● 06.14.17

● Links 14/6/2017: New BlackArch Linux ISO and Q4OS 1.8.6, Orion

Posted in News Roundup at 6:59 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Microsoft first revealed its concerns over Chromebooks in an attack on Google’s laptops more than three years ago. While Chromebooks haven’t become best-sellers for consumers just yet, they have started to become popular with students in the US and slowly with some businesses. Microsoft is now revealing it’s worried about this threat with two new videos on its Windows YouTube channel today.

• The first promises that Windows 10 “outshines” Chrome OS for businesses, with features like Windows Ink, Cortana, Windows Hello, and Microsoft Edge. Bizarrely, Microsoft isn’t positioning its new Windows 10 S operating system as its alternative to Chrome OS, instead it’s using the Windows 10 Pro version for comparisons. In the second video Microsoft highlights Sway, Windows Ink, and security through Windows Hello. Some of these are reasonable comparisons between Windows 10 and Chrome OS, but overall these videos just prove Microsoft has a lot to fear from Chrome OS.

• Five years ago, I pitched a crazy idea to an internal innovation team at Dell: what if Dell took its highest end laptop, pre-loaded Ubuntu on it, included all the needed drivers and targeted it at developers? Rather than a no-brainer, this proposal struck the innovation team as counter-intuitive. Dell had already been successfully selling Ubuntu preloaded on systems but these had been lower end offerings. Would customers really be willing to pay for Linux-based high-end systems? And what did developers really need or want?

Server

• Docker Inc has been busy the first two weeks of June with a series of initiatives that aim to help grow the company’s business opportunities.

• On June 5, Docker announced that its’ Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) was validated as an approved to Dockertechnology for use in the United Kingdom (UK) G-Cloud 9 framework. The UK Government’s Crown Commercial Service operates G-Cloud 9 as a way to enable public sector organizations to consume cloud services.

• When considering open source storage software, GlusterFS and Ceph share that designation and little else. Knowing how each option works can help in the selection process.

• ZTE’s open source road began in 2014. Now, more than 200 professional developers from ZTE are working with partners in 13 open source communities. Recent Stackalytics.com data shows ZTE is among the top contributors within the OPNFV, OpenStack, and kubernetes communities. ZTE looks forward to continued work with SDN/NFV ecosystem partners to promote maturity of open source and industrial software development.

• Containerization technology takes the hassle out of setting up software and can boost the reproducibility of data-driven research.

• So Bitnami isn’t the kind of company you usually find sunning it on a deckchair. It’s more of an engine room kind of firm. It takes care of a lot of boring plumbing in creating and deploying open source software packages, underpinning image management for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform Launchpad, and VMware, covering over 140 open source packages including Jenkins, SugarCRM and WordPress.

Kernel Space

• Blockchain enthusiasts claim the technology will do for transactions what the Internet did for communications: essentially upend transactions as we known them.

• “Blockchain is going to become everything,” said Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one, a company that creates blockchain technologies for businesses. “In my opinion it’s as big as the Internet.”

• When I last wrote about NVMe, the feature to improve NVMe performance over emulated environments was just a living discussion and a work in progress patch. However, it has now been officially released in the NVMe Specification Revision 1.3 under the name “Doorbell Buffer Config command”, along with an implementation that is already in the mainline Linux kernel! \o/

• You can already feel the difference in performance if you compile Kernel 4.12-rc1 (or later) and run it over a virtual machine hosted on Google Compute Engine. Google actually updated their hypervisor as soon as the feature was ratified by the NVMe working group, even before it was publicly released.

Graphics Stack

• David Airlie has queued up his own work on introducing the “DRM sync objects” concept into DRM-Next for in turn landing with the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel.

• If you are running Intel Haswell hardware with integrated graphics and have been seeing hangs under Linux, you’re not alone but a fix is in the works.

Benchmarks

• With last week having posted some fresh macOS Sierra vs. Linux OpenGL benchmarks, here are some more interesting tests to compare the Intel OpenGL driver on Windows 10 Pro x64 to the open-source Intel OpenGL driver used by Linux. Linux beating macOS wasn’t too much surprise considering that Apple has been neglecting OpenGL for years, but the Linux vs. Windows OpenGL comparison is a much tougher battle.

Applications

• Following the Inkscape snap, there is a new vector graphics editor readily available to install. With project sharing built-in, a modern UI built with Electron and more on the roadmap (real-time collaboration, versioning…), you should keep an eye on Vectr!

• Out of beta 9 months ago, it features a growing set of tools: shape tools, raster import, filters, and pretty much everything you need to get started on vector graphics with an easy to use interface.

• How well does Linux handle Wireless printing? This is a questions that billions ask themselves every morning before their first shot of coffee, and hopefully, today, I will be able to answer this question. A few weeks down the trouser of time, I bought myself a new printer, and it comes with Wireless connectivity.

• If you’ve read my reviews and printing tutorials, so far, they have mostly revolved around Samba printing, often with a less than perfect record. Now though, I have a new device, so it will be interesting to see how Linux distros cope with this thing. Shall we?

• The release candidate of version 3.7 of Turris OS – the OpenWRT-based operating system of Turris Omnia routers – is now available. Among many other changes, this updates syslog-ng from version 3.0 to 3.9, so it adds about seven years’ worth of new syslog-ng features, including new parsers, filters, formatting options, destinations, and performance enhancements.

• In the near future various upstream projects related to the Ubuntu desktop experience as we have known it so far may become only sporadically maintained or even fully unmaintained. Ubuntu will switch to the Gnome desktop environment with 18.04 LTS as its default desktop, maybe even earlier. The Application Indicators [1] brought into being by Canonical Ltd. will not be needed in Gnome (AFAIK) any more. We can expect the Application Indicator related projects become unmaintained upstream. (In fact I have recently been offered continuation of upstream maintenance of libdbusmenu).

