking after the election’s exit poll showed the Tories losing their majority, in a shock result.

• My former colleagues on The Guardian hold an enviable record in the annals of political journalism. They have succeeded in getting the result of every major political event in the country wrong.

• Even if you tried consistently to be wrong, fate would decree that occasionally you would get one result right. Their consistency in getting things so wrong, for so long, challenges the theory of random number generation. The infinite monkey theorem holds that a monkey hitting keys of keyboards at random ad infinitum would eventually type the works of Shakespeare. This is not true. The Guardian never gets a political result right.

Censorship/Free Speech

• He added that companies should go as far as filtering their feeds and opening encryption access to law enforcement.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The world’s first mobile passport is now operational in the UAE. Dubai’s Terminal 3 and initially Emirates Airline will allow passengers to use a digital passport on a smartphone instead of showing a physical printed passport.

• If you’re running a hidden service, you should upgrade to this release, or one of the other versions released today.

Civil Rights/Policing

• An Uber executive who reportedly obtained the medical records of a Delhi woman who was sexually assaulted by one of the company’s drivers would have had no legal reason to access the documents during the investigation or trial, according to the police officer who oversaw the case.

• Government contractor Reality Winner made explosive comments about burning down the White House in notebooks the FBI found in her Augusta, Georgia, residence, according to a prosecutor who spoke in U.S. District Court on Thursday.

• Winner pleaded not guilty to charges of leaking classified government information. She was denied bail.

• d-acts dept

• Paul Hansmeier — bankrupt both in moral and financial terms — is facing the blackness awaiting him at the bottom of a hole he dug himself. After engaging in copyright trolling, fraud, Disability Act trolling, more fraud, and generally embodying everything anyone hates about lawyers, he’s now facing a multi-charge federal indictment. Fortunately for him, his representation is far more competent than he is.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The senators pointed to a CBS News investigation that described “more than 4,000 complaints against AT&T and [subsidiary] DirecTV related to deals, promotions and overcharging in the past two years.” But customers have little recourse because they are forced to settle disputes with AT&T in arbitration, according to Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Edward Markey (D-Mass.).

• But our investigation uncovered more than 4,000 complaints against AT&T and DirecTV related to deals, promotions and overcharging in the past two years.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Qualcomm and Microsoft are on the verge of ushering in a new class of always-connected mobile devices that run full-blown Windows 10. The two tech titans are enabling ARM-based Snapdragon 835 processors to run Windows 10 with full x86 emulation, meaning that devices will be capable of not only running Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps from the Windows Store, but legacy win32 apps as well. And there is little question, Intel is likely none too pleased with the situation.

Copyrights

• The vote in the Legal Affairs Committee, which leads on this issue, will follow in September. The outcome clearly shows: Every single vote counts – we must continue to fight.

• A new report from the Digital Citizens Alliance, which bundles Internet piracy, hacking, {sic} malware, and fake news into one convenient bundle, suggests that platforms like Facebook and YouTube should collaborate to weed out “bad actors.” In the same way that casinos share information about cheats, Internet platforms should do the same, the report argues.

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