● 12.20.18

● Links 20/12/2018: Skrooge 2.17.0, Linux Mint 19.1, HardenedBSD 12

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Dell has been championing Linux for nearly 20 years, having shipped it on client systems since 1999. I was recently surprised to learn that Dell has shipped various flavors of Linux on more than 160 unique platforms just this year. When it comes to consumer-level systems, Dell’s amazing XPS 13 Developer Edition (my current daily driver) has been the guiding light. But for those users who crave more processing and graphics horsepower, the Precision 5530 and 3530 mobile workstations are worth a look. Especially since Dell has just upgraded them to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• The Mac is an ever-increasingly closed-off ecosystem, with users finding that they need to use dongles and converters for everything from ethernet cables to SD card readers. The decision to replace the Escape and Command keys with the gimmicky “touch bar” a couple of years ago wasn’t great either.

• It’s safe to say that when it comes to macOS, the honeymoon is over. Longtime users are starting to get fed up with Apple from the way they restrict compatibility to their amateur file system, to the way their operating system takes away advanced functions longtime users are used to using.

• In this article we’ll go over the best Linux distributions that Mac users can install either on their Macs or on dedicated Linux computers.

• Too many choices overwhelm the consumer/customer/user.

• Too many desktop choices held Linux back from succeeding as a desktop operating system? Linux creator Linus Torvalds certainly thinks so.

• In an interview with TFiR, Torvalds expressed his views on the ‘failure’ of desktop Linux.

• Apparently, if you manually click on “Check on Updates,” Microsoft will somehow consider you a “seeker” a.k.a tester, i.e., it will send you “preview” updates which haven’t been tested on a stable computer.

Server

• The enterprise server market belongs to Linux now. Clouds, web-servers, you name it, Linux runs it. One of the biggest reasons for this remains that Linux is cheaper than the alternatives. But that doesn’t mean Linux has all its way when fighting against legacy systems. Take, for example, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

• Wanting to save money, the IRS set up a migration plan in 2014 to move 1,400 databases and 190 applications designed to operate on Oracle Sparc servers running Solaris Unix to IBM mainframes running zLinux. According to the Department of Treasury auditors, the “IRS made a decision to consolidate platforms and migrate applications to Linux-based operating systems.” In theory, two-thirds of applications and databases were supposed to have been moved by December 2016… in theory.

• I know my database will be slower on Kubernetes and cloud native storage, but HOW MUCH slower? This is a question everyone thinking of moving traditionally hosted stateful services like database to Kubernetes ask all the time. And until now, we haven’t had good answers. This presentation will detail a series of microbenchmarks on PostgreSQL running on and off Kubernetes in a variety of configurations, including bare metal, local storage, gluster, and rook. You’ll get a solid idea of what the cost in latency and throughput is for abstracting away your storage problems, and be able to make platform decisions for yourself.

• As we round out 2018, it’s time to reflect on how the year has gone and our plans for the coming year. For the fifth consecutive year, we reached out to our customers to hear where they are in their technology journey and where they want to go in 2019. For our annual Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook, we surveyed more than 400 Red Hat customers around the world, with respondents from 51 countries. These IT leaders weighed in about their current challenges, their deployment strategies, technologies they are excited about, as well as budget and technology priorities for 2019.

• IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source cloud software, have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.

• The company reported third quarter earnings of $94 million, or 51 cents a share, on revenue of $847 million, up 13 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the third quarter were 96 cents a share.

• Wall Street was looking for non-GAAP third quarter earnings of 87 cents a share on revenue of $852.8 billion. Red Hat said currency fluctuations hurt sales somewhat. On a constant currency basis, Red Hat sales would have been up 15 percent.

• While the cloud offers a compelling cost advantage, lower cost is not the only differentiator that will define tomorrow’s winners and losers in the cloud marketplace. Might the purple cloud — made up of Big Blue’s cloud and Red Hat’s Linux and Kubernetes distro — be the most secure?

• Remember the saying, “No one ever gets fired for hiring Big Blue”? At a time when technology seemed to be changing fast, executives wanted to reduce risk and play it safe. This was before the cloud and at a time when distributed computing seemed like some new-age religion.

• While most bloggers seem focused on why IBM would pay $34 billion for Red Hat, I thought it might be timely to point out the recent Kubernetes vulnerability, CVE 2018-1002105. This vulnerability — announced by Google and credited to Darren Shepherd’s discovery — remains too new at the time of this writing to even be found in the NIST’s National Vulnerability Database.

• The OpenShift community produces a lot of interesting tutorials about how to try new solutions and configurations but unfortunately they are mostly based on a minimal setup such as MiniShift, which is definitely a cool gimmick, but badly resembles a real cluster setup. Often those posts only concentrate on the known good path about how something is supposed to function in the best case. They rarely mention how it could be debugged or fixed if it doesn’t work as expected. As all of us know, the more complex a system is, the more can go wrong and this technology is no exception especially when run in a real distributed setup. To give you some insight in how such procedures can go wrong, I’d like to share the experience I made when I tried to update my multi-master/multi-node OKD cluster. As an experienced Linux engineer or developer you might think that version updates are nothing special or exciting, but this experience will disabuse you. I hit many issues and here is how I did it.

• At the core of the modern cloud-native application movement is an open-source technology that is perhaps not as well known as it should be. That technology is the open-source etcd project, which provides a distributed key-value store that is used by all the major public cloud providers and is at the core of the Kubernetes container orchestration system.

• The etcd project is not new, in fact it was started five years ago by a team of developers from CoreOS, which is a company that was acquired by Red Hat for $250 million on Jan. 30. As a distributed key value store, etcd provides a mechanism that enables data to be stored in a stable, reliable and consistent way across a cluster of different machines. As of Dec. 11, the etcd project is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is also home to the Kubernetes project along with 30 other cloud-native projects.

• When people discuss cloud computing, two terms are frequently used: virtual machine and containers. This is especially true in the era of multicloud, when a cross platform strategy is essential.

• The two technologies share common ground: both virtual machines and containers are software technologies, and both run in a virtualized environment. After that they differ in operation, size, management, use cases and other factors.

• Let’s look at virtual machines and containers.

• Recently I’ve started updating my free online workshops for business rules and process automation that showcase how to get started using modern business logic tooling. These updates start with moving from Red Hat JBoss BRMS to Red Hat Decision Manager and from Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite to Red Hat Process Automation Manager.

• This article highlights the first lab update for Red Hat Decision Manager, where you learn to install Decision Manager on your laptop.

• In this blog post, we’re going to see how KubeVirt upstream community project and Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh co-exist on the Red Hat OpenShift Platform (OCP), and how they interact with the existing containers pods in a microservices world.

• As much as we will like to think everything is in containers, it is to be noted that, in real world applications, users may interconnect traditional modules or workloads, like databases, running in the form of VMs with modern microservices implemented in containers. The traditional VMs requires and support scale up rather than the scale out model supported by microservices. This is the kind of use case we want to illustrate and explore by combining KubeVirt and OCP.

• Fast food restaurants are not typically considered as being places where the latest trends in IT and cloud computing can be found, but that’s what’s happening at fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A.