• You might not be tired of seeing still wallpapers on your desktop just yet but maybe it’s time to move on to backgrounds with cooler features anyway – parallax wallpapers.

Proprietary

• ‘Backup and Sync’ is the name of Google’s all-new Google Drive desktop client. The rejigged and refreshed app is being released later this month.

• Recently, Fengtao Software, the industry leader in the field of DVD, Blu-ray and video backup solutions, released the 1st official version of its DVDFab software package for the Linux platform, making the company the only one on the market offering complete set of multimedia backup solution for the Linux operating system. In the meantime, the software company this time partners with QNAP, a reputable NAS device manufacturer, to offer a comprehensive disc-based backup solution.

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

Games

• The open-source Godot 2D/3D Game Engine continues working towards its big “Godot 3.0″ release although it remains months behind schedule.

• It’s been a while since the last progress report, and there have been lots of changes in the development branch that you might not have heard of yet. Usually we let our lead developer Juan (reduz) do progress reports on his impressive work on rendering features, but since he was in holidays for more than a month, we’ll showcase the work of some key contributors this time.

• Feral Interactive, the UK-based video game publisher, announced that they’re working on porting the upcoming XCOM 2: War of the Chosen expansion to the very popular, award-winning XCOM 2 game to Linux, SteamOS, and macOS platforms.

• XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is the new DLC (downloadable content) for XCOM 2 that was unveiled by Firaxis Games at PC Gaming Show 2017. The expansion adds new content to the original game, which you’ll have to own to play this DLC, including new factions, three powerful new soldier classes, as well as new alien and ADVENT threats.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents: Space Odyssey was announced late last year and the initial website that was setup listed Linux support. The Kickstarter has now launched and it doesn’t mention Linux now, neither did their press email to me.

• The email to me and the Kickstarter now only state Windows & Mac, which is a massive shame. I was incredibly excited by the idea of it and I’m a fan of Neil myself. I’ve watched many of his talks and they always fill me with wonder.

• Tacoma [GOG, Steam] is a sci-fi narrative adventure set aboard a high-tech space station and boy does it look good. It’s now due for release on August 2nd and looks like Linux will be day-1. It’s already listed on both stores as having Linux support, which is a good indicator.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Cedric Bail, a long-time contributor to the Enlightenment project who works on EFL integration with Tizen at Samsung Open Source Group, discussed some of the lessons learned in optimizing wearable apps for low battery, memory, and CPU usage.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The KDE Frameworks have been available in FreeBSD for a while now, but we haven’t seen much movement on the desktop environment or the applications front. KDE4 is still the latest you can get from ports. The plasma5/ branch in the KDE FreeBSD ports repository contains all the applications, and KDE Plasma 5 Desktop, and is very up-to-date with KDE releases — but it’s not in official ports, and that makes it a little more difficult than it needs to be to install the latest KDE Software on FreeBSD.

• The KDE-FreeBSD team is starting to migrate individual applications to recently-released KF5 versions. That sometimes means letting go of some features: Plasma 5 integration isn’t going to happen until we have Plasma 5 in the official ports tree. But KDevelop 5.1 is a valuable upgrade over 4.7, and the IDE suffers very little (except if you wanted the embedded konsole part).

• The KDE Project is pleased to announce the general availability of the second point release to the latest KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment for select GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Plasma Vault lets you create an encrypted folder in which you can securely stash any files you wish to keep private. This might be your WIP xmas shopping list, candid photos of Bigfoot in fancy swimwear, or work documents of a sensitive nature.

• Most modern Linux distributions let you set up an encrypted home folder during installation. This helps ensures that all the documents, files and whatnot you keep in your Home folder are secure-ish by default.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In order to be able to restore a tab in Nautilus, we have to keep a list with the minimum of information to recover the tab. This means that we’ll store the history, the view before search, in case the closed tab is a search, so that we know what was the view type before searching and last but not least, the location which was closed. Storing the location also means that the window will now keep a reference of the closed locations.

• Reading the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines gives a good idea on how to arrange elements and reduce complexity. The HIGs also emphasize on having a clear goal which helps in deciding which elements need to be arranged at all. But I did not grasp the wideness of being purpose-driven for this goal of the application which might then mean to abstract from technical details on the way. So now I try to explain this observation here.

Distributions

New Releases

• UBOS Beta 11 is here, and we are proud to add the Marvell EspressoBIN to the list of supported devices.

• Launched on Kickstarter earlier this year, the EspressoBIN is an interesting board: it doesn’t have any graphics (which is fine with us because most UBOS devices are used as headless servers) but instead it has three Ethernet ports and a SATA connector. The currently available 1GB version costs only $49 on Amazon. So it’s perfect for running UBOS.

• We have also verified that the Raspberry Pi Zero W (the $10 version that has WiFi) also works out of the box with UBOS.

• We announce the release of a new Q4OS Orion version. Q4OS GTK+3 themes has been significantly improved in this version, supporting Google Chrome 59, which has definitively moved to GTK+3 libraries. We have made several relevant modifications in Q4OS Orion to be ready for installation under other Debian based operating systems, so anyone is now enabled to gain Q4OS Orion based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus as well as Devuan Jessie, see Q4OS based on Ubuntu and Q4OS setup on Devuan. More under the hood improvements and Q4OS specific fixes are delivered as well. All the updates are immediately available for existing Q4OS users from the regular Q4OS repositories.

