● 11.06.17

● Links 6/11/2017: Mesa 17.3 Features, DragonFlyBSD 5.0.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Sadly, though, it was all a terrible mistake Vince Vizzaccaro, NetMarketShare’s executive marketing share of marketing has said that the reported Linux share was incorrect.

Server

• Arduino unveils a set of added features for its Create Cloud platform (create.arduino.cc) aimed at expanding the number of Arduino-supported platforms for the development of IoT applications. With this release, Arduino Create Cloud users can now program Linux boards as if they were regular Arduino boards. Multiple Arduino programs can run simultaneously on a Linux-based board and programs can communicate with each other leveraging the capabilities of the latest Arduino Connector.

• Arduino has also developed a unique out-of-the-box experience that enables anybody to set up a new device from scratch from the cloud without any previous knowledge by following an intuitive web based wizard. The initial release has been sponsored by Intel and supports X86/X86_64 boards. As a reference implementation, a simplified user experience has been designed for the AAEON UP board, although other platforms are already supported by the Arduino Create Cloud platform (Intel NUC, Dell Wyse, Gigabyte GB-BXT).

• Container technology can combine speed and density with the security of traditional virtual machines and requires far smaller footprint operating systems in order to run.

• Containers offer a new form of virtualisation, providing almost equivalent levels of resource isolation as a traditional hypervisor.

• Additionally, containers present lower overheads both in terms of lower memory footprint and higher efficiency. This means that higher density can be achieved – simply put, you can get more for the same hardware.

• Cloud computing and platform virtualisation software and services provider VMware has announced that it is buying VeloCloud Networks, a provider of software-defined wide-area network technology, for an unspecified sum.

Kernel Space

• The end of life was reached this past weekend with the release of Linux kernel 3.10.108, which is the last maintenance update for the Linux 3.10 branch. Therefore, users and OEMs are now urged to upgrade to a more recent, long-term supported Linux kernel, such as the Linux 4.4 LTS series.

• “It is the last one in this branch and changes the status of the 3.10 branch to end of life. Thus for once I’m *not* suggesting to upgrade to this one, except if it’s just to finish your migration to a newer branch (such as 4.4),” said Willy Tarreau in the mailing list announcement.

• An Intel engineer over the weekend sent out the latest patches for implementing the company’s User-Mode Instruction Prevention (UMIP) support within the Linux kernel.

• User-Mode Instruction Prevention appears to be on track for upcoming Cannonlake processors and prevents certain instructions from being executed if the ring level is greater than zero. These instructions include the store task register, store machine status word, store global descriptor table, and store interrupt descriptor table. To fend off possible escalation attacks, Intel’s UMIP security feature will prevent these instructions from being executed outside of the highest level privileges.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 17.3 is due out in the days ahead as the Q4’2017 installment of Mesa 3D for delivering the updated open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver stacks for Linux and other platforms. As usual, this quarterly update to Mesa introduces a ton of new features, performance improvements, and other enhancements.

Benchmarks

• Following various F1 2017 Linux gaming benchmarks over the past few days since this game’s Linux release this past Thursday with a port to Vulkan, here is a 23-way graphics card comparison for this formula one racing game while having coverage of the NVIDIA, AMDGPU-PRO, and RADV Vulkan drivers atop Ubuntu Linux.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Remember Vendetta – Curse of Raven’s Cry? [Steam] The game that originally released as Raven’s Cry, then it was removed from Steam and eventually it returned. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind and now the problems continue.

• While not officially released, Corpse Party [Steam, Official Site], a story-driven adventure and horror game can now be played on Linux.

• Speaking on the Steam forum (source), the developer said it’s not ready for release yet, but Linux gamers are able to access it on Steam and test away. Really great to see more Japanese titles make their way to Linux, let’s hope we get more!

• It was on 6 November 2012 when the Steam Linux beta roll-out began and gained more steam as the year came to a close. In those early months the Steam Linux marketshare debuted at around 1%, rose eventually to around 2% with early hype of Steam Machines, while recently has been hovering well below 1% and most recently at 0.35%.