• Edge computing, the idea of having cloud-native resources at the edge of a network, is an emerging concept in IT, and it’s having an impact at fast food restaurant chain Chick-fil-A. The restaurant chain is also making use of the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system and the concept of GitOps to help manage its edge deployments with a DevOps approach.

• Chick-fil-A shared its edge computing story at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018 in Seattle last week alongside cloud-native vendor Weaveworks. With GitOps, operations are enabled via a pull request, using the Git version control system.

• Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) have all existed in the developer community for many years. Some organizations have involved their operations counterparts, but many haven’t. For most organizations, it’s imperative for their operations teams to become just as familiar with CI/CD tools and practices as their development compatriots are.

• CI/CD practices can equally apply to infrastructure and third-party applications and internally developed applications. Also, there are many different tools but all use similar models. And possibly most importantly, leading your company into this new practice will put you in a strong position within your company, and you’ll be a beacon for others to follow.

• With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta, we wanted to take a look at some of the changes that are coming in identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. We’ve been preparing for the update of the Linux authentication toolbox for some time. This is part of our continuous focus on providing IT organizations with features that are designed to give them control over their environments and raise confidence in their deployments.

Audiocasts/Shows

• We’re just back from touring System76’s new factory, and getting the inside scoop on how they build their Thelio desktop. This is our story about walking in as skeptics, and walking out as believers.

• Using computers to analyze text can produce useful and inspirational insights. However, when working with multiple languages the capabilities of existing models are severely limited. In order to help overcome this limitation Rami Al-Rfou built Polyglot. In this episode he explains his motivation for creating a natural language processing library with support for a vast array of languages, how it works, and how you can start using it for your own projects. He also discusses current research on multi-lingual text analytics, how he plans to improve Polyglot in the future, and how it fits in the Python ecosystem.

• But before we get into that, we discuss the recent GPL enforcement case Hellwig vs. VMware at the OLG Hamburg. The Software Freedom Conservancy is involved as well.

• Eric Seidel co-founded the Flutter project at Google and now manages the engineering teams. Eric worked on Chrome, Safari and WebKit for about a decade prior to starting Flutter.

• We provide recommendations on Linux computers pre-installed with Linux. We also have two “Gone Linux” stories, recommendations on learning the terminal, some comments on Snap packages, suggestions on listening in Rythmbox, and information on where to purchase Linux distribution media. And more, of course.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.19.11 kernel.

• All users of the 4.19 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.19.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.19.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

• Due to the Linux 4.21 merge window expected to open up next week just prior to Christmas, some kernel subsystem maintainers who won’t be around in the days ahead have been sending in their pull requests early. Among those with early feature pulls is David Sterba continuing to oversee the Btrfs file-system development.

• Most notable to Btrfs in Linux 4.21 is the long-awaited support for swap files on Btrfs is now working but with a number of limitations for the time being, such as no compression or snapshotting.

• The I3C subsystem had sought to be included in Linux 4.20, but ultimately it was rejected for being too late in the cycle for introducing a brand new subsystem. But now it’s requested to be pulled into the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window.

• Boris Brezillon has issued a new pull request looking to add I3C to the Linux 4.21 kernel. That 4.21 merge window should open next week, but due to the holidays, a number of PRs have been submitted early — including the I3C Material.

• Coming to the next version of the Linux kernel is new sound driver support for the AMD ACP3x (Audio Co-Processor 3.x).

• This new AMD ALSA SoC PCM driver is used initially for AMD Raven Ridge APUs with the Audio Co-Processor 3.x (ACP3) but appears to be used by future AMD hardware too. This ACP3x driver is a bit late for supporting audio on Raven Ridge hardware with an I2S codec, but better late than never. Going back years there has been Linux support for support for older versions of the ACP.

Linux Foundation

• The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) Summit 2018 was held at the Club Auto Sport in San Jose, California, last week, a unique and appropriate location given that DPDK is the engine that powers many NFV platforms today, including auto-focused platforms. As presenters shared the latest research and developments with DPDK in an automobile-themed environment, it was clear that the DPDK initiative’s scope is expanding beyond its original Intel roots. While Intel still has an outsized role within the project, DPDK’s home at the Linux Foundation lends more credibility to its outreach efforts.

Graphics Stack

• Samuel Pitoiset of Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted a set of patches implementing support for shaderStorageImageMultisample. These patches are based upon work started months earlier by David Airlie and important for DXVK and for other Vulkan use-cases.

• The nearly 400 lines of code enable Vulkan shaderStorageImageMultisample for Polaris GFX8 hardware and newer with this open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. The shaderStorageImageMultisample support is important for RADV since it’s the only blocker remaining for the DXVK project to fully support Shader Model 5.0 in its effort of mapping Direct3D 11 features atop Vulkan.

• If you recently installed the Radeon Software 18.50 Linux driver package or recently updated your system’s firmware from the linux-firmware.git tree and experiencing GPU hangs with Radeon “Vega 10″ graphics hardware, the firmware may be to blame.

• The Intel DRM “Fastboot” option is what allows skipping a mode-set upon the device initalization during the Linux boot process to allow for a slick and smooth Linux desktop boot experience free of any excess flickers. While Intel Fastboot has been an option for years, it isn’t yet the default behavior for this graphics driver.

Benchmarks

• Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the Linux kernel performance from the start to end of 2018 using an Intel Core i9 7980XE system. Here is the second part of that testing in looking at the same Linux 4.14 vs. 4.20 kernel benchmarking while putting the i9-7980XE performance side-by-side against the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX for seeing how its performance was impacted under the same kernel tests.

• Using my two highest-end Intel/AMD HEDT systems, I benchmarked the Intel Core i9 7980XE and AMD Threadripper 2990WX systems using the Linux 4.14.4 kernel from the end of 2017 to that of Linux 4.20 Git for the current state of the mainline kernel performance with both systems equipped with quad channel memory, NVMe SSD storage, and focusing on I/O and system/CPU tests for this comparison.

• With yesterday’s release of Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.0, one of the most pressing changes for Linux guests is the use of the new VMSVGA 3D graphics device emulation by default. VMSVGA is the SVGA II graphics adapter from virtualization competitor VMware, but allows for the mature SVGA Linux graphics driver stack to be used. Here are some benchmarks looking at the OpenGL performance on VirtualBox 6.0.

Applications

• Aiming at the Elementary OS, the “Notes-Up” is today’s notes editing and management app. This app includes a User Interface which is moderate and minimalist. We have already said that the Notes-Up aims at the Elementary OS, however, this software is also available for the OpenSUSE and Arch Linux. This Markdown editor is prepared to amaze you with the note editing skills.

• You will also get the support of the keyboard shortcuts if you are using this application for editing your notes. The name of the developer of this app is Philip, and he said that being a Computer Engineer, he used to write up all his school and other essential notes only with the text editor so that he can maintain all his files and keep them all managed and organized.

• A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps resolve computer related problems. Companies seeking to offer better customer service often provide help desk support via the telephone, website, and or by email. Help desks may also be set up simply for internal use, to provide help to a firm’s employees. The importance of the help desk cannot be overrated, and it represents a core part of a successful business.

