● 06.30.17

● Links 30/6/2017: Ubuntu 17.10 Alpha 1, Mozilla Employee Denied Entry to the United States

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Project Sputnik has done an admirable job over the years of bringing a “just works” Linux experience to Dell Ultrabooks like the XPS 13 Developer Edition—in fact, we’ve tested and largely enjoyed those experiences multiple times now. But while the XPS 13 is a great machine that I would not hesitate to recommend for most Linux users, it does have its shortcomings. The biggest problem in my view has long been the limited amount of RAM; the XPS 13 tops out at 16GB. While that’s enough for most users, there are those (software developers compiling large projects, video editors, even photographers) who would easily benefit from more.

• This came from nowhere! System76 today announced that they’ve been working lately on their own GNU/Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu and the GNOME desktop environment.

• When Canonical announced the death of the Unity desktop environment, it sent shock waves through the Linux community. After all, Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux-based desktop operating system and switching to GNOME was changing its trajectory. With Unity, Canonical was promising Ubuntu would be an OS that could scale from smartphone to desktop with a focus on convergence, and then suddenly, it wasn’t. Overnight, Ubuntu became just another desktop distro — not necessarily a bad thing.

• Meet Pop!_OS, a brand new Linux distribution from System76. Yes, the company best known for selling Linux laptops that come pre-loaded with Ubuntu now rolling their own path with a homespun based on Ubuntu 17.04 and using the GNOME desktop environment. But why?

• Linux machine vendor System76 has launched their own operating system named Pop!_OS. Based on Ubuntu GNOME, this new Linux distro’s Alpha version is right now available for download. The first final release of Pop!_OS will be shipped on October 19, 2017. System76 has described it as an operating system built for creators.

Server

• Like FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, Linux containers are self-contained execution environments—with their own, isolated CPU, memory, block I/O, and network resources—that share the kernel of the host operating system. The result is something that feels like a virtual machine, but sheds all the weight and startup overhead of a guest operating system.

• In a large-scale system, running VMs would mean you are probably running many duplicate instances of the same OS and many redundant boot volumes. Because containers are more streamlined and lightweight compared to VMs, you may be able to run six to eight times as many containers as VMs on the same hardware.

• Platform9, a startup whose Software-as-a-Service platform takes much of the pain out of using open source cloud infrastructure technologies, has raised $22 million in Series C funding. It supports frameworks like Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Fission.

• The funding round was led by Canvas Ventures, along with existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Menlo Ventures, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise also participating. In 2015 Platform9 raised $10 million in Series B funding. The company says the current round will be used to scale its sales force, product and marketing teams, as well as put resources toward expanding its product line, which it calls “open source as a platform.”

• Docker containers have a steep learning curve because of the intrinsic paradigm shift from hardware virtualization to OS-level abstraction. Developers and IT pros know how to interact with line-of-business applications through VMs, but Docker packages an application with all its dependencies into portable containers that share an OS and run on different host servers with different hardware platforms.

• PiCluster is a great platform to manage and orchestrate Docker containers. Although it started as a way to manage my Raspberry Pi’s, it can be run on any operating system that supports Node.js and Docker. PiCluster has been under heavy development lately and I like to share what is new in v1.9.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.11.8 kernel.

• All users of the 4.11 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.11.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.11.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

• he Linux Foundation launched a new open source project focused on security for orchestration of multi-cloud environments.

• The Open Security Controller Project software will automate the deployment of virtualized network security functions — such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and application data controllers — to protect east-west traffic inside the data center.

• The Linux Foundation launched the Open Security Controller project, an open source project focused on centralizing security services orchestration for multi-cloud environments.

• Open source computing has always been a major boon to the world of developers, and technology as a whole. Take Google’s pioneering Android OS for example, based on the open source code, which can be safely credited with impacting the world of everyday technology in an unprecedented manner when it was introduced. It is, hence, no surprise when a large part of the automobile industry is looking at open source platforms to build on advanced automobile dynamics.

Graphics Stack

• An open-source contributor has begun working on a new open-source driver for the ARM Mali-400 GPU.

• We will likely be seeing more driver-specific per-application performance/workaround tuning within Mesa Gallium3D drivers moving forward.

• NVIDIA has today announced the 384.47 beta driver for Linux, which succeeds their current 381 short-lived stable release series.

• Today NVIDIA released their first 384 series Linux driver beta and for the occasion I fired up some fresh OpenCL / Vulkan / OpenGL benchmarks in seeing if there are any performance changes for users to see with this new series that will eventually succeed the 381.22 stable release.

• Originally Mir 1.0 was expected early in the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, but with their dramatic shift away from Unity 8 and Mir, that’s no longer happening but there are new plans for Mir 1.0.