• Heard of Zero-K [Official Site]? It’s an open source RTS that uses the Spring RTS Engine [Official Site] and it’s actually pretty good. They’re going to release it on Steam, with a campaign currently under development.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• As expected for a new stable series, Enlightenment 0.22 is a major release bringing great improvements, new features, and countless bug fixes. And we’ll start with the support for the next-generation Wayland display server, which was greatly improved in this release, adding support for relative pointer motion protocols, pointer constraints, and xdg-shell v6.

• “The majority of development for this cycle has gone towards improving Wayland support,” said Mike Blumenkrantz in the release notes. “This covers, but is not limited to: adding support for xdg-shell v6, pointer constraints, and relative pointer motion protocols. These additions improve XWayland support and increase stability across all components running under Wayland.”

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I was already a grizzled 7-year usability veteran when I moved to Ireland in 2000 to work on GNOME for Solaris, and by extension, try to help the GNOME community figure out how to focus on and deal with usability issues. While it’s been a handful of years since I last actively did that, I’m posting this from our latest build of GNOME 3 on Solaris, so I guess I didn’t completely break everything.

Distributions

• When people doubt that an election will be conducted fairly, their trust in the outcome and their leaders naturally erodes. That’s the challenge posed by electronic voting machines. Technology holds the promise of letting people vote more easily and remotely. But, they’re also prone to hacking and manipulation. How can trust be restored in voting machines and election results?

• Voting demands the ultimate IoT machine (to borrow a line from BMW). The integrity of these machines with their combination of sensors, security and data analysis produce the results that impact every aspect of all our lives.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s v3.0 Ceph storage software adds iSCSI block, POSIX file and containerisation support to the object storage core, making it a unified protocol storage software product.

• Adding to previous generations of its cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 has been unveiled, and this one is set to deliver containerised services.

• Based on the OpenStack “Pike” release, the containerisation of OpenStack is a new capability that the new platform has been armed with, marking a move to bring the technology to the enterprise.

Fedora

• My full-time job is working as one of two maintainers for the Fedora kernels. This means I push out kernel releases and fix/shepherd bugs. Outside of that role, I maintain the Ion memory management framework and do occasional work on arm/arm64 and KSPP (kernel hardening).

• Fedora 27 was originally scheduled to ship at the end of October, but now it’s not going to be released for at least one more week.

• Fedora’s latest Go/No-Go meeting determined that Fedora 27 still isn’t ready to ship due to open blocker bugs. Thus the release has been pushed back now until at least 14 November.

• There still are five blocker bugs in place and one additional proposed blocker: the issues range from F27 installs failing on Macs to GRUB and systemd issues. Blockers are outlined here.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Released in early July 2017, Pardus 17 is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series. Now, the first point release, Pardus 17.1, is available to download bringing all the latest technologies from the Debian GNU/Linux 9.2 “Stretch” release.

• On top of that, Pardus 17.1 makes various user-visible changes, such as to rename the Downloads folder to Downloaded, enhance the System Settings Menu, redesign the default printer test page, remove the password for the live “pardus” user, update the Symbol system theme, as well as to add a bunch of new desktop wallpapers.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• If you’re wondering, there weren’t any other betas released for the Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11.5 operating system, so the Beta 3 release comes as a surprise to us all. It rebases the OS on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and brings various performance improvements.

• For example, the driver capabilities have been increased through the inclusion of a new Linux kernel, and the operating system now offers much better performance on various devices. However, this beta release still has some known issues, especially with Microsoft Surface computers, as noted in the release announcement.

Devices/Embedded

• Gladys is the creation of Node.js expert and backend software engineer Pierre-Gilles Leymarie, the guy who lost his MacBook Pro laptop earlier this summer and decided to replace it with a Raspberry Pi 3 computer, which he built using an old wireless mouse and USB keyboard, along with a 22-inch HDMI LCD, for one week.

• Gladys is designed from the ground up to act as a central hub that interacts with a variety of smart, IoT (Internet of Things) devices you may own, from smart speakers and smart light bulbs to coffee machines and motion sensors. It supports Philips Hue lamps, Sonos speakers, Fibaro motion sensors, Mi-Light lamps and Wi-Fi bridge.

• Compulab’s Linux-ready, 112 x 84 x 34mm “Fitlet2” mini-PC features an Apollo Lake SoC, -40 to 85°C support, and M.2 and “FACET” expansion.