• Help desk software is crucial to the smooth operation of a help desk and customer support staff. Without high quality software, tracking help desk support issues can be extremely difficult and can result in the deterioration of customer relationships. Tracking and responding to help desk calls is quicker and more effective when using well designed help desk software. This type of software helps organizations to manage their email better, as well as offering powerful request management as well as an audit trail, logging and tracking users’ requests for assistance.

• There is a good selection of open source help desk software available for Linux. Since we last covered this type of software, our recommendations have changed.

• Hello everyone, in this article I will outline the progress that the Kiwi TCMS team has made towards achieving the goals in our 2018 roadmap (mid-year update here). TLDR; goals are completed at 62%. Refactoring legacy code is showing good results, less so on the front-end side and there are items still in progress!

• It doesn’t matter which operating system you use, you are to utilize security software for keeping your operating system or network secured. Basically, security programs are such utilities that serve you different purposes: removal of spyware, resistance to the virus, firewall protection and many more. In short, security tools can be referred to as the blood of an operating system that destroys the harmful things just like real blood. However, there are numerous security programs, but all of those won’t function equally and properly with every operating system. Hence, here we have listed the top 20 Linux security tools predominantly for the Linux users, but if you are a user of any other operating system, you may also try.

• Cutegram is an unofficial Telegram desktop client. The first question is do you recall what Telegram is? Telegram Messenger is an instant messaging system based on cross-platform. Users can send self-destructive and encrypted messages and media files like documents, images, and videos. It supports any type of file format.

• Cutegram is a cross-platform, open source, and free desktop client for Telegram. A non-profit company named Aseman created, developed and released it under GPLv3 license. Users of Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, and MacOS can download, install and use it for free.

• By default everyone prefer history command to review/recall the previously entered commands in terminal.

• Papyrus is a different note manager which is developed with the security concern in mind. Before we go further, let’s talk about why do we need a note manager with better security? We all know how important a note manager is to maintain our daily activities!

• We take notes for many purposes, for example, If you are an employer, then you may already know that how much difficult it is to manage your daily task properly with privacy. You can hardly manage to do all the things deployed around you. As a result, it becomes a threat of losing your job. And this is where Papyrus comes to help you out of this panic.

• TIDAL is an entertainment platform that tries to create a bond between artists and fans through music. People who use Tidal can listen to music on Android, Apple, and Windows devices. The problem is that Tidal does not have a client app for Linux distros. However, every problem has a solution. In this case, the name of the solution is Tidal CLI Client. It is a music streaming app(command line-based). It is available in 52 countries, and you can have access to 58 million songs.

• Notelab is free software for the Linux, Windows, MacOS, and Solaris user that can change the working speed from high to highest, seriously! Using a hard paper to note all your information which you get all day long seems backdated in this modern era. It’s too tough to write all the notes on a paper with just a pen. This is where the Notelab software comes to help you. Notelab is an excellent software for the note-taking purpose.

• It comes with some excellent features that will make you feel that you are writing on a real paper with a pen. It’s like whenever you write something on it, you will see the strokes instantly. This software will help you to organize information carefully. You say how? Well, suppose you are taking an important note from your boss or class, and there are some keywords those needs to be highlighted. So how will you mark them as the keywords? Here Notelab will help you out by customizing those words with various color.

• Sometimes you may need to access essential data saved on your Linux operated computer storage, but you may fail repeatedly. The most common reasons for such a problem are virus attack, permanent or accidental removal of files, error messages and so on. Whatever the reason might be, such a loss may cause irrecoverable damage to you. As it is an instantaneous accident, so you can hardly take precautionary measures. But, what you can definitely do is to use several Linux data recovery tools for getting back your lost data.

• VirtualBox 6.0 was released yesterday with improved HiDPI and scaling support, reworked user interface (which includes a new built-in file manager), support for Linux 4.20, VMSVGA 3D graphics device emulation on Linux and Solaris guests, and much more.

• VirtualBox is a x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software that runs on Windows, Linux, macOS and Solaris, and supports a large number of guest operating systems, including Windows Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris, OS/2 and OpenBSD.

• The new major VirtualBox release includes important user interface changes. The new version has greatly improved HiDPI and scaling support, including better detection and per-machine configuration.

• We have released version 2.10.0 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime.

• We release a new curl version every eight weeks. On average we ship over thirty releases in a five-year period.

• A lot of people use curl versions that are a few years old, some even many years old. There are easily more than 30 different curl version in active use at any given moment.

• Not every curl release introduce changes and new features, but it is very common and all releases are at least always corrected a lot of bugs from previous versions. New features and fixed bugs make curl different between releases.

• Linux/OS distributions tend to also patch their curl versions at times, and then they all of course have different criteria and work flows, so the exact same curl version built and shipped from two different vendors can still differ!

• Text to Speech (TTS) is a technology to assist disabled people in reading-by-hearing for those who cannot see and in speaking-by-typing for those who cannot speak. eSpeak Speech Synthesizer is an amazing program on GNU/Linux to help anybody helping themselves (or, helping others who have disabilities and impairments). This article is one part of my new series in GNU/Linux accessibility and I want this to be easy for everybody. I will explain to you in this first part the basics by using espeak as a perfect example for first timers. You will learn how to type the text and let computer speaks it loud. This way, you can help anyone who is mute to speak using their computer.

• Continuing the first part: Okular PDF Reader has read out loud (text to speech) feature but it needs configuration to make it works. You might find that there are very limited number of documentations available on the net about this case and if you find them you will know how complicated they are. So in this article I make it simple for you and I guarantee it’s very easy to do this on Ubuntu (including Kubuntu and Neon). Ah, yeah, I include here a demonstration video you can play (don’t worry it’s hosted on PeerTube server, not YouTube). You will start with several basic knowledge below, then install everything needed, and then do the job. I hope this may help you to help anyone with disabilities or impairments to use GNU/Linux. Enjoy!

• HandBrake 1.2.0 is now available as the latest update to this popular cross-platform, open-source video transcoder software.

• HandBrake 1.2.0 switches back over to FFmpeg from Libav for doing all of the heavy lifting for the video transcoding. HandBrake 1.2 also drops a number of deprecated/legacy presets, adds new presets around the Amazon Fire and Chromecast, fixes some Blu-ray issues, adds support for decoding TIFF/LZMA video, supports the Speex audio decoder, improves its FreeBSD build support, and has a variety of other improvements.

• We all know, we almost 80-90% migrated from PC (Desktop) to laptop.

• But one thing we want from a laptop, it’s long battery life and we want to use every drop of power.

• So it’s good to know where our power is going and getting waste.

• You can use the powertop utility to see what’s drawing power when your system’s not plugged in.

• You need to run the powertop utility in terminal with super user privilege.

• It will access the hardware and measure power usage.

• So how long different client software like web browsers cache DNS responses internally? Anywhere from 2 seconds to infinity!