• As claimed, the forthcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 “Stretch” operating system has entered the final phase of development and should be released in a few days or weeks, so we are currently finishing in making to release new Q4OS Scorpion branch based on Debian Stretch. The new Q4OS Scorpion edition should be available in about a month or two after the official release of Debian Stretch.

Arch Family

• The developers of the BlackArch Linux operating system for ethical hacking and penetration testing purposes have released today a new ISO snapshot that includes many updated components, new ones, and the latest GNU/Linux technologies.

• Today we released new BlackArch Linux ISOs. For details see the ChangeLog below.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• KDE Applications 17.04.2 is now available to openSUSE Tumbleweed users after arriving in the most recent snapshot of the five snapshots delivered this week.

• Snapshot 20170612 is the largest snapshot of the week and centers mostly on fixing bugs and adding patches. GNOME’s Bijiben upgraded to version 3.24.0 and fixed a memory leak as well as cleaned-up some code. The library used mainly by GTK and GNOME Application, glibmm2_4 moved to version 2.50.1 and also fixed a memory leak. Other libraries updated in the snapshot were the portable renderer for Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha libass 0.13.7, emulation/playback library for video games and music libgme 0.6.1, and the machine learning software library opencv 3.2.0. The update to Linux Kernel 4.11.4 deleted several patches, including one for IPv6 and X11 package xlockmore 5.54, which fixed the xmb fonts and xjack mode. Yast2-trans removed obsolete Portable Object Template files and enhanced translations through the use of Weblate.

Red Hat Family

• Prince Sultan University has announced it has collaborated with Red Hat Academy, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to create the King Salman Education for Employment Program Red Hat Academy.

• Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan University has tied up with open source product provider Red Hat to create the King Salman Education for Employment Program Red Hat Academy. Red Hat Academy is an open source, web-deployed and web-managed education programme designed to provide turnkey curriculum material to academic institutions to start and sustain an open source and Linux curriculum programme.

Finance

Fedora

• Most Fedora users are probably aware that Fedora Workstation ships with a basic calculator application. This small app has pretty much always been a part of the Fedora desktop. However, did you know that the Calculator app in Fedora Workstation also has a built-in search provider allowing you to perform quick calculations directly in the overview? Great for quick, on-off calculations without having to launch a separate app.

Debian Family

• At Collabora one of the many things we do is build Debian derivatives/overlays for customers on a variety of architectures including 32 bit and 64 bit ARM systems. And just as Debian does, our OBS system builds on native systems rather than emulators.

• Luckily with the advent of ARM server systems some years ago building natively for those systems has been a lot less painful than it used to be. For 32 bit ARM we’ve been relying on Calxeda blade servers, however Calxeda unfortunately tanked ages ago and the hardware is starting to show its age (though luckily Debian Stretch does support it properly, so at least the software is still fresh).

• Apart from being somewhat slow, one of the downsides of the original Raspberry Pi SoC was that it had an old ARM11 core which implements the ARMv6 architecture. This was particularly unfortunate as most common distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) standardized on the ARMv7-A architecture as a minimum for their ARM hardfloat ports. Which is one of the reasons for Raspbian and the various other RPI specific distributions.

Derivatives

• We reported last week that the developers of the Parrot Security OS ethical hacking and penetration testing GNU/Linux distribution are evaluating a possible migration of their operating system from Debian GNU/Linux to Devuan GNU/Linux.

• We are especially proud to present you Tails 3.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch). It brings a completely new startup and shutdown experience, a lot of polishing to the desktop, security improvements in depth, and major upgrades to a lot of the included software.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical announced on Twitter that they have new Linux 4.11-based kernel packages ready for public testing in the repositories of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• The TurtleBot 2, which Open Robotics calls the “world’s most popular open source robot for education and research,” has long been the de facto development platform for the open source Robot Operating System (ROS). Many TurtleBot developers run ROS from Ubuntu, but Windows is also available on the netbook “brain” nestled inside the two-wheeled bot. The newly shipping TurtleBot 3 replaces the Intel Core based netbook with a choice of two embedded Linux computers running Ubuntu with ROS: the TurtleBot 3 Burger runs Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi 3 while the larger TurtleBot 3 Waffle instead integrates a more powerful, Atom-based Intel Joule computer-on-module.

• Following on their promise to continue the development of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system for Ubuntu Phone and Tablet devices, the UBports team is today proud to announce the first stable OTA update.

• The UBports camp is now shipping their first stable over-the-air (OTA-1) update to those wishing to use this fork of Ubuntu Phone / Unity 8.

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is informing Softpedia today about the availability of a custom compiled Linux 4.11.3 kernel for Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux 64-bit systems.

• Arne Exton is known for always rebasing his latest GNU/Linux distributions on some of the recently released Linux kernels, and to prepare for the launch of the new Ubuntu-based Exton|OS build, the developer unleashed a custom compiled Linux 4.11.3 kernel that can be installed in virtually any Ubuntu or Debian machine.

• Canonical has announced today that Amazon’s new Greengrass IoT (Internet of Things) platform is available for installation on Snappy-supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems as a Snap package.

• Greengrass was launched by Amazon last week as the latest IoT development platform designed from the ground up to allow devs to create intelligent edge software. Amazon is currently in talks with several hardware distributors and is hoping to deliver Greengrass to as many devices as possible.

• According to MAAS developer Blake Rouse, it would appear that it’s a lot easier now to deliver a production-ready version of Canonical’s MAAS (Metal as a Service) cloud-style provisioning construct on Ubuntu-based operating systems.

• Canonical designed MAAS to help promote and automate the deployment and dynamic provisioning of hyperscale computing environments like cloud services or big data workloads. While MASS is an open-source and free-to-use product, Canonical also offers commercial support to its enterprise customers.