• Compulab has upgraded its rugged Fitlet line of mini-PCs, switching from AMD to Intel Apollo Lake processors up to a quad-core Atom x7-E3950. The Fitlet2 is available with Linux Mint or Windows 10 IoT for $153 and up.

Tizen

• If you own a Tizen device and you are a Telegram user like me, today’s there’s a fresh update of the Telegram app waiting for you. I owe you just a clarification before going into details: I am not talking about the official Telegram app, since there is no official Telegram app – at least, not yet. The update in fact regards “Telegram for Tizen (Unofficial)”.

Android

• The El-10 can be mounted on all sorts of glasses, from regular to the protective working kind. It has a tiny 640 x 400 OLED display that, much like Google Glass, sits semi-transparently in the corner of your vision when you wear the product on your face. A small forward-facing camera can capture photos and videos, or even beam footage back to a supervisor in real time. The El-10 runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and comes with only a bare-bones operating system, as Olympus is pushing the ability to customize it to a buyer’s likes and needs. It even has — drumroll — a headphone jack for earpieces or microphones (or both).

Free Software/Open Source

• You’ve probably never heard of the late Jim Weirich or his software. But you’ve almost certainly used apps built on his work.

• Weirich helped create several key tools for Ruby, the popular programming language used to write the code for sites like Hulu, Kickstarter, Twitter, and countless others. His code was open source, meaning that anyone could use it and modify it. “He was a seminal member of the western world’s Ruby community,” says Justin Searls, a Ruby developer and co-founder of the software company Test Double.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Every time a user clicked onto links starting with file://, as opposed to https:// and http://, the vulnerability would kick into action. It’s been named TorMoil by its finder.

• A recent LWN.net article, “The trouble with text-only email“, gives us an insight through an initially-narrow perspective into a broader problem: how the use of e-mail by organisations and its handling as it traverses the Internet can undermine the viability of the medium. And how organisations supposedly defending the Internet as a platform can easily find themselves abandoning technologies that do not sit well with their “core mission”, not to mention betraying that mission by employing dubious technological workarounds.

• To summarise, the Mozilla organisation wants its community to correspond via mailing lists but, being the origin of the mails propagated to list recipients when someone communicates with one of their mailing lists, it finds itself under the threat of being blacklisted as a spammer. This might sound counterintuitive: surely everyone on such lists signed up for mails originating from Mozilla in order to be on the list.

• Unfortunately, the elevation of Mozilla to being a potential spammer says more about the stack of workaround upon workaround, second- and third-guessing, and the “secret handshakes” that define the handling of e-mail today than it does about anything else. Not that factions in the Mozilla organisation have necessarily covered themselves in glory in exploring ways of dealing with their current problem.

SaaS/Back End

• The OpenStack Foundation is hosting its semi-annual Summit event in Sydney, Australia from Nov. 6 to Nov 8 highlighting use-cases and progress in the multi-stakeholder, open-source cloud infrastructure effort.

• At the first day of the event, several initiatives designed to help improve and promote integration between OpenStack and other open-source cloud efforts were announced. Among the announcements was the Open Infrastructure Integration effort, the launch of the OpenLab testing tools program, the debut of the public cloud passport program and the formation of a financial services team.

• “We’re really put some focus into the strategy for the OpenStack Foundation for next five years,” Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation told eWEEK. “We spent the last five years developing code and building a large user base, looking forward we’re listening to the challenges that users are facing to help us determine what we should be doing.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• A new VCL plug-in that is in development will allow LibreOffice to blend nicely with the KDE Plasma / Qt5 desktop.

• The Visual Components Library (VCL) that allows LibreOffice to make use of functionality across different graphical tool-kits and operating systems now has a Qt5 plug-in.

BSD

• This last development release of GhostBSD 11.1 release is ready for testing. All MATE and XFCE images are available only has 64 -bit architectures. For some of you, it might be chock that we are dropping i386 it is a decision that was hard to make. We hope for those that need i386 will find refuge to another BSD project.

• If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Three interesting applications will be demonstrated, and their underlying theory and design explained. The audience will be exposed to some novel GNU Radio tips and DSP tricks. INMARSAT Aero will be revisited to show (in Google Earth) spatial information, such as waypoints and flight plans, that are transmitted from airline ground operations to airborne flights. A good chunk of the VHF band is used for airline communications; plane spotters enjoy listening to tower and cockpit communications.