• DNS records come with a time-to-live (TTL) hint in seconds that suggest how long a cache can consider the response to be fresh; and reuse it to answer subsequent queries before having to refresh it. Different DNS clients treat this hint differently: and either ignore it completely in favor of their own policies, or enforce minimum or maximum duration on the records.

Proprietary

• Only months after reaching the 2.0 milestone, the independent Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has added a bunch of useful features.

• Vivaldi 2.2, out today, adds tab session management and access keys. Tab sessions are new to Vivaldi but not the browser world – Edge (RIP, or not) uses them. It’s a feature so blindingly obvious, it’s puzzling why it isn’t a standard.

Instructionals/Technical

• Greetings from another day in our 24-day-long Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.

• We hope that even if you’ve seen some of these before, there will be something new for everybody in our series.

Wine or Emulation

• Yes, in October, I succumbed to the temptation from the evil empire and installed Windows 10 to my daughter’s laptop as a dual boot with Mageia. Well, I actually did it because of two reasons: Windows-based school assignments and a Windows-only game that she wanted to play and that does not run well on WINE.

• Re-based off last week’s second release candidate of Wine 4.0 is now Wine-Staging 4.0-RC2.

• Wine-Staging 4.0-RC2 comes in at 810 patches atop the current upstream Wine code-base. Some patches around the GDI code were upstreamed in recent days while the staging tree picked up a WineX11 patch to improve key translation as some games like Skyrim, Dragon Age 2, and Star Trek Online weren’t seeing all keyboard key events on recent versions of Wine. This staging patch fixes the six year old Wine bug/regression.

Games

• Tangledeep is a roguelike for players of all different skill-levels. It has some sweet art, engaging gameplay and the way they’ve done the character class system is quite interesting too.

• As for the just announced expansion, Legend of Shara will be the first fully-featured expansion pack for the game. It’s going to include plenty of new content and features including a new story, new boss fights, plenty of new areas to explore, new monsters, an increased level cap and the list of additions goes on for a while. Considering it was already quite a big game before, that’s impressive.

• I’ve had a lot of fun with it! I think this might be my current favourite fighting game. It’s nowhere near as complex as some other fighting games, while still remaining a decent challenge. Great if you’re not usually into them that’s for sure.

• It works well on Linux, the Steam Controller worked out of the box and so I don’t really have any issue with it at this point.

• Valve have been quick to respond to feedback and issues with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive lately, especially with the Danger Zone Battle Royale mode. In the last week, it’s had a few nice updates.

• While not officially shown as such on Steam, the city-builder Endciv now has a Linux build up for testing.

• It arrived last week, although it came across some Unity bugs with it not being given a resolution. After speaking to the developer about it, that’s now sorted and it runs.

• Here’s a bit of a surprise that I didn’t know was coming. Dead In Vinland, a survival management sim now has a Linux beta version. I have to say, it looks really good. Mixing in elements from lots of genres together to make a rather interesting brew.

• The building sim Transport Fever from developer Urban Games and publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment has a fresh update out and a teaser of a new game.

• The update adds in some features the community has asked including trains driving backwards instead of them magically flipping around. There’s also a new Dutch translation, improved track construction tools, improved vehicle replacement, an improved camera tool and plenty more features have been tweaked on top of a healthy dose of bug fixes.

• By far the biggest news this year—Steam Play! Valve surprised everyone by announcing their own special fork of Wine named Proton, this includes DXVK which kicks over D3D11 and D3D10 into Vulkan (which Valve funded). Allowing many more games to be played on Linux easily through the Steam client, that don’t actually support Linux.

• If you’ve been holding out on picking up the excellent Slay the Spire, you might want to now with a release coming.

• On January 23rd next year, Slay the Spire is leaving Early Access behind. On top of that, the price will be increasing and so buying it soon would be a good idea.

• Cities: Skylines just received a nice update as a little surprised adding in some nice new content and fixing a lot of issues. Everyone has a few bug fixes to the main game, as well as a free Winter Festival Market landmark.

• On top of that the Industries, ParkLife and Green Cities, After Dark, Snowfall and the free Carols, Candles and Candy DLC all have plenty of bug fixes. The Industries DLC specifically had quite a lot of bugs fixed with it, so hopefully some of the people who were having issues will have a better time with it.

• Vector 36 isn’t like a lot of other racing games. Instead of a car, you’re racing inside a vehicle which hovers above the surface and it’s quite interesting.

• So, your favorite game isn’t available on Linux. What now? It might come as a surprise that there are plenty of excellent games that run on Linux through Wine or Steam’s new Steam Play feature. You can get up and running with them quickly, and enjoy decent performance.

• Now, before you get started, Lutris is easily your best bet for handling Wine games outside of Steam. If the game is a Steam game, enable Steam Play on your account to play your Windows games like native through Steam for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• In this video, we look at the 5 new features which stood out for me in KDE Applications 18.12.

• Here is another release for the release month! This time it’s a new release of Pixel Wheels. This one has been a long time coming: version 0.10.0 got released in September.

• The Skrooge Team announces the release 2.17.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

• Since the author of AqBanking recently posted the question how this works, I think it is a good idea to document it in a publically visible way. First of all: why do we need mapping at all? KMyMoney as well as AqBanking deal with the representation of bank accounts and assign each such object an internal ID. Unfortunately, both of them use a different ID for the same account and so one needs some way of turning a KMyMoney ID into an AqBanking ID and vice versa. This is what we are talking here.

• Since KMyMoney does not only support AqBanking as an online banking backend it provides a standardized interface to all of them. Also, a set of procedures is defined to support a wide range of possible backends. Now we deal with two different interfaces: one required for KMyMoney and another one required by AqBanking. The trick here is the glue-logic residing in KBanking. It does all the magic that is needed for a successful marriage of the two participants.

• This type of headerbar is used to a extensively in GNOME and macOS. The adoption of headerbars appears to be an industry trend, and people often ask why KDE apps don’t have headerbars or even seem to be working towards gaining them.

• Developers wanting to create applications for the Linux-based KDE desktop environment are getting a helping hand from Canonical and Snapcraft. And bleeding-edge users who want to experiment with the full KDE Plasma desktop can now install it as a snap.

• Users wanting to try out KDE Plasma can now install the whole Plasma desktop as a snap. By using the KDE Plasma desktop snap, you’re not making any changes to your underlying system, while also having the option of easily removing it.

• The KDE Plasma Desktop snap is available as a tech preview “and should not be considered for production”.

• Available as a standalone application, the KDE Plasma Desktop snap can be installed on any system that supports snaps, no matter if the system was previously using Plasma desktop or not (it doesn’t replace existing Plasma desktop).

• There are currently some limitations like Wayland not working with this session. You also cannot run applications from the host system, though you’ll see other snaps (if you already have some applications installed as snaps) in the menu, but running them won’t work. apt / snap commands to install extra software don’t work either. As a result, this is useful for testing purposes, and not to replace your current desktop environment, at least for now.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If you use GNOME 3.30 or later, you may find that ‘icons on desktop’ feature does not exist anymore. You cannot add anything to your personal Desktop folder like you usually did. Fortunately, thanks to csoriano, this removed feature can be added back by installing Desktop Icons extension. You will find this extension useful if you use latest GNOME on Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, and Ubuntu if the Nautilus version is over 3.26. This article shows how it looks from openSUSE Tumbleweed GNOME. Try it and enjoy!