Devices/Embedded

• Avnet’s $89 MiniZed SBC is its lowest cost Zynq-based board yet. It offers 8GB eMMC, WiFi, BT, USB host, 2x micro-USB, and an Arduino interface.

• The MiniZed SBC breaks new ground in pricing among Avnet’s Xilinx Zynq-7000 based computer-on-modules and SBCs, selling for $89 compared to $199 for the MicroZed SBC. The MiniZed supports “industrial IoT applications such as motor control and embedded vision,” says Avnet. Like Avnet’s other Zed boards, it’s not a fully open source hardware design, but it offers a Linux SDK, and is supported with extensive documentation and the long-running Zedboard.org community site. (See farther below for more on other Zed boards, including a fairly recent, Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC based UltraZed module and starter kit.)

• Eero’s second-gen mesh networking router adds Tri-Band WiFi, a second GbE port, and an Eero Beacon model that doubles as a nightlight.

• The Eero made quite a splash when it launched in 2015 as one of the first mesh networking WiFi routers aimed at the home. Since then, it has been joined by mesh routers like the Linksys Velop, the Netgear Orbi, and Google WiFi. Now San Francisco-based Eero has delivered a second generation Eero model that adds Tri-Band capability and a second Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as a stripped-down companion called the Eero Beacon. The company also launched an Eero Plus security service that sells for $99 a year.

Phones

Tizen

• Samsung’s presence in Vietnam dates back to as far as 2012 when the company established its first research and development centre in Hanoi, Vietnam. The company’s plant in the country was to account for 18 percent of Vietnam’s total exports in 2013. The ripple effect from the investment meant many locals were employed by Samsung in the factory. Vietnamese relish working for foreign companies especially one with a high reputation as Samsung.

• South Korean manufacturing giants, Samsung, has unveiled the new models of its Tizen-powered QLED signage. These models were released at InfoComm 2017 in Orlando and sales of these products will commence in the US soon. Samsung put in a lot of effort in the development of this product which will run on Tizen 3.0 and it made sure that it is compatible with HDR10 Plus, Knox security as well as QLED technology. These new models are a complete update of the previous models because they come with upgraded hardware chip which ensures that they have a faster loading time. The upgraded models also support HTML5 and Linux-based open-source platforms for developers.

• The Tizen-powered Gear S3 Frontier/Classic and the Gear S2 (Sport)/Classic are compatible with a good deal of Android smartphones, but the biggest concern for some interested Gear smartwatch buyers is whether or not Android apps will be available on their Tizen-powered smartwatch.

Android

• People who study the history of languages probably will look back at our current time and scratch their heads. We keep inventing verbs! First, Google became the verb we use for searching. Then, “Facebooking” someone became a viable way to contact them. Heck, I forgot about “texting” someone. It seems we just keep taking perfectly good nouns and making them verbs. We keep verbing all our nouns! But I digress.

Free Software/Open Source

• If you’re like most people who are knowledgeable about free and open source software (FOSS), you’re probably also interested in encouraging more people to use it. The good news is there are many ways you can help people who are not as technically minded as you learn about and use FOSS.

• For example, you can recommend a piece of software that may be useful to them, help them install the software, and troubleshoot when they have an issue. By helping them, you’re spreading the word about FOSS (which is usually not advertised as much as most proprietary software), probably improving their experience with the software, and doing something altruistic, which can make you feel good—if everything goes well, that is.

• Wozniak said he often does his own DIY projects using Raspberry Pis and similar boards and he acknowledged that were he were coming up today he would no doubt be considered a maker. “I’m pretty sure that I would be with my little Arduino, Raspberry Pis, and $9 C.H.I.P computers, programming motors and making strange things under my control,” he said. “And hopefully I’d have enough brilliance in my software that the devices would start doing semi-intelligent things. I’d be out there just playing around. I never had an intention to start a company with anything

• According to a recent Request for Information from the United States Coast Guard (USCG), the maritime branch of the U.S. Armed Forces is conducting market research of sources capable of providing a computerized, integrated Electronic Health Record solution for replacement of the USCG manual paper health records at 114 ashore sites (clinics and sick bays) and 62 afloat sick bays. The requested scope of the EHR by USCG is broad and includes primary care, urgent care, counseling, occupational health, and dental care.

• I had an epiphany today about a major reason open source is disrupting enterprise software. This is perhaps one of those things that you have heard so much, you’ve gone numb to it. All the big giants are still alive and kicking, however; so is this really happening? The answer is yes, however the mechanics are not what you think. It is not simply just a cost play. The acquisition – one of the main weapons that big software vendors had to fight disruptors – is losing effectiveness. And that changes everything. Allow me to explain:

• The project is a collaborative venture between the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), Università di Pisa, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR), the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Ocado Technology, and Disney Research Zurich.

• [...]

• The company have also recently announced the release of Kubermesh, an open source package designed to simplify data center architectures for use in smart factories. The system uses container-based technology to implement private cloud architecture on-site, with desktop computers configured to replicate the kind of computational and storage capabilities typically offered by high-end servers in data centers.

• Open Source projects exhibit natural increasing returns to scale. That’s because most developers are interested in using and participating in the largest projects, and the projects with the most developers are more likely to quickly fix bugs, add features and work reliably across the largest number of platforms. So, tracking the projects with the highest developer velocity can help illuminate promising areas in which to get involved, and what are likely to be the successful platforms over the next several years. (If the embedded version below isn’t clear enough, you can view the chart directly on Google Sheets.)