Licensing/Legal

• The terms in GPL v3 clause 14 are very similar to those in the GPL v2.

• Over the years, I’ve seen many open source projects that say they are GPL licensed without explicitly indicating a version number, while also including the text of an entire GPL license (e.g., v2 or v3). The ambiguity this potentially creates may be beneficial or detrimental to you, depending on factors such as whether you are the licensor or the licensee.

• Senior Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has claimed he asked the Linux Foundation to withdraw funding from the Software Freedom Conservancy back in 2016, because he was unhappy with the way in which the SFC went about enforcing compliance with the GPL, the licence under which the Linux kernel is published.

• Kroah-Hartman’s claim was made as part of a long discussion about a spat between the SFC and the Software Freedom Law Centre, a body provides pro-bono legal services to developers of free, libre, and open source software, in which the SFLC has asked a court to cancel the trademark of the SFC due to what it claims is “priority and likelihood of confusion” to its own trademark.

• The bizarre aspect of the legal fight between the two bodies, both of which are involved in activities around the GPL, is that the SFLC launched the SFC in 2006 to carry out GPL enforcement.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Broadcom announced on Nov. 6 that it has proposed to acquire rival network and mobile silicon vendor Qualcomm in a deal valued at $130 billion. Under the terms fo the proposed deal, Broadcom would pay $70 per each Qualcomm share, which is a 28 percent premium over Qualcomm’s share closing price on Nov. 2.

Security

Finance

• THIS WEEK, REPRESENTATIVES of three major internet platforms — Google, Facebook, and Twitter — are testifying before Congress about their role in facilitating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But a fourth giant sat comfortably removed: Amazon.

• Instead of getting yelled at by lawmakers, Amazon is on the verge of winning a multibillion-dollar advantage over retail rivals by taking over large swaths of federal procurement.

• Language buried in Section 801 of the House-passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is being hashed out in a conference committee with the Senate, would move Defense Department purchases of commercial off-the-shelf products to “online marketplaces.” Theoretically, that means any website that offers an array of options for paper clips or office furniture; in reality that signals likely dominance for Amazon Business, the company’s commercial sales platform.

• Section 801 stipulates that the program should be designed “to enable Government-wide use of such marketplaces.” Scale, then, is key. Over time, this change would give platforms like Amazon access to all $53 billion in federal government commercial item purchases.

• Buying a $27-million private jet or plush mega-yacht means millions in sales taxes — unless you know the right pro.

• Formula One auto racing star Lewis Hamilton got a new luxury jet, a $27 million candy-apple-red Bombardier Challenger 605 with Armani curtains. He also got a refund on the value-added tax.

• And the lawyers at Appleby, an elite law firm headquartered in Bermuda, were there to help.

• They teamed with the London-based accounting giant Ernst & Young to craft an arcane plan to sidestep the VAT, a consumption tax charged in Europe on everything from socks to cars. One of the conditions: Hamilton’s inaugural flight would have to touch down on the Isle of Man, the British crown dependency in the Irish Sea known for its lenient tax treatment of the world’s super-rich.

• Canada’s future prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was vacationing with his family in the picturesque mountain village of Mont-Tremblant, Que., with a lot on his mind.

• After years of speculation, he had decided he was going to make a play for the country’s top political office.

• With him that weekend was longtime family friend Stephen Bronfman, 53, a third-generation descendant of one of Canada’s wealthiest families that had founded such iconic brands as Seagram, the Montreal Expos and the Eaton Centre.

• “(Trudeau) came to me and said, ‘You know, I’ve made a decision. I’m going to run for the leadership,’ ” Bronfman recalled in a 2013 interview. “I’d always told him, especially since he’d gotten in politics and was first elected, ‘Justin, anything I can do to help, just let me know.’ ”

• The well-connected Bronfman, a known philanthropist and environmentalist, took the reins of the party fundraising machine in late 2013, significantly boosting annual donations.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• “What we ought to do with regard to the Russians is retaliate, seriously retaliate against the Russians,” McConnell told MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt on Saturday. “These tech firms could be helpful in giving us a way to do that.”