• The Friday 14th was the last day of the second Fractal Hackfest. I’ve not spend much time writing real code, the Thursday was mainly another hacking day and I’ve been able to continue with the fractal-backend creation, but there’s a lot of work to do there.

• Freedom of choice is a central plank of open source software, and it’s very relevant when choosing and configuring a desktop environment. One of Linux’s best features is its modularity.

• Extensibility relates to the ability to customize a desktop environment to an individual’s preferences and tastes. This flexibility is offered by themes, extensions, and applets.

• GNOME ships with a System Settings tool which isn’t as diverse as some of its peers. There’s still useful options such as a simple way to enable remote access and file sharing. If you’re serious about customizing GNOME, you’ll need the GNOME Tweaks utility. It’s not an official GNOME app, but it offers some advanced tinkering. But when it comes to micro-configuring the GNOME desktop to your preference, Tweaks still leaves us asking for more. Fortunately, there’s an awesome range of extensions that provide additional functionality.

• Here’s our recommended GNOME shell extensions. Most of the extensions are not officially supported by GNOME. But they all take the desktop to the next level, either by adding useful functionality, improving your workflow, or simply offering a touch of panache to the desktop. All the extensions all compatible with the latest release of GNOME. Naturally there’s only open source goodness on offer.

Distributions

Reviews

New Releases

• The latest updates from debian 9.6 (stretch), antiX and MX repos.

• GIMP 2.10 (with plugins) MESA 18.2.6 updated firmware 4.19.5 kernel (with blk-mq file system corruption patch) Updated packages (sample) Browser: Firefox 64.0 Video Player: VLC 3.0.3 Music Manager/Player: Clementine 1.3.1 Email client: Thunderbird 52.9.1 Office suite: LibreOffice 6.0.1 Some Xfce components updated (Xfce-settings, Thunar, etc…)

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• “Time flies when you’re having fun”, 6 months after releasing the official SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 GA and 1 week after releasing the official SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP4, your SUSE Linux Enterprise Engineering Team (SUSE LEET?!) is thrilled to announce the first beta of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1!

Slackware Family

• MATE Developers are still working on next major update, MATE 1.22, but in the meantime, they are still pushing updates to the latest stable release: MATE 1.20. Several packages were getting fixes while others have received translations updates and they have been pushed to public for few days. I’m a little bit behind as i’m focusing on stabilizing Cinnamon packages and it seems they are now in stable states as LinuxMint 19.1 has been released. I can now focus on my MATE project again.

Fedora

• We’re pleased to announce the second release candidate for Qubes 4.0.1! Features:

• Fixes for bugs discovered in 4.0.1-rc1 All 4.0 dom0 updates to date Fedora 29 TemplateVM Debian 9 TemplateVM Whonix 14 Gateway and Workstation TemplateVMs Linux kernel 4.14

• You can explore the available columns using –columns=help. In Flatpak 1.2, all the list-producing commands will support the –columns option: list, search, remotes, remote-ls, ps, history.

• One nice side-effect of having –columns is that we can add more information to the output of these commands without overflowing the display, by adding optional columns that are not included in the default output.

• We had a great Fedora 29 release party at Pune, India on 15th December.

• The latest Linux desktop environment sought for inclusion in the Fedora package repository is for the Deepin Desktop Environment.

• The desktop environment of Deepin is being proposed for added to the F30 package repository for this project that aims for ease-of-use / usability and elegance.

Debian Family

• I am a Debian Developer since November 28. When I joined Debian in 2015. I didn’t had any plans to became a DD. Back then my contributions were uploading screenshots to the screenshots.debian.net and I mainly done this to escape from boring college lab projects (my most respected teachers, sorry).

• Fast forward to 2018 many things changed in my life and Debian played a good portion in it.

• Welcome to another of my monthly summaries on my work in the free software world. My mission is to make engineering and science available for everyone, and Debian, the Universal Operating System, is my weapon of choice.

• I received some feedback on my last post that I made it seem I would be stepping away from my role maintaining FreeCAD and other packages on the Debian Science Team, which was an unfortunate miscommunication on my part. Mainly, I just would like to reduce the proportion of my overall free software time on it, from its current amount, nearly 100%, to a roughly even 1/3rd split between Debian Science, FreeCAD, and PostCAD. The latter is a promising personal project to make an OpenCASCADE-powered CAD extension for PostgreSQL, bringing support for CAD file formats, datatypes, and algorithms to the powerful Postgres ecosystem, similar to what PostCAD has done for geospatial analysis. This could serve as a backend for both FreeCAD in the short term, and in the long term, it could power a web-based version of FreeCAD, perhaps with some Django-powered middleware serving a REST API for some WebGL-based frontend.

• So, besides summarizing my work this month, I also plan to give a synopsis on my Debian packaging, for both what’s in-progress and on my wishlist. As you’ll see, it’s quite extensive. My hope is that by whittling away at both lists, my Debian Science work can focus more on maintenance of existing packages, and free up some time for other things.

• Been quite some time since I wrote about anything. This time, it is Debutsav. When it comes to full-fledged FOSS conferences, I usually am an attendee or at most a speaker. I have given some sporadic advices and suggestions to few in the past, but that was it. However, this time I played the role of an organizer.

• DebUtsav Kochi is the second edition of Debian Utsavam, the celebration of Free Software by Debian community. We didn’t name it MiniDebConf because it was our requirement for the conference to be not just Debian specific, but should include general FOSS topics too. This is specifically because our target audience aren’t yet Debian-aware to have a Debian-only event. So, DebUtsav Kochi had three tracks – one for general FOSS topics, one for Debian talks and one for hands-on workshops.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Linux is an open-source operating system and Ubuntu is one of its very popular distros which is rapidly increasing its user base. With Linux and its distros, one can learn and do a lot of things. In simple words, Linux is an ocean of knowledge and endless opportunities. Many people reading this article will claim that they know everything about Linux and they are expert at Ubuntu but this is not the case because there are many things you don’t know about Linux.

• This article is dedicated to everyone using Ubuntu, right from the noobs to the Linux professionals. Today I am going to give you list of Top 25 Ubuntu news websites and blogs which you guys will find very helpful to learn more about Linux and its distros. The website listed here cover all the minor details such as How-to guides, news, tutorials and everything you need to know about Linux.

• If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).

• We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.

• The GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop continues being tuned for better performance.

• Canonical’s Daniel Van Vugt has shared his latest status update concerning all of his performance profiling and tuning work for the distribution’s GNOME Shell based desktop.

• The development work of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo is going on in full progress. In a related development, according to a recent report from Phoronix, the Ubuntu developers are working to reduce the CPU usage of the open source operating system.

• Specifically, Canonical’s Daniel Van Vugt has shared his updates on different bug fixes that aim to reduce the GNOME Shell’s CPU usage by a third for maximized windows.