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) skillsets are now becoming a crucial way for technology-focused workers to differentiate themselves from the pack. Moreover, from Elon Musk’s OpenAI organization to Google’s sweeping new open AI initiatives announced at the recent Google I/O conference, investment in AI is driving many new opportunities. For technologists who straddle the arenas of open source and AI, opportunities are looking particularly promising.

• Scientists from Geoscience Australia have released new software that will improve the ability to process big remotely-sensed satellite datasets. The new “PyRate” software is open source Python software for collating and analysing Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) displacement time series data.

Events

• The Kernel Summit is undergoing some changes this year; the core developers’ gathering from previous events will be replaced by a half-day “maintainers summit” consisting of about 30 people. The process of selecting those people, and of selecting topics for the open technical session, is underway now; interested developers are encouraged to submit their topic ideas.

• As you might be aware, DebConf 17 is coming soon and it’s gonna be the biggest DebConf in Montréal ever.

• Of course, what makes DebConf great is the people who come together to work on Debian, share their achievements, and help draft our cunning plans to take over the world. Also cheese. Lots and lots of cheese.

• Last weekend we had the PyLadies Pune June meet up. The day started with Shilpee Chamoli taking a data science 101 with Python. As few people were having trouble in installing Jupyter and the other dependencies, I suggested to use Azure notebooks, and a few of us did that. This was the first time I was attending a pandas workshop, even though I packaged it a few years back for Fedora. The simple problem related to Titanic data was fun to work on.

• Patrick Ohly, a software engineer at Intel, discusses integrity protection schemes and system update mechanisms at the recent Embedded Linux Conference.

• At the recent Embedded Linux Conference, Walt Miner provided an AGL update and summarized AGL’s Yocto Project based Unified Code Base (UCB) for automotive infotainment.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, Mozilla unveils several initiatives including an event focused on Internet Health with special guests DeRay McKesson, Lauren Duca and more, a brand new podcast, new tech to help create a voice database, as well as some local SF pop-ups.

• Mozilla is doing this to draw the public’s attention to mounting concern over the consolidation of power online, including the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed actions to kill net neutrality.

• Firefox has finally been outfitted with simultaneous multiple content processes, a UI process, and a GPU acceleration process— eight years after the project, codenamed Electrolysis (E10S), began. Mozilla is calling Firefox 54 “the best Firefox ever,” and they’re probably not wrong (though Firefox 3.5 was pretty good, in my opinion).

• Ubuntu users can now upgrade the latest Firefox 54 release through Software Updater, but Firefox’s new multiprocess handling is disabled by default.

• This is it: this is the Firefox release you’ve been waiting for, the release that finally puts a bit of pep in the open-source browsers’ step.

• Mozilla promoted today the Firefox 54.0 web browser to the stable channel for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

• While not a feature-rich release, Firefox 54 should be an exciting one because it ships with the e10s-multi implementation by default, adding support for multiple content processes to the beloved web browser by millions of computers users worldwide. This makes Firefox 54 the first release of the web browser to use multiple operating system processes for better resource management.

CMS

• In May, we found ourselves well and truly in the thick of conference season, as we discussed no less than five separate open source focused events which have either come to pass, or are on the horizon.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

BSD

• All in all, I’m happy with the system, but I’m an OpenBSD fan boy. It’s hard to get mad at a system that generally “just works.”

Public Services/Government

• April, France’s free software advocacy organisation, is once again signing up candidates in the elections for France’s next National Assembly, to its Free Software Pact. The second and final round of the elections will take place this Sunday. However, free software-champion MP Isabelle Attard has already lost her seat; “a big loss for digital freedom”, the group says.

• The source code for software solutions developed for and owned by public administrations in Poland does not have to be made public under European rules on public sector information, a regional court in Warsaw (Poland) has ruled. The case was brought before the court last November by the ePanstwo Foundation, an NGO promoting open government, requesting the publication of the source code of the EZD document management system, which is owned by the public administration of the Podlachia region.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Metafluidics is a brand new open repository for fluidic systems, built by MIT Lincoln Laboratory (Lexington, MA) in partnership with open source technology & design consulting company Bocoup (New York, NY) and maintained by the Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.

Programming/Development

• Recently I installed the GCompris educational software suite on a friend’s Linux laptop. While researching information about the application, I found out about Rudra Nil Basu, a young programmer from India, who has blogged about his contributions to GCompris. Based on his work, he was selected to be a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participant and will receive a stipend to continue working to improve GCompris.

• I recently had the opportunity to ask Rudra some questions about how he’s translating his passion for game development into making learning fun for young children and supporting open source software and source code sharing. Some questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

• We’re about a month away from the start of the 5.0.0 release process, so it’s time for the traditional schedule and call for testers email.

• Hans Wennborg has published his proposed schedule for the LLVM / Clang 5.0 release that would put the stable debut at the end of August.

• We took a short break as several conferences and other events interfered during the month of May, keeping us busy and away from this series. But we are back now with a short and useful hack I came up with this weekend.

Leftovers

• Docs.com, which originally began as a collaboration between Microsoft and Facebook to provide a service similar to Google Docs, is being closed in favour of SlideShare, a service that Microsoft acquired along with its purchase of LinkedIn.

• This month marks 10 years since Apple launched the first iPhone, a device that would fundamentally transform how we interact with technology, culture, and each other.

• A Number 10 spokesman has said that a cross-Government meeting at the Civil Contingencies Secretariat will take place at 4pm today to co-rodinate a response to the huge fire in west London.

• A Grenfell Tower resident who wrote a blog post warning that it would take a “catastrophic fire” for the building’s landlord to take notice of safety concerns has told BuzzFeed News how he almost died when the tower block was engulfed in flames in the early hours of Wednesday.

• Edward Daffarn, 55, is one of the campaigners from Grenfell Action Group, which published a series of blog posts warning of fire safety concerns with Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), the private business that has the contract with the local authority to run its social housing.