Benchmarks

• Thanks to this week’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition launch, AMD pushed out a new build of their hybrid driver stack for Linux, AMDGPU-PRO. This new release is marketed as AMDGPU-PRO 17.20 and is only found when looking for the Frontier driver, but it’s been working out fine so far in my Polaris/Fiji GPU testing. Here are some benchmarks compared to their current stable series, AMDGPU-PRO 17.10, as well as the newest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV driver stack.

• Continuing on with our Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarking this week are some numbers when testing this ten-core Skylake-X processor on various Linux distributions under an array of different workloads. Tested for this roundup was Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 17.04, Fedora 26, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Manjaro 17.0.2, and Clear Linux 16160.

• Following my initial Intel Core i9 7900X Linux benchmarks this week were questions raised about its power use and thermal efficiency. Here are some tests looking at those factors, including the performance-per-Watt.

Applications

• At this point in time, it can be argued that Blender needs no formal introduction, but for the sake of Linux users who are new to the community, I will introduce it anyway.

• Blender is a 3D creation suite with support for the entire 3D pipeline – modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing, and game creation.

• As a free and open-source project, its code is contributed by hundreds of professionals, hobbyists, students, VFX experts, animators, professionals, scientists, and studios from all over the world.

• It has become such a technological sensation that it is being used for various TV shows, short films, advertisements, and feature films now.

• Phockup is a simple, straightforward, command line tool for sorting photos into folders based on date. It’s an ideal tool for making organized backups.

• Hands up if use GNOME Terminal as your default terminal on Ubuntu? That’s a lot of hands. GNOME Terminal is great. It’s fast, featured, and straightforward. But it doesn’t hurt to try a few alternatives to it from time to time. Be it the vintage chic of retro term or the modern minimalism of Hyper.

• Weblate 2.15 has been released today. It is slightly behind schedule what was mostly caused by my vacation. As with 2.14, there are quite a lot of security improvements based on reports we got from HackerOne program and various new features.

• Fortunately, the vast majority of all open source software installs can be made trivial for anyone to do for themselves. Modern package managers perform all the same steps as a caveman install, but automatically. Package managers also install dependencies for us automatically.

• [...]

• The pkgsrc package manager is unique in that it fully supports most POSIX compatible (Unix-like) operating systems.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• When buying the MSI X299 SLI PLUS for our initial X299 + Intel Core X Series Linux benchmarking from NewEgg it came with the MSI DS502 Gaming Headset as a free gift. Curiosity got the best of me today, and it actually works just fine under Linux.

• The MSI DS502 is advertised as a gaming headset and features “enhanced virtual 7.1 surround sound, intelligent vibration system, smart audio controller, color LED light”, among other features.

• The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker [Steam, Steam] sees you as a psychiatrist trying to solve a murder. The unique thing here is that the game is played out through various actors using FVM (full motion video).

• The interesting thing here for Linux gamers, is that since Paradox now own the studio, all future titles could end up making their way onto Linux.

• I’ve been playing through Micro Machines World Series [Steam, Deliver2] and I have to say it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s really damn fun and great to have it on Linux!

• Micro Machines World Series rolled out today and it’s greeted by same-day Linux support.

• This is the port we’ve been expecting by Virtual Programming and great to see they made it out for day-one. Micro Machines World Series is a racing game of the Micro Machines micro-vehicles. This new game has NERF guns, catapults, and more to add to the driving excitement.

• EVERSPACE [Official Site], the gorgeous looking space shooter may eventually come to Linux, but it seems it won’t be any time soon due to Unreal Engine issues.

• The developers of Dragon’s Lair [Steam, Official Site] said back in 2013 that with enough interest it would come to Linux, fast forward to 2017 and it finally has.

• Rocket League [Steam] is going to get some new customization options in the form of Rick and Morty themed drops.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• If you’ve been using Linux for a while, you have probably heard or even played with various desktop environments; Unity, Gnome, Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A personal quest of finding the most suitable interface between YOU and the system. But I bet you half a shilling you have not yet had a chance to experiment with Nomad.

• Nomad Desktop is the face of a new Linux distribution named Nitrux. The naming choice is a little tricky, because Nomad is already heavily used to brand a range of software products, and the domain name for Nitrux has the magical NX combo in there. But it does look very interesting. The JS-heavy homepage offers a lot of visual candy, the screenshots are shiny, and Nitrux aims to carve its own niche in a small world saturated with desktop environments. The backbone behind this effort relies on Ubuntu and Plasma and cutting-edge Qt5 solutions, similar to KDE neon. Let’s see what it does.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• as you can guess, I’m a heavy user of GNOME Builder. I use it every day to build various things, most of which you guys know of already

• Because I spend so much time on it, it is essential that Builder simply Just Works, and perfectly. Builder sometimes shows a rough edge here and there, but all in all, it’s a masterpiece. It’s awsome in many aspects! Christian Hergert really deserves our respect (and, why not?, many free beers too!)