• Unity8 is a graphical shell targeting a range of devices and form factors including phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Unity8 uses the facility to customize Mir’s default window management to give its “convergent” experience.

• In addition to the phones and tablets supported by Ubuntu Touch work is in progress to adapt Unity8 for use on PostmarketOS, Arch, Fedora, Debian in addition to Ubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

• The mainstreaming of Linux is accelerating every day. Many servers use Linux distributions, while Android remains the undisputed king of mobile. True, adoption of operating systems based on the open source kernel are still virtually nonexistent on the desktop, but as Windows 10 gets worse and worse, more and more home users may turn to Ubuntu, Google Chrome OS, and others. Just yesterday, Dell updated two of its mobile workstations to the latest Ubuntu LTS version.

• Linux Mint 19.1 is now officially available as the first update to the Linux Mint 19 stack that debuted back in July and powered by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• Actually company’s not even the right word — Purism is a “social purpose corporation” that prioritizes software and hardware freedom, privacy, and security over profit. All of the laptops the company sells are powered by GNU/Linux software. And Purism’s first phone will be too.

• The Linux phone is not dead yet, although the Ubuntu Phone project has been buried a while ago. Purism’s upcoming phone promises to deliver support for both the company’s own PurismOS, but also for Ubuntu Touch, which has been picked up for further development by the UBports team last year, after Canonical abandoned it. Sriram Ramkrishna, Business and Community liaison for Prism, revealed yesterday that the first Librem 5 developer kits are on their way.

• According to Sriram, the generic i.MX 6 boards — which were used for most demos that made it to the public so far — have been upgraded to the Purism i.MX 8M-based hardware. Since there is still a lot of work required to bring the whole project closer to its market-ready status, the backers who are receiving the kits will also get access to a Matrix channel. “This channel will be staffed by our engineering team who will be on hand to answer questions, work with the community on merge requests,” but all those interested can send an email to info@puri.sm to gain access to the group.

• Qualcomm and Intrinsyc opened pre-orders on a 75 x 36mm “Qualcomm Flight Pro” reference platform for drones and robotics that runs Linux on a Snapdragon 820 with WiFi, BT, GNSS, IMUs, 4x cameras, and optional motor board.

• The Qualcomm Flight Pro reference platform for consumer drones and robotics applications is a follow-on to the Qualcomm Flight platform, which was previously launched under the name Snapdragon Flight. Intrinsyc is distributing the Qualcomm Flight Pro for Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and has opened pre-orders at $949, with shipments due in early January.

• A recent core movement has been greatly helped by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Makers around the globe had been tinkering more and more with open hardware – with the Arduino for one – as the price and complexity fell. The Raspberry Pi was the icing on the home-made cake, with all the abundant resources the Foundation brought with it. This issue we’re celebrating maker culture and helping all the many people that we expect will be wondering what to do with their new toys after Christmas. So jump on board and join the maker revolution and build something fun, something shared and something open source!

• Lanner’s “LEC-3034” is a fanless, Intel Bay Trail based DIN-rail box PC with up to 4x GbE, 4x USB, and 8x isolated serial ports plus SATA and mSATA storage and M.2 support for 4G.

• Lanner’s line of industrial computers, which includes its recent, Apollo Lake based NVA-3000 embedded vision computer, now has a new DIN-rail mountable PC that harkens back to Intel’s previous Bay Trail generation of Atom SoCs. The fanless, 169.5 x 127 x 69mm LEC-3034 runs Linux 2.6 or Windows 7 on a dual-core, 1.33GHz Atom E3825 and supports -40 to 70°C temperatures.

• Today I’m playing around with a Nordic Thingy:52 Bluetooth 5 development kit from Nordic Semiconductor.

• I don’t know if 74 chips have got smaller since I was a kid or if I’ve just got bigger but this is a test of dexterity.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Is messaging really so complicated that you need five different messaging apps on your phone? Discover the reasons behind messaging vendor lock-in.

• One of the saddest stories of vendor lock-in is the story of messaging. What makes this story sad is that the tech industry has continued to repeat the same mistakes and build the same proprietary systems over the last two decades, and we as end users continue to use them. In this article, I look at some of the history of those mistakes, the lessons we should have learned and didn’t, and the modern messaging world we find ourselves in now. Along the way, I offer some explanations for why we’re in this mess.

• You wrote a Python library. I’m sure it’s amazing! Wouldn’t it be neat if it was easy for people to use it? Here is a checklist of things to think about and concrete steps to take when open sourcing your Python library.

• So it seemed like only a matter of time before the companies built around open source software would have to confront their own crisis of confidence: open source business models are really tough, selling software-as-a-service is one of the most natural of them, the cloud service providers are really good at it — and their commercial appetites seem boundless. And, like a new cherry red two-seater sports car next to a minivan in a suburban driveway, some open source companies are dealing with this crisis exceptionally poorly: they are trying to restrict the way that their open source software can be used. [...]

Events

• The OpenShift Commons Gathering at KubeCon Seattle, last week, was packed with information on the past, present and future of Red Hat OpenShift in all its forms. Over 350 people from over 115 companies from around the world to gathered at the event and hear about the future of the platform. The event even included the first live demo of Red Hat OpenShift 4.0, which is currently in development.

• This was the first time the outside world got a glimpse of the OpenShift 4.0 platform in action. The goal for the platform, said Derek Carr, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, is similar to the original goal of Kubernetes. While Kubernetes was built to enable a 10 fold increase in the velocity of application operations, the goal of OpenShift 4.0 is to provide a 10 fold increase in velocity for Kubernetes-based operations.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• After promoting the Chrome 71 web browser to the stable channel earlier this month, Google has updated the Chrome OS operating system for Chromebook devices to version 71. Chrome OS 71 is now the most stable and advanced version of the Linux-based operating system that powers Chromebook devices of all sizes and shapes, and it brings quite a bunch of improvements and new features, especially to newer models, such as Google’s Pixel Slate tablet that rivals most Android and iOS-powered tablets.

• Google has rolled out the public beta of the Chrome 72 web browser across all supported platforms. This is a sizable feature release that also packs its share of deprecations.

Mozilla

• One of the great things about Firefox is the ability to customize with extensions…

LibreOffice

• Improve your C++ skills! Last week, we had a workshop covering an introduction to the language, and looking at functions and strings. Participants watched a couple of presentation videos, and then had the opportunity to put questions to experienced LibreOffice developers.

• LibreOffice has the capability to add references to a document and finally a bibliographical index, which is essential for scientific publications. The style of references depend on the journal and the discipline. So it is common to just add numbers in square brackets like [1] in engineering whereas humanities show name and year like (author, year). And finally the formatting of the bibliographical index is a science itself. LibreOffice can handle this to some extend but not in a nice and convenient way.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Project Mu offers secure management of UEFI settings, reportedly better security, a “high performance boot”, modern BIOS menu examples including an on-screen keyboard, secure management of UEFI settings, and related features.

BSD

• With ZFS On Linux (ZOL) being more actively developed than the ZFS file-system code within the OpenSolaris-derived Illumos kernel, FreeBSD will be transitioning their ZFS file-system kernel driver to be based on ZOL.