• I was woken up this morning at 4am by the buzz of my phone: a friend was standing outside the Grenfell Tower block in Kensington, watching it burn, and felt like she needed to speak to someone. She lived down the road – was born and bred in the borough, back when it was slightly less affluent than it is now – and had been alerted to the fire by an impossibly large plume of yellow smoke outside her window as she got ready for bed around 1am. When I spoke to her, she’d been wandering the streets for three hours, talking to other residents who had come out of their homes to find out what the commotion was and stayed because they knew someone who lived in the tower or simply felt they couldn’t go back to bed knowing what was going on a few metres away. She sent me photos of herself standing at the police cordon, the tower an unrecognisable pillar of flames behind it. The pavements were covered in black ash for a mile. Grown men were crying.

• Theresa May’s new chief of staff was one of a series of housing ministers who “sat on” a report warning high-rise blocks like Grenfell Tower were vulnerable to fire for four years.

• A former Chief Fire Officer and secretary of a parliamentary group on fire safety today revealed successive ministers had had damning evidence on their desks since 2013 and nothing had happened.

• And the Labour MP who chairs the group said ministers had “sat on” the recommendations for almost four years.

• Who could not be horrified by the images of the tower block in west London engulfed by a huge fire in the early hours of Wednesday morning, with trapped residents waving frantically for help from the upper floors?

• The tragic blaze at the 24-storey Grenfell Tower is not the first time one of the capital’s tower blocks has hit the headlines in the worst possible way. Almost 50 years ago Ronan Point in Newham, east London, partly collapsed after a gas explosion, killing four people. The incident marked the end of an era for building tower blocks, highlighting the shoddy methods of the mass construction system that was so common at the time, and destroying confidence in high-rise living.

Science

• The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters.

• Of particular concern is China’s interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries.

• The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds.

• This paper has a wonderful combination of properties: the results are easy to understand, somewhat surprising, and then leave you pondering over what it all might mean for a long while afterwards!

• The Alto, which was released in 1973 but was never a commercial success, was an incredibly influential machine. Ahead of its time, it boasted resizeable windows as part of its graphical user interface, along with a mouse, Ethernet, and numerous other technologies that didn’t become standard until years later.

Health/Nutrition

• A NerdWallet study of medical crowdfunding said GoFundMe had indicated that $930 million of the $2 billion raised in the period the study analyzed was from medical campaigns.

• It will take massive citizen mobilization to stop big parts of this abomination from coming into law.

Security

• The discovery of the malware, dubbed “Industroyer” and “Crash Override”, highlights the vulnerability of critical infrastructure, just months after the WannaCry ransomware took out NHS computers across the UK.

• Many development teams view security as an impediment to agility and innovation, but efforts over the past few years have tried to integrate security controls and testing directly into DevOps workflows without sacrificing development speed and deployment flexibility.

• Known as DevSecOps, this marriage between security and agile development aims to implement core security tasks like event monitoring, patch management, privilege control and vulnerability assessment directly into DevOps processes. This includes dynamic and static vulnerability testing at all levels of the development cycle, so that major flaws can be discovered early on, before the code makes it into production.

• The Commerce Department is asking for public input on what the government should do to combat cyberattacks launched by armies of infected computers.

• There are USB sticks that will destroy your computer, USB sticks loaded with spyware, and even official enterprise USB sticks infected with malware. Last, but never least, when it comes to stealing data from a computer, you can’t beat a USB stick. There are devices like the USG USB stick firewall, which can protect you, or if you’re a Linux user, you can always stop attackers armed with USB sticks with USBGuard.

Defence/Aggression

• Over the past decade, the United States has claimed broad authority to carry out drone strikes across the world, even in places far from the battlefield. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. acknowledged killing between 2,867 and 3,138 people in strikes that took place in countries like Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

• Although in the waning days of his presidency, Obama took some steps to improve transparency about drone strikes, including providing the total estimated death toll, a new report by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies says that the U.S. is still lagging in providing a full accounting of its drone program. Among other failures, the report, titled “Out of the Shadows: Recommendations to Advance Transparency in the Use of Lethal Force,” says that the U.S. has only acknowledged approximately 20 precent of its reported drone strikes — failing to claim responsibility or provide details in the vast majority of cases.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• According to the Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly, a bit more than 10 percent of all electricity generated in the US in March came from wind and solar power (including both distributed residential solar panels and utility-scale solar installations). That’s a record number for the country, and it reflects continuing effort to install more renewable capacity across the nation.

Finance

• The statistics on inequality – those used, for instance, in Thomas Piketty’s bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century – only include the income and wealth the taxman sees. So how high is inequality when also accounting for what he doesn’t see? Recent leaks from tax havens suggest the gap between the rich and the rest is even wider than we think.

• Tax records are invaluable for the study of economic inequality. They contain detailed information about the income (and, in some countries, wealth) of taxpayers. Much of this information comes directly from employers and banks, and is therefore reliable. And because tax records exist as far back as the early 20th century, they can be used to shed light on the long-term evolution of inequality.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Are you proud to be British – or English, or East Anglian, or a member of whichever other tribe you may feel you belong to? Daft, really, isn’t it?

• It’s no achievement, after all, to be born in any particular place or time. I didn’t choose to be born in one of the world’s wealthiest and most developed countries. Rather than, say, Syria, or Ethiopia. Or in a famine or plague year. Or Jewish in 1930s Poland. Or on the brink of some future nuclear apocalypse – which, in fact, we may be.

• It was none of my doing. It was just luck. Random chance. Nothing I could do about it.