• I started to write some automated unit tests that utilize the python module “nose”. Right now they tests a wormhole transfer checking the key integrity after the download.

• The GNOME Project is responsible for the software that is used by hundreds of thousands of people, companies, and organizations around the world. Anyone can participate in the development of our software, and that equality of opportunity is an essential part of GNOME’s mission.

• Our project and our software exist thanks to the GNOME community: a diverse, multinational group of people who share a common interest and passion. We recognize and celebrate the strength we gain from our diversity and seek to defend and extend it wherever possible. In doing so, we reject discrimination including that based on nationality, race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Distributions

Reviews

• IPFire is a Linux distribution that is focused on delivering a starting point for a router and firewall solution with a web interface. It can be made to do a whole lot, but it may not be the best fit for the needs of a home network.

• I’ll not go in to performance testing at all in this review as this will vary based on your hardware. You can use any x86_64 (or armv5tel) system with at least two Ethernet ports. You may need a third Ethernet port if you want to use an external wireless access point rather than configuring the box you want to use with IPFire as your access point.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• “SUSE Business Critical Linux” will be provided jointly by Fujitsu and SUSE to address customers’ evolving needs with a highly reliable, 24/7 support framework that significantly extends current support periods, from five years to up to eight years per SUSE service pack.

• It’s been only a week since our last report on the latest package updates that landed in the stable repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system, and Douglas DeMaio is back with some fresh info.

• According to his report, only three snapshots saw the light of day since last week, but they brought some major package updated to the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling distribution. First off, the graphics stack was updated to the latest Mesa 17.1.3 3D Graphics Library, which should add an extra layer of performance improvements for better gaming with AMD Radeon or Intel GPUs.

• Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week brought a few major release packages and a clear example for how the automated testing tool openQA can prevents a snapshot from being released.

• The unicode character map Gucharmap, which uses the gtk+ toolkit and runs on any platform that gtk+ supports, was updated to version 10.0.0 in the repositories in the 20170625 snapshot. The GNOME project updated translations and support of editors like Bluefish as well as many others. Other major release were also in the 20170625 snapshot. An update of net-tools to version 2.0 dropped the network statistics (netstat) Extended Internet Daemon (xinetd) service to phase out xinetd. Users of the proc file-system get cgroup namespaces with the arrival of the psmisc 23.0 package.

Red Hat Family

• As you doubtlessly have noticed, IT is moving away from server rooms and data centers to clouds and containers. Red Hat, the leading Linux company, has. In its latest release of its hybrid cloud, the Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat proclaims it offers “an end-to-end, deployment-ready solution for enterprise digital transformation.”

• Specifically, Red Hat claims the new Red Hat Cloud Suite enables organizations to more easily build cloud-native applications, deploy them and manage these workloads through a single offering, helping businesses to modernize without sacrificing existing IT infrastructure investments.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• After patching a recently discovered systemd vulnerability in Ubuntu 17.04 and Ubuntu 16.10, Canonical today released a new major kernel update for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 17.04, Ubuntu 16.10, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (HWE), patching up to fifteen security flaws.

• Today, Canonical announced the availability of the first Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, but only for opt-in flavors that are willing to participate in the Alpha milestones.

• Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” Alpha 1 is now available as the first official development release (sans the daily ISOs) for this upcoming milestone.

• There has been tons of Ubuntu news lately, with the death of Unity continuing to be felt in the Linux community. Just yesterday, a company that is one of Ubuntu’s biggest proponents — System76 — announced it was creating its own operating system using that distribution as a base. While some might see that as bad news for Canonical’s distro, I do not — some of System76′s contributions should find their way into Ubuntu upstream.

Flavours and Variants

• A quiet revolution has been rumbling in Leeds. It may not seem revolutionary: a gathering of software developers is scarcely going to get people taking to the barricades in these uncertain times, but the results of this particular meetup could shape access to NHS PCs in the coming years.

• The gathering in question was a hack week that ran until June 30 is to find a way to deploy NHSbuntu, a version of Ubuntu built for the NHS, on 750,000 smartcards used to verify clinicians accessing 80 per cent of applications – excluding those for clinical use – on millions of NHS PCs.

• If successful, NHSbuntu would replace the current system using Windows. Ultimately, the aim is to replace Windows on the desktop, too. Smartcard recognition has been the huge barrier.

Devices/Embedded

• Artesyn’s rugged line of COMX-T modules debut with COMs using NXP’s quad-core QorIQ T2081 and QorIQ T1042 SoCs, clocked to 1.5GHz and 1.4GHz, respectively.