• Particularly with Delphix moving their ZFS code to be based upon ZOL rather than the Illumos kernel tree, that ZFS code isn’t being maintained as well as ZOL. As a result, the FreeBSD ZFS maintainers have decided to transition to ZOL — and the upstream ZOL developers are willing to allow FreeBSD support directly within ZOL as a single shared code-base.

• If you’re an avid Linux system user like me or are working as a sysadmin for managing company networks, chances are you’ve stumbled at least once with terms like FreeBSD and BSD. So, what are these and what is their significance? In this guide, we’ll cover the differences between FreeBSD vs Linux thoroughly, and will also highlight their similarities at the same time. Overall, our objective is to enlighten our readers about the different variations of the infamous Unix systems and how they are categorized. Stay tuned throughout this guide to learn more about these legacy systems in order to choose the right one for your job.

• While FreeBSD tends to be pretty good about security by default, the HardenedBSD downstream derivative is out with their latest release based upon FreeBSD 12.

• In addition to re-basing against upstream FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE, the inaugural stable release of HardenedBSD 12 adds Non-Cross-DSO CFI, introduces support for jailed Bhyve virtualization, per-jail toggles for unprivileged process debugging, enables Spectre V2 mitigation with Retpolines by default, disables SMT/HT by default, makes greater use of the LLVM compiler toolchain components, and for increasing performance its applications are now built with link-time optimizations (LTO).

• The first public release of hardened/12-stable/master branch, which contains lots of security improvements over 11-STABLE.

• HardenedBSD has released version 12 of its security-enhanced fork of FreeBSD. Improvements in this release include Non-Cross-DSO Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) for applications on amd64 and arm64; jailed bhyve; per-jail toggles for unprivileged process debugging; Spectre v2 mitigation with retpoline applied to the entirety of base and ports; Symmetric Multi-Threading (SMT) disabled by default; and more.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This is to announce sed-4.6, a stable release.

• There have been 52 commits by 6 people in the 38 weeks since 4.5.

• See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

• Special thanks to Assaf Gordon for doing so much of the work. Thanks to everyone else who has contributed!

• GNU Sed 4.6 is worth mentioning since now by default it uses fully-buffered output rather than line-buffered outputs in writing to files. This should “noticeably improve performance” for the common sed -i commands and other Sed configurations when writing out to files. The previous behavior though can be used if desired by the -u switch.

• 2018 sadly wasn’t the year that the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) transitioned to a Git workflow for developing this flagship open-source compiler… But Eric S Raymond does continue making progress on being able to convert the GCC tree from SVN to Git.

• Back during the summer Eric S Raymond said the Git transition was being held up by RAM prices, in particular needing more DDR4 in his main workstation with 64GB not being enough for his software to convert the massive SVN tree to Git. And that’s when he said his system with more RAM would work out better than using a public cloud, the GCC build infrastructure, or other alternatives to quickly access more computing resources with greater amounts of RAM to handle this conversion of the revision control system.

• A little over six years ago, the GNU Guix project was announced. Since that first email, the project and the community gathering around Guix have grown steadily.

• Around 265 people have collectively contributed tens of thousands of commits to the project. In the past year alone, we have received close to 11,000 commits. More than 8,700 packages are now available, and Guix is supported on five different CPU architectures. Guix has made inroads in the field of scientific computing, and we have been able to secure institutional support for parts of our build farm providing binary substitutes to users. As a welcoming community, you have spent countless hours introducing Guix to new users, to help them when they experienced bugs, and to remove those bugs from Guix.

• In addition to all of that, your generous financial contributions in the past year have been instrumental in bootstrapping and maintaining our new build new farm, for which we experimented with hardware that has been stripped of Intel’s Management Engine, and which is running Libreboot instead of a proprietary BIOS. While it turned out to be not quite as simple as we had expected, we have learned valuable lessons from this experience. Your contributions have also paid for server hosting fees, for hardware replacement and maintenance costs, and for additional ARM build hosts.

Public Services/Government

• Rules and regulations were one of the barriers to sharing the source code of software solutions, the canton explains in a press release. The existing rules allowed sharing, but this permission was made crystal clear in the ICT regulations approved in January this year.

• This encouraged the IT department to offer tools that make it easy for the canton’s public services to share their code. The IT department created a page for the canton on GitHub, a popular platform for sharing source code.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Since 2000, 8.5 billion chips based on MIPS cores have been shipped, according to Swift. A broad range of customers are sticking with MIPS, including Microchip, Mobileye (now an Intel company), MediaTek, and Denso, Japan’s leading tier one.

• Although commanding consistent respect among engineers, MIPS — whose ownership has been anything but stable — has struggled to build its ecosystem and generate momentum. MIPS trails far behind Arm today. Wave’s goal is to reverse a trend that looked for a long time like a downward spiral for MIPS. `

• Wave Computing says it plans to “open source its MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA)” to make it easier for chip makers, developers, and researches to use the chip designs for their projects.

• The MIPS Open program will allow participants to access “the most recent versions of the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA free of charge — with no licensing or royalty fees.” Users will also be covered by hundreds of patents owned by MIPS.

• The MIPS ISA will be open-sourced with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions opening up and will be free of any licensing or royalty fees as well as access to existing MIPS patents.

• Wave Computing, the Silicon Valley company that is accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) from the edge to the data center, announced it will open source its MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA) to accelerate the ability for semiconductor companies, developers and universities to adopt and innovate using MIPS for next-generation system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Under the MIPS Open program, participants will have full access to the most recent versions of the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA free of charge – with no licensing or royalty fees. Additionally, participants in the MIPS Open program will be licensed under MIPS’ hundreds of existing worldwide patents.

• In the city, we’re constantly saturated with the radio waves from 10 or 20 different routers, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure. But in rural communities there might only be one internet connection for a whole village. LibreRouter is a hardware and software project that looks to let those communities build their own modern, robust mesh networks to make the most of their limited connectivity.

• The intended use case is in situations where, say, a satellite or wired connection terminates at one point, the center of an area, but the people who need to use it live nearby — but well outside the hundred feet or so you can expect a Wi-Fi signal to travel. Often in such a case it’s also prohibitively expensive to run more wires or install cellular infrastructure.

Programming/Development

• Dillinger is a cloud-enabled Markdown editor which is free to use. Its simple and modern interface will make you feel more comfortable to work with. If you are a beginner and looking for a tool that will allow you to convert your Markdown text to HTML or HTML to Markdown easily then here you have Dillinger. What you need to do is just write your text or drop your file in the left window there then select the format you want it to be converted, and you will see it has been converted to the chosen format in the right window.

• Our roadmap is available online, including the overall plans for 2018.

• Tooling is an important part of what makes a programming language practical and productive. Rust has always had some great tools (Cargo in particular has a well-deserved reputation as a best-in-class package manager and build tool), and the 2018 edition includes more tools which we hope further improve Rust users’ experience.

• In this blog post I’ll cover Clippy and Rustfmt – two tools that have been around for a few years and are now stable and ready for general use. I’ll also cover IDE support – a key workflow for many users which is now much better supported. I’ll start by talking about Rustfix, a new tool which was central to our edition migration plans.