• Bloomberg reports that incursions into voter databases and software systems were almost double the size that was previously revealed.

• Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

• It was also just one data point, and so it had to be interpreted with caution. But the pattern has been repeated so far in every major European election since Trump’s victory.

• One of the striking ironies of Theresa May’s humiliation at the polls last week was that a Tory campaign that framed the election as a battle over Brexit, in which the Tories presented themselves as guardians of the people’s democratic will, as the one party that understood Brexit voters and would meet their hopes and ambitions, proved so thoroughly aloof and distant from the demos. Over the weekend, as Tory heads have rolled, knives have been sharpened and chatter about changes in leadership have clogged up the column inches, this profound disjoint has gone largely unexamined.

• Jeremy Corbyn tried to pass through a law that would required private landlords to make their homes safe and “fit for human habitation” last year – but it was rejected by the Conservatives.

• Labour proposed an amendment to the Government’s new Housing and Planning Bill – a raft of new laws aimed at reforming housing law – in January last year, but it was rejected by 312 votes to 219.

• According to Parliament’s register of interests, 72 of the MPs who voted against the amendment were themselves landlords who derive an income from a property.

• Conservative MPs have voted against proposed new rules requiring private sector landlords to ensure their properties are fit for human habitation.

• A Labour amendment to the government’s housing and planning bill, designed to ensure that all rented accommodation was safe for people to live in, was defeated by 312 votes to 219 on Tuesday, a majority of 93.

• “The majority of landlords let property which is and remains in a decent standard. Many landlords go out of their way to ensure that even the slightest safety hazard is sorted quickly and efficiently,” said the shadow housing minister, Teresa Pearce, who proposed the amendment.

• A company that owns buildings with Donald Trump and the family of Jared Kushner is a finalist for a $1.7 billion contract to build the FBI’s new headquarters.

• Vornado Realty Trust is one of three finalists to build a replacement for the bureau’s current headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., the massive J. Edgar Hoover Building, according to Garth Beall, manager of Renard Development. Renard is hoping the federal agency running the bidding process, the General Services Administration, will choose a Renard site in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the new headquarters.

• Owen Smith, who challenged Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the Labour party , is reportedly in line for a job in a revamped shadow cabinet.

• The former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary is thought to be in line for Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary when Mr Corbyn reshuffles his top team, the New Statesman reported this morning.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Senate Republicans on Tuesday quickly backed away from a proposal to restrict media access in the Capitol after an angry backlash from reporters and an emergency meeting between the Senate Rules Committee and the media gallery directors.

• Donald Trump has caught 500,000 veterans in one of his recent blocking sprees.

• What were we just saying about how it’s important to defend Section 230 of the CDA even when it’s hard? Well, here’s a hard case in New York City where the situation is very unfortunate. It appears that a woman discovered that an old sex tape of hers had surfaced online from 10 years earlier when she was 17. Someone had posted it to Tumblr, where over 1,000 people apparently viewed it — and somewhere around 500 “reblogged” it or commented on it in some manner. This is, undoubtedly, traumatic for the woman. She appears to believe that “an angry ex” posted it to Tumblr originally, which would make this a classic “revenge porn” situation.

• The EU Court of Justice (CJEU) has been issuing some seriously dangerous copyright rulings recently. Last fall, for example, there was the ruling saying that mere links to infringing content could be direct infringement, rather than indirect (or not infringing at all). Even worse, that ruling argued that posting hyperlinks on a site that is “for profit” requires an assumption that the platform is sophisticated enough to make sure the links are not to infringing content. As we warned that would lead to problematic results, such as a followup ruling in Sweden that merely embedding a YouTube video can be seen as infringing.

• For some observers, struggling UK Prime Minister Theresa May and triumphant French President Emmanuel Macron may seem at somewhat opposite ends of the current political climate. But… apparently they agree on one really, really bad idea: that it’s time to massively censor the internet and to blame tech companies if they don’t censor enough. We’ve been explaining for many years why this is a bad idea, but apparently we need to do so again.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper went from having a comfortable, shadowy job in a comfortable, shadowy office to being the face of the American surveillance state after the Snowden leaks. Instead of only being periodically hassled by a couple of Intelligence Committee members (mainly Ron Wyden), Clapper was called to account for the NSA’s apparent surveillance sins. And he handled it badly.

• Tomorrow, the government is scheduled to release a group of significant opinions of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The documents are being released as a result of a FOIA lawsuit filed by EFF last year, seeking disclosure of all of the FISC’s still-secret, yet significant, opinions.

• The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would radically reshape its right of publicity law. Assembly Bill A08155 [PDF] would dramatically expand New York’s right of publicity, making it a property right that can be passed on to your heirs – even if you aren’t a New York resident. The bill was introduced less than two weeks ago and is being rushed through without any hearings. EFF is urging legislators to slow down before passing an unnecessary law that would threaten the freedom of expression of individuals, activists, artists, and journalists around the United States.

• But Facebook groups seem designed more for open sharing and collaboration than for privacy, and securing a Facebook group can be confusing, especially when it comes to choosing your group type and diving into privacy settings.

• Earlier this afternoon the Home Office published a French-British Action Plan on its website. You can read it here

• The “action plan” agreed by Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron outlines 4 steps for an “initiative to ensure the internet cannot be used as a safe space for terrorists and criminals”.

• Google is turning Drive into a much more robust backup tool. Soon, instead of files having to live inside of the Drive folder, Google will be able to monitor and backup files inside of any folder you point it to. That can include your desktop, your entire documents folder, or other more specific locations.