• Artesyn Embedded Computing has launched a line of 125 x 95mm COM Express Basic Type 6 COMX-T Series computer-on-modules that run Linux on NXP’s Power Architecture based QorIQ T processors: The COMX-T2081 offers a quad-core, dual threaded QorIQ T2081 for eight virtual cores, and the COMX-T1042 has a quad-core, single-threaded QorIQ T1042. Both of these pin-compatible SoCs have appeared in products such as the X-ES Xpedite 6101 mezzanine module.

• In his keynote presentation at Automotive Linux Summit, AGL director Dan Cauchy proudly announced that the 2018 Toyota Camry will offer an in-vehicle infotainment system based on AGL’s UCB. The Linux Foundation

• At the recent Automotive Linux Summit, held May 31 to June 2 in Tokyo, The Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project had one of its biggest announcements in its short history: The first automobile with AGLs open source Linux based Unified Code Base (UCB) infotainment stack will hit the streets in a few months.

• In his ALS keynote presentation, AGL director Dan Cauchy showed obvious pride as he announced that the 2018 Toyota Camry will offer an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system based on AGL’s UCB when it debuts to U.S. customers in late summer. Following the debut, AGL will also roll out to most Toyota and Lexus vehicles in North America.

• Similar to the Raspberry Pi is the Orange Pi series of single board systems.

• These single boards are not compatible with the Operating System (OS) images for Raspberry Pi. In this article we will cover installing and setting up an OS.

• There’s another ARM SBC (single board computer) trying to get crowdfunded that could compete with the Raspberry Pi 3 while being a quad-core 64-bit ARM board with 4K UHD display support, up to 2GB RAM, and should be working soon on the mainline Linux kernel.

• The “Libre Computer Board” by the Libre Computer Project is this new Kickstarter initiative, in turn is the work of Shenzhen Libre Technology Co. Through Kickstarter the project is hoping to raise $50k USD. The board is codenamed “Le Potato.”

• Le Potato is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU while its graphics are backed by ARM Mali-450. Connectivity on the board includes HDMI 2.0, 4 x USB 2.0, 100Mb, eMMC, and microSD. Sadly, no Gigabit Ethernet or USB 3.0. Unlike the Raspberry Pi 3, it also goes without onboard WiFi/Bluetooth.

• Grinn and RS Components unveiled a Linux-ready “Liteboard” SBC that uses an i.MX6 UL LiteSOM COM, with connectors compatible with Grinn Chiliboard add-ons.

• UK-based distributor RSA Components is offering a new sandwich-style SBC from Polish embedded firm Grinn. The 60-Pound ($78) Liteboard, which is available with schematics, but no community support site, is designed to work with the separately available, SODIMM-style LiteSOM computer-on-module. The LiteSOM sells for 25 Pounds ($32) or 30 Pounds ($39) with 2GB eMMC flash. It would appear that the 60-Pound Liteboard price includes the LiteSOM, but if so, it’s unclear which version. There are detailed specs on the module, but no schematics.

• Albeit being about 6 months late, Tesla finally started pushing the new Linux kernel update to the center console in its vehicles this week.

• While it’s only a backend upgrade, Tesla CEO Elon Musk associated it with several long-awaited improvements to the vehicle’s user interface. Now that the kernel upgrade is here, those improvements shouldn’t be too far behind.

• Sources told Electrek that the latest 8.1 update (17.24.30), upgraded the Linux Kernel from the version 2.6.36 to the version 4.4.35.

• The Internet of Things has enjoyed major growth in recent years, as more and more of the world around us gets smarter and more connected.

• But keeping all these new devices updated and online requires a reliable and robust software background, allowing for efficient and speedy monitoring and backup when needed.

• Software fragmentation has already become a significant issue across the mobile space, and may threaten to do so soon in the IoT.

• Luckily, Canonical believes it can solve this problem, with its IoT Ubuntu Core OS providing a major opportunity for manufacturers and developers across the world to begin fully monetising and realising the potential of the new connected ecosystem.

• Among the key features this release enables is the Region of Interest (ROI) for HEVC encoder in constant and variable bitrate modes.

• Developers can now control the compression rate of specific rectangular regions in input stream while keeping the bitrate target. This makes it possible, for example, to reduce compression of the areas where the viewer needs to see more details (e.g. faces or number plates), or to inrease it for the background with complicated texture that otherwise would consume majority of the bandwidth. ROI can also be used to put a privacy mask on certain regions that have to be blurred (e.g. logos or faces).