• Who gets counted as a gang member — and whether those counts include people who are not identified as members of gangs but who are associated with a gang2 — can vary from state to state, department to department, and even officer to officer. “What’s accurate and what’s not accurate really depends on the level of training for the police officer,” Harris said.

• President Donald Trump probably doesn’t need another reason to be upset over the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which has already swept up at least three members of his campaign. Here’s one anyway: Prosecutors working for Robert Mueller say a Trump Tower condo owned by Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, isn’t worth nearly as much as Manafort claims.

• In a court filing on Saturday, Manafort offered up a Trump Tower condo with an “approximate net asset value” of $3 million as collateral in a $12 million bail package he proposes to get himself off house arrest as he awaits trial.

• A Russian lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 election campaign said the U.S. president’s son told her his father, if elected, could return to the issue of a U.S. law which imposes sanctions on Russian officials related to the death of a Russian lawyer, Bloomberg reported.

• Juli Briskman gave the middle finger to Donald Trump as his motorcade passed her on her bike in Sterling, Virginia last Friday (Oct. 28). A photo taken from behind by AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski shows Briskman’s impromptu protest as black Secret Service SUVs maneuver around her bike.

Censorship/Free Speech

• As the controversy over Russia-linked content on U.S. websites continues, Russian online news outlet Federal News Agency accused Google of political censorship as its stories no longer show in Google News’ search results.

• “FNA staff believe that that blocking of Google News users’ access to content from Federal News Agency is an act of political censorship in the interest of the US government, aimed at restricting information on fighting international terrorism,” the news outlet said in a statement.

• “To force Google to observe Russian and international law, the staff of Federal News Agency is preparing addresses to the [Russian] Anti-Monopoly Service and other government agencies, as well as a lawsuit,” it went on to say.

• Eight people were murdered by a terrorist in New York City, who in a choreographed attack copied from online forums, used a truck to mow down pedestrians at a time and place chosen to maximize destruction.

• At the same time, in Washington, DC, the so-called Tech Giants were testifying before a committee of the United States Senate about Russian interference in the last US presidential election…specifically, Russian usage of social media through paid ads to sow hate and dissent in America.

• Chinese distributors of overseas publications must verify that the content is legal in China, Beijing said late on Sunday, after a major western publisher blocked access to some content in the country citing local regulations.

• Springer Nature, which publishes science magazines Nature and Scientific American, said last week that it had pulled access to less than 1 percent of its articles in China, which it said was regrettable but necessary to avoid all content being blocked.

• According to Springer, it is not really censoring articles in China, because people outside can still read them. That insults both Chinese researchers, whom Springer clearly thinks don’t count, and our intelligence.

Privacy/Surveillance

• As the deadline for renewing and reforming key portions of the NSA’s spying apparatus looms less than two months away, two of the most important members of the House Intelligence Committee have stayed remarkably quiet in the conversation.

• Congress just introduced multiple bills to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that authorizes controversial NSA surveillance programs and is set to expire at the end of this year. Some of the bills include various ways to fix what is called the “backdoor search” loophole. Currently, the NSA “incidentally” collects the communications of countless Americans and stores those communications in vast databases. The FBI routinely searches through these databases for information about U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. The FBI does not obtain any probable cause warrants for these searches, skirting Fourth Amendment protections and earning these searches the title of “backdoor searches.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• We’ve reached the point in terrorism hysteria where someone can be prosecuted simply for having a copy of book already owned by millions. Ryan Gallagher details the trial of Josh Walker — a man who actually left the UK to fight against terrorists, only to be charged under the nation’s terrorism laws when he returned.

• [...]

• Not wishing to alarm outsiders, the group routinely destroyed its notes and other documents post-game. This was the direct result of being previously reported to the police by a janitor who came across notes the group left behind after role-playing a terrorist attack. Apparently, Walker forgot to toss his printed Anarchist Cookbook PDF into the fire with the rest of the prep materials.

• The prosecution claimed Walker retained his copy of the book — again, a book anyone can download from the local library — because he was “curious” about the contents. More ridiculously, the prosecution suggested the printed PDF Walker had in his bedroom “endangered public safety.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• France, Spain, and Portugal are now arguing that people sharing music and movies together is a more serious threat to society than terroristic mass murder or child exploitation. This becomes apparent when looking at leaked position papers regarding the ongoing revision of European copyright law.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.