• The backup feature will come out later this month, on June 28th, in the form of a new app called Backup and Sync. It sounds like the Backup and Sync app will replace both the standard Google Drive app and the Google Photos Backup app, at least in some cases. Google is recommending that regular consumers download the new app once it’s out, but it says that business users should stick with the existing Drive app for now.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Bonderman was recorded making the remark in reply to to fellow board member Arianna Huffington, who was speaking about the need for more female representation on Uber’s board. When “there’s one woman on the board, it’s much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board,” Huffington said, to which Bonderman shot back “what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.”

• So, the lawyers say, while their client, Matthew Keys, did access internal material at the Tribune Media Company without permission, he should not be convicted of two counts of “intentionally [causing] damage” as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act outlines.

• “Essentially, what’s happened here is the government charged unauthorized damage, and it spent most of its time putting on an unauthorized access case,” Tor Ekeland, one of Keys’ lawyers, said during the hearing before a panel of three judges.

• Media access to West Papua, where more than half a million of its indigenous people have reportedly been killed over five decades, remains restricted.

• News coverage of the alleged genocide is extremely difficult because of the restrictions on local and foreign media.

• The UK stabbed activists campaigning for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia in the back by allegedly voting for the country to join the UN Commission for Women’s Rights, a woman who was arrested for “driving while female” has said.

• The Mysuru police arrested a printing press owner for tearing up the Quran and using its pages to print bank deposit challans. The man identified as Naveen Kumar supplied the printed forms to a nationalised bank’s branch in Mysuru’s K R Mohalla.

• A few days ago, on Indian TV chat show The Urban Debate on Mirror Now, anchor Faye D’Souza was hosting an episode on this subject when a cleric tried to shame her for her suggestion that men and women should have the same freedoms.

• The problem is about how to reverse decades-long policies of promoting unbridled multiculturalism that allowed the ideologies of Islamism and Salafism to permeate an inchoate European Muslim society, thereby militating against the creation of an European Islam free from the ideological baggage exported by conservative and Islamist individuals, groups and governments.

• Recently, the Supreme Court passed on a case that could have seen it address the highly-problematic civil asset forfeiture issue head on. In that case, cops seized $201,000 (and a bill of sale for a home) from two people during a traffic stop. Despite having no evidence of criminal activity, the cops kept the $201,000 and claimed it was the result of narcotics trafficking. And, despite this claim, law enforcement never arrested the couple it took the money from and charges were never brought.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• So we’ve long noted how giant ISPs like Comcast have repeatedly tried to claim that the FCC’s fairly modest 2015 net neutrality rules utterly devastated broadband industry investment. The problem for Comcast is that any time a journalist takes the time to review publicly-available SEC filings and earnings reports, that claim is proven indisputably false. Yet, no matter how many times this complete and total fabrication is pointed out by the media, broadband industry lobbyists simply continue to repeat the claim, hoping lazy reporters regurgitate it (which still somehow happens more often than not).

• Over several years, the FCC, under Democratic leadership, moved to cap the cost of calls for inmates. Activists argued that prisoners were effectively being extorted by private companies charging exorbitant rates — a move that benefited private prisons and the states that got cuts of the revenue. Some of those states joined with companies in appealing the FCC’s rules. The agency first moved to cap rates across state lines, and then, later, within states.

• [...]

• After current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was appointed to lead the commission, the agency did not move to revoke the rules, but did stop defending them in court, leaving independent intervenors to continue the fight.

• A federal appeals court today struck down price caps on intrastate phone calls made by prisoners. Inmates will thus have to continue paying high prices to make phone calls to family members, friends, and lawyers.

• The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with prison phone company Global Tel*Link in its lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission. But that’s exactly what the FCC’s current leadership wanted. The FCC imposed the prison phone rate caps during the Obama administration, but current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai instructed commission lawyers to drop their court defense of the intrastate caps.

• President Donald Trump plans to nominate Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel for another term on the Federal Communications Commission.

• Rosenworcel had to leave the commission at the end of last year when the Republican-led US Senate refused to reconfirm her for a second five-year term. The departure of Rosenworcel and former Chairman Tom Wheeler left the FCC with just three out of the typical five members, with Republicans holding a 2-1 majority. Republican senators didn’t want Rosenworcel to stay on the FCC at the time because it would have resulted in a 2-2 deadlock.

• There is “no question” that there is a link between the infrastructure of the internet and human rights, Nicolas Seidler, senior policy advisor at the Internet Society, said at an information society event this week. Human rights are becoming “increasingly part of the design of the internet,” Niels ten Oever, head of digital at ARTICLE 19, said at the same event.

• The thematic workshop Rights, Governance, Protocols and Standards was organised on 12 June during the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2017 (WSIS Forum 2017), taking place from 12-16 June. The WSIS Forum, co-organised by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UNESCO, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNCTAD, is the largest annual gathering in the world of the “ICT for development community” according to ITU.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom shouldn’t be allowed to recover seized assets, argues a Justice Department filing with the US Supreme Court. The brief, filed on Friday, cited his fugitive status as well as a lack of evidence supporting claims that poor health was preventing him from entering the US.

• The US Government has opposed Kim Dotcom’s petition to the US Supreme Court, through which he hoped to regain control over millions of dollars in seized assets. The Department of Justice states that Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues were correctly branded as “fugitives” and argues that there are no grounds to take on the case.

• Some of the world’s largest entertainment groups have formed a huge coalition with a mission to reduce online piracy. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment is comprised of 30 companies including the studios of the MPAA, Amazon, Netflix, CBS, HBO, BBC, Sky, Bell Canada, CBS, Hulu, Lionsgate, Foxtel, Village Roadshow, and many more.

• Infamous BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay can be found liable of copyright violations even if it doesn’t host any infringing content, Europe’s top court has ruled.

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