Phones

Tizen

• Over the years, Samsung Electronics has unveiled a lot of Tizen-powered devices, many of which have received positive reviews. Two years ago, Samsung decided to start shipping Tizen on all of its upcoming Smart TVs as part of a bid to boost Tizen TV ecosystem. Since then, we have seen the likes of the SUHD TV line which was unveiled at CES 2016, Las Vegas, an event in which Samsung released a total of 49 TVs at the same time. Now, to further boost the popularity of Samsung-Tizen TV, Jio Cinema has been added to its Tizen TVs.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• AT&T is set trial 10-gigabit symmetric passive optical network technology (XGS-PON), tapping its growing virtualization and software expertise to drive down the cost of next-generation PON deployments.

• The carrier said it plans to later this year conduct the XGS-PON trial as part of its plan to virtualize access functions within the last mile network. Testing is expected to show support for multi-gigabit per second Internet speeds and allow for merging of services onto a single network. Services to be supported include broadband and backhaul of wired and 5G wireless services.

• The initial commit happening this morning that is mostly structuring for the Cannonlake SoC enablement and some boilerplate work while more of the enablement is still happening. Landing past that so far is the UART initialization while more Cannonlake code still has yet to land — this is the first of any post-Kabylake code in Coreboot.

• In the early 1990s, I was a DOS “power user.” I used DOS for everything and even wrote my own tools to extend the DOS command line. Sure, we had Microsoft Windows, but if you remember what computing looked like at the time, Windows 3.1 was not that great. I preferred working in DOS.

• Windstream is dipping its toe into the open source waters, joining the Open Network Automation Project (ONAP), its first active engagement in open source. (See Windstream Joins ONAP.)

• The announcement could be the sign of broader engagement by US service providers in the open source effort. At Light Reading’s Big Communications Event in May, a CenturyLink speaker said his company is also looking closely at ONAP. (See Beyond MANO: The Long Walk to Network Automation.)

• Windstream has been informally monitoring multiple open source efforts and supporting the concept of open source for some time now, says Jeff Brown, director of product management and product marketing at Windstream. The move to more actively engage in orchestration through ONAP was driven by the growing influence of Windstream’s IT department in its transition to software-defined networking, he notes.

• Open source software (OSS) projects start with the intention of creating technology that can be used for the greater good of the technical, or global, community. As a project grows and matures, it can reach a point where the goals of or perspectives on the project diverge. At times like this, project participants start thinking about a fork.

• Forking an OSS project often begins as an altruistic endeavor, where members of a community seek out a different path to improve upon the project. But the irony of it is that forking is kind of like the OSS equivalent of the third rail in the subway: You really don’t want to touch it if you can help it.

Events

• It is our great pleasure to announce that openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 will take place at the University of Electro Communications, Tokyo, Japan on October 21 and 22.

• openSUSE.Asia Summit is one of the great events for openSUSE community (i.e., both contributors, and users) in Asia. Those who usually communicate online can get together from all over the world, talk face to face, and have fun. Members of the community will share their most recent knowledge, experiences, and learn FLOSS technologies surrounding openSUSE.

• This event at Tokyo is the fourth in openSUSE.Asia Summit. Following the first Asia Summit in Beijing 2014, the Asia Summit has been held annually. The second summit was at Taipei in Taiwan, then in Yogyakarta in Indonesia last year. The past Asia Summits have had participants from China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Germany.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the program for the Diversity Empowerment Summit North America, taking place September 14 in Los Angeles, CA as part of Open Source Summit North America. The goal of the summit is to help promote and facilitate an increase in diversity, inclusion, empowerment and social innovation in the open source community, and to provide a venue for discussion and collaboration.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Daniel Stenberg, an employee at Mozilla and the author of the command-line tool curl, was not allowed to board his flight to the meeting from Sweden—despite the fact that he’d previously obtained a visa waiver allowing him to travel to the US.

• Stenberg was unable to check in for his flight, and was notified at the airport ticket counter that his entry to the US had been denied.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Arduino is always pointed as example for successful Open Source Software and Hardware project.

• With thousands of contributors and millions of users this project is bespoken leader among microcontroller development.

• No one remembers the tools used before Arduino.

• There were few attempts to fork it for other platforms like Maple for STM32, Energia for MSP430, MPIDE for PIC32 but they never managed to make enough critical mass outside the main Arduino project and then simply were absorbed in Ardino IDE when it got possibility to merge different processor platforms. That was the end of all forks.

BSD

• I came to unlock the forwarding path and thanks to the multiple reviews from bluhm@, sashan@ and claudio@ it happened! It started as a boring hackathon because I had to review and fix all the abuses of splnet() in pseudo drivers but then it went very smoothly. I still haven’t seen a bug report about the unlock and Hrvoje Popovski even reported a 20% forwarding performance increase.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GRUB bootloader now supports file-systems making use of EXT4 file-system encryption but where the boot files are left unencrypted.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Aquapioneers has developed what it calls the world’s first open source aquaponics kit in a bid to reconnect urban dwellers with the production of their food.

Open Access/Content

• Kiwix powers offline Wikipedia and provides other content to users, like all of the Stack Exchange websites.

Leftovers

• Microsoft says with 1 in 2 Australia online shoppers already coming to eBay, the launch offers consumers a convenient, secure and complementary shopping experience to its physical flagship store in Pitt Street Sydney, and online retail platform, microsoft.com.

Health/Nutrition

• Among the key questions that researchers are struggling to answer: Is the recent spike in deaths primarily the result of increased heroin use, or is it also due to the increased potency of the drug, perhaps because of the addition of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can kill in small doses?

• When patients have a choice between opioids and medical marijuana for a painful condition, an overwhelming majority say they prefer marijuana, that it works just as well, and has fewer side effects, a new survey finds.

• Mail Me to the GOP is a new service that will ship your cremains to the GOP lawmaker of your choice after Trumpcare kills you.

• The form also allows you to send a custom message to the lawmaker, such as “My combat tour in Iraq resulted in enough disability to make me uninsurable, but not enough to get all my healthcare through the VA. You killed me, you prick.”

Security

• Today, June 29th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the OutlawCountry project of the CIA that targets computers running the Linux operating system. OutlawCountry allows for the redirection of all outbound network traffic on the target computer to CIA controlled machines for ex- and infiltration purposes. The malware consists of a kernel module that creates a hidden netfilter table on a Linux target; with knowledge of the table name, an operator can create rules that take precedence over existing netfilter/iptables rules and are concealed from an user or even system administrator.

• The installation and persistence method of the malware is not described in detail in the document; an operator will have to rely on the available CIA exploits and backdoors to inject the kernel module into a target operating system. OutlawCountry v1.0 contains one kernel module for 64-bit CentOS/RHEL 6.x; this module will only work with default kernels. Also, OutlawCountry v1.0 only supports adding covert DNAT rules to the PREROUTING chain.

• ELSA can be customized to match environmental and operational factors, including sampling interval, maximum logfile size, invocation and persistence. Using the same geo-location databases maintained by Internet giants, additional back-end software can generate a tracking profile.

• Two weeks ago, in a similar Vault 7 dump, WikiLeaks revealed how the CIA could use a malware “implant” (codenamed CherryBlossom) to turn at least 25 WiFi router and access point models into surveillance posts.

• WikiLeaks has published leaked documents purportedly from ‘OutlawCountry’, an alleged CIA program designed to overcome and alter firewalls on a Linux operating device.

• [...]

• “The target must be running a compatible 64-bit version of CentOS/RHEL 6.x (kernel version 2.6.32),” the program’s user guide says.

• OutlawCountry v1.0 has a kernel module for the 64-bit distribution of CentOS/RHEL 6.x and it will only work with the default kernel which is 2.6.32. (This kernel version is very old; for comparison, the current testing stream of Debian has a 4.9.0-3 kernel.)

• Fulton-based Sonatype is bringing on some deeper knowledge about potential security vulnerabilties with an acquisition.

• A security researcher has found a fix for the latest Petya Ransomware attack. For now, you can vaccinate your system in seconds by creating a particular file. If Petya finds that file on the disk, it stops the encryption business. Please note that users need to create this file independently on each computer and it doesn’t fix things globally like WannaCry killswitch.

• Payload delivered in mass attack destroys data, with no hope of recovery.

• By all appearances, Nyetna primarily targeted Ukraine. But in hitting Ukraine, it significantly disabled one of the key cogs to the global economy, the world’s biggest container shipping company. Does that count as an attack on the US, or at least its critical infrastructure?

• The primary target of a crippling computer virus that spread from Ukraine across the world this week is highly likely to have been that country’s computer infrastructure, a top Ukrainian police official told Reuters on Thursday.

• Cyber security firms are trying to piece together who was behind the computer worm, dubbed NotPetya by some experts, which has paralyzed thousands of machines worldwide, shutting down ports, factories and offices as it spread through internal organizational networks to an estimated 60 countries.

• Ukrainian politicians were quick on Tuesday to blame Russia, but a Kremlin spokesman dismissed “unfounded blanket accusations”. Kiev has accused Moscow of two previous cyber strikes on the Ukrainian power grid and other attacks since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

• Security software company Kaspersky has warned that there is “little hope for victims to recover their data” if they fall victim to the ransomware bastard because the installation ID displayed in the ransomware note, sent with the ransom so that the appropriate decryption key can be sent back, is entirely randomly generated.

• I encourage you to explicitly forbid social engineering attacks in your pentest scopes. Instead, try simulating the kinds of compromises that social engineering attacks lead to, with an emphasis on detection and response. This provides much more satisfying and useful outcomes, without the risks that allowing social engineering introduces.

Defence/Aggression

• iUnfortunately, the slow death of the daily press briefing is only part of a larger assault by the Trump administration on a precious public resource: information.

• The House Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved an amendment that would revoke a 2001 law giving the president authority to undertake war against al Qaeda and its affiliates unless a replacement provision is created.

• Lawmakers applauded when the amendment was added by voice vote to the defense spending bill, highlighting the frustration many members of Congress feel about the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which was initially approved to authorize the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Each degree of warming means the US loses an average of 1.2 percent of its GDP.

Finance

• The number of Britons living in Spain over the age of 65 has more than doubled in the past 10 years, according to official statistics.

• The joint research by Britain and Spanish statisticians shows there were over twice as many British citizens living in Spain at the time of the EU referendum than there were Spanish citizens resident in Britain.

• The special report by the Office for National Statistics and the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica says there were 296,000 British citizens who had been living in Spain for more than 12 months in 2016, while the UK was home to an average of 116,000 Spanish people between 2013 and 2015.

• China stands as a looming reminder of what happens when banks don’t respond quickly enough. Alipay and an offering from Tencent carved up more than 90 percent of the country’s $5.5 trillion mobile payments market between them in just four years.

• Survivors of the Grenfell Tower disaster are to be banned from the first meeting of senior councillors since the fire amid fears of “disruption”.

• The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) said Thursday’s cabinet meeting will be held in private, chaired by the under-fire council leader.

• Jeremy Corbyn, despite what many supporters believe, has historically been opposed to the EU. When this is discussed however generally rail nationalisation is raised as an example and it’s then pointed out that the EU doesn’t prevent state owned railways. It’s then also pointed out that Labour policies aren’t really that radical and that many Scandinavian states have similar left wing policies.

• This leads to the hope that either a) Corbyn isn’t really pro-brexit or b) as soon as he understands that he can nationalise the railyways or utilities or have a larger State under the Single Market rules he’ll be OK with the EU again.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A group of researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Technology, Indiana University, and Yahoo wanted to investigate the tradeoffs that happen on social media. Their simulated social network allowed them to tweak different parameters to see what would happen.

• House Democrats are suggesting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions could be removed from office for the role he played in President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.

• The suggestion, made in a letter released Thursday by two senior Democrats and signed by 32 others, is directed to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who investigates misconduct. The letter asks Horowitz to consider “whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions violated his recusal from matters relating to the presidential campaigns in 2016 when he participated in President Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.”

• The letter notes an intent to “make clear that our request is separate and apart from Special Counsel [Robert] Mueller’s investigation which concerns only whether any criminal acts occurred.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• The algorithm will read every comment posted on Instagram and hide them if they are deemed abusive. The comments will still be visible to the person who wrote them, but will be hidden to other users.

• In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada has ordered Google to remove a company’s websites from search results. The case had nothing to do with copyright but according to music industry group IFPI, the implications are clear. When search engines link to illegal content, courts can compel them to permanently remove results, globally.

• Even if this particular site violated Canadian law and is rightfully delisted within its jurisdiction, being able to extend Canadian law onto the global internet is a huge stretch and sets us on a very slippery slope.

• In a brief statement, Zillow said it will “not pursue any legal action.” The company issued the statement shortly after an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney representing Kate Wagner fired back at Zillow in a five-page letter. Wagner is behind the viral architecture blog, McMansion Hell.

• These days of action are only the latest German clampdowns on speech deemed unpleasant or potentially dangerous. ‘Our constitutional democracy cannot tolerate such agitation’, said the interior minister of Saxony, Markus Ulbig. The justice minister, Heiko Maas, who has been at the forefront of the debate about hate speech, says hateful commentary poses a grave threat to Germany’s political culture.

• A prominent Vietnamese blogger has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after being found guilty of distorting government policies and defaming the communist regime in Facebook posts and in interviews with foreign media, her lawyer said. Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, also known as “Mother Mushroom”, was sentenced at the end of a one-day trial in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa, her lawyer, Vo An Don, said.

• The conviction related to the content of 18 articles on her Facebook page and interviews with foreign news outlets such as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, Don said.

• Quynh, 37, co-founded a network of bloggers and is very popular in Vietnam. She has written about human rights, civilian deaths in police custody, and the release of toxic chemicals by a Taiwanese-owned factory that killed thousands of fish in one of Vietnam’s worst environmental disasters.

• Counter-terrorism is being slowly privatized and carried out by low-paid workers at technology companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter.

• Although these companies hire expert advisers and former government agents to tackle extremist propaganda and recruitment enabled by their platforms, much of the grunt work is carried out by contractors earning $15 an hour or, in YouTube’s case, volunteers.

Privacy/Surveillance

• When law enforcement argues it needs a “backdoor” into encryption services, the counterargument has typically been that it would be impossible to limit such access to one person or organization. If you leave a key under the doormat, a seminal 2015 paper argues, a burglar eventually finds it. And now recent events suggest an even simpler rebuttal: Why entrust a key to someone who gets robbed frequently?

• The Australian Defence Force will soon launch a separate unit that will serve to both defend military targets against cyber attacks and also launch offensive operations as required.

• A key part of information warfare is psychological and undermining and influencing the adversary.

• This will be a key part of the new unit’s role, and its arsenal of cyber weaponry will be able to be used to defend, gather intelligence or launch attacks.

• During peatland fires, government sensors on the ground monitor the air quality in local areas. Lee says data from the tweets matched up with readings from the sensors.

• It’s also working on a product called Lens, which will give the company greater insight into our daily lives than ever before, turning people’s phone cameras into search engines.

• Provision in the UK’s controversial surveillance laws create a potential means for the UK government to press-gang “any” UK computer expert into working with GCHQ. Computer scientists and researchers are concerned about the provision – even though the consensus is that it is unlikely to be applied in practice because it would damage wider co-operation.

• The potential ramifications of the bulk interception warrants were brought to our attention by Reg reader Simon Clubley. More specifically, Clubley is concerned about the Bulk Equipment Interference Warrants section of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (section 190).

• Officials “familiar with the situation” (possibly read “jealous as hell”) expressed concern about Cornyn’s personal NSA tour. And for good reason. If Rogers and other NSA officials were feeding Cornyn information the rest of the NSA’s Congressional oversight isn’t privy to, that’s a problem. It’s more of a problem as the date for Section 702′s reauthorization approaches. And it seems even more problematic that Cornyn was given a personal walk-and-talk while oversight members were failing to get substantive answers from the DNI during a Senate hearing.

• Twice in the past month, National Security Agency cyberweapons stolen from its arsenal have been turned against two very different partners of the United States — Britain and Ukraine.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The glimmer of hope to come out of this moment, however, is that India’s coders have been building new organizing platforms. Workers have been organizing regionally in Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra and West Bengal for fair contracts and improved working conditions. One formal union has emerged—the Communist New Democratic Labor Front (NDLF) launched an IT Employees (ITE) wing in January. So far there are only 200 members, established recently in Tamil Nadu, which has a tech workforce of roughly 200,000, according to organizer S. Kumar, writing via e-mail from Tamil Nadu.

• The sister, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed at a Berlin bus stop when her youngest brother fired three bullets into her head. The brothers said the family’s honor had been offended because she divorced the man her family had forced her to marry at age 16 and then began dating and refused to wear a head scarf.

• Last week the Supreme Court managed to hold its nose long enough to properly assert that banning convicted sex offenders from social media was plainly an infringement on their First Amendment rights. While much of the media coverage focused on the question of sex offenders having access to these well-trafficked websites, the real implications of the ruling were always likely to be far more reaching. We specifically pointed to the reasonable question: if sex offenders can’t be blocked from internet sites due to their First Amendment rights, how can we possibly require ISPs to disconnect those accused of piracy from the internet under even the most tortured reading of 512(i) of the DMCA?

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler spoke out against the FCC’s proposed repeal of net neutrality rules this week, saying the repeal will help monopoly broadband providers abuse their dominant position.

• There’s “a monopoly provider for three-quarters of the homes in America, and no choice,” Wheeler said in a forum (video) in Arlington, Virginia Monday hosted by US Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “When you’ve only got one provider, who makes the rules? The provider makes the rules.”

• Wheeler was referring to FCC data that shows most Americans live in areas with either one provider of high-speed broadband (at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream) or none at all.

• With the FCC’s new Republican leadership seeking to overturn net neutrality rules, “the question becomes, will giant companies be able to exploit their monopoly position?” Wheeler said. “Who is going to stand up for consumers? Who is going to stand up for innovation? And who is going to stand up for the most important network for determining our future in the 21st century?”

DRM

• The Copyright Office, by contrast, fails to even show that DRM does anything useful in the world, but still advises against allowing people to buy or share tools to let them bypass DRM in order to do the kinds of things the Copyright Office endorses, from repairs to security research.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Shortly after Sci-Hub was ordered to pay $15 million in piracy damages to Elsevier, the American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit of its own against the “Pirate Bay for Science.” The scientific society would also like to see a cut of the loot. In addition, it asks the court for a broad injunction which would require ISPs to block the site.

• The fact that a global academic publishing company could be awarded millions in damages against someone trying to help other scientists to spread and access publicly-funded knowledge – exactly as science is supposed to work – is an indication of how broken copyright is today. Until that massive problem is fixed, Sci-Hub will remain what one leading academic called a “necessary, effective civil disobedience“.

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