• It is that time of year again when we recognize someone from our community in memory of our friend Malcolm.

• Malcolm was an early core contributor to Django and had both a huge influence and large impact on Django as we know it today. Besides being knowledgeable he was also especially friendly to new users and contributors. He exemplified what it means to be an amazing Open Source contributor. We still miss him.

• A better plugin model, a new IDE, and Kubenative Workspaces — Eclipse Che Is on Fire !

• Programming is about languages, of course, but also much more. Along with good languages, programmers need toolsets to support coding: software development kits (SDKs), command-line utilities for source-code inspection and even editing, package managers, repositories targeted at developers, and so on. The ten articles listed below cover programming in this broad sense.

• The PyQt5 includes QML as a means of declaratively describing a user interface and is possible to write complete standalone QML applications.

• The demand in business applications is growing fast and developers are facing many challenges such as evolutivity, scalability, and re-usability. In order to satisfy business needs, developers around the world need to create new tools that will help them solve the above presented challenges.

• While Facebook’s HHVM “HipHop Virtual Machine” project was born as a faster PHP implementation, with PHP7 offering significant upstream performance improvements and Facebook pursuing their own Hack programming language implementation with HHVM, the v3.3.0 release is the last release officially focusing on PHP language support.

• The Eclipse Foundation, the platform for open collaboration and innovation, finishes the year 2018 driving innovation through open source in a wide range of global initiatives, including Internet of Things, Java runtimes, GeoSpatial, Automotive, Model-based engineering, IDEs, and emerging technologies. Serving as a platform enabling open collaboration for the world’s new digital economy — managed by an efficient staff of just 30 full-time professionals — the Eclipse Foundation now boasts oversight of more than 360 projects and 1,550+ code committers who have contributed more than 162 million lines of code to date with a estimated software value of approximately $9 billion.

• Since I launched it 18 months ago, three cohorts of students have participated in Weekly Python Exercise — receiving a new Python challenge via e-mail every Tuesday, and the solution the following Monday. Students had access to our exclusive forums, and traded ideas, solutions, and techniques with one another. Some attended my live, video office hours, when I answered Python questions that they might have.

• When it comes to forecasting data (time series or other types of series), people look to things like basic regression, ARIMA, ARMA, GARCH, or even Prophet but don’t discount the use of Random Forests for forecasting data.

• Random Forests are generally considered a classification technique but regression is definitely something that Random Forests can handle.

• Every time I need to install Python on OSX or whenever a colleague asks for help, I have to search fo the most updated instructions on Google, and every time I find different ways of doing the exact same thing.

• Tired of this, I decided to write down my own notes. Please note that I don’t claim this to be the best way of installing Python on OSX. It works fine for me so use it at your own risk.

• Every data scientist knows that data pre-processing and feature engineering is paramount for a successful data science project. Often, however, these steps are time-consuming and involve you waiting for computations to finish, keeping you from creating that awesome model. In this post we will look at a few tricks that intend to speed up your pandas data-crunching workflows by enabling Pandas to use your machine in an optimal way.

• PEP 8, sometimes spelled PEP8 or PEP-8, is a document that provides guidelines and best practices on how to write Python code. It was written in 2001 by Guido van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and Nick Coghlan. The primary focus of PEP 8 is to improve the readability and consistency of Python code.

• Welcome to the final chapter of this pygame project where we have finally concluded the pygame project which has been ongoing for some time already.

• Eclipse Che is a great platform to build cloud-native tools. For Eclipse Che to be successful in its mission, it requires a strong extensibility model with an enjoyable developer experience for contributors.

• In the past, Eclipse Che’s extensibility was focused on white-labelling use cases. ISVs were able to customize Eclipse Che, building their own version by completely customizing it and distributing it to their own audiences. While that extensibility approach has been great for many partners, it has always been seen as complex, with a technology stack (especially GWT in the IDE) which resulted in a non-optimal developer experience. The lack of a dynamic extensibility also forced a Che Plugin to be packaged in a “Che assembly” in order to make it available to end users. There was no way to quickly build a plugin, package it so that it could be installed in a running Che and make it available without rebuilding all of Che.

• To address these issues we’ll be phasing out the GWT-based IDE in favour of another open Eclipse Foundation IDE project: Eclipse Theia. As introduced earlier, Eclipse Theia is a framework to build web IDEs. It is built in TypeScript and will give contributors a more enjoyable experience with a programming model that is more flexible and easier to use, and makes it faster to deliver their new plugins.

• Our main goal is to provide a dynamic plugin model. In Che, a user shouldn’t need to worry about the dependencies needed for the tools running in their workspace — they should just be available when needed. This means that a Che plugin provides its dependencies, its back-end services (which could be running in a sidecar container connected to the user’s workspace), and the IDE UI extension. By packaging all these elements together, the user’s impression is that Che “magically” provided language services and the developer tooling they need for their workspace.

• PyCharm 2018.3.2 is now available. This version comes with a couple of small improvements. Get it now from our website.

• Bruce Lawson has written a rather nice description of the practical value of semantic HTML, and you should read it, especially if you’re a full-stack developer who feels that HTML is the super-easy part of your toolkit and the components are the most important. But there’s one extra argument I’d like to add to his list; less important than some of the others, but a different nuance.

• This talk will introduce the workflows and concerns of data scientists and machine learning engineers and demonstrate how to make Kubernetes a powerhouse for intelligent applications. We’ll show how community projects like Kubeflow and radanalytics.io support the entire intelligent application development lifecycle. We’ll cover several key benefits of Kubernetes for a data scientist’s workflow, from experiment design to publishing results. You’ll see how well scale-out data processing frameworks like Apache Spark work in Kubernetes. System operators will learn how Kubernetes can support data science and machine learning workflows. Application developers will learn how Kubernetes can enable intelligent applications and cross-functional collaboration. Data scientists will leave with concrete suggestions for how to use Kubernetes and open-source tools to make their work more productive.

• During my Pythonic data science team coaching I see various problems coming up that I’ve helped solve before. Based on these observations and my prior IP design and delivery for clients over the years I’ve put together a 1 day public course aimed at data scientists (any level) who want to be more confident with lower-risk approaches to delivering data science projects.

• Successfully Delivering Data Science Projects runs on Friday February 1st 2019, early bird tickets have sold out, a handful of regular tickets remain (be quick). This course suits any data scientist who has discovered just how vague and confusing a research to deployment project can be, who’d like to be more confident in their plans and outcomes.

Standards/Consortia

• Vulkan 1.1.96 is out this morning and while it doesn’t introduce any new extensions, it does have a number of corrections and clarifications to this graphics/compute API’s documentation.

Leftovers

• A New York Police Department spokesman told Ars that Kroll died of a drug overdose.

• Colin Kroll, the co-founder and chief executive of the popular app HQ Trivia, was found dead on Sunday, apparently of a drug overdose, at his home in Lower Manhattan. He was 34.

• Continually ask yourself, “How much is too much?” when it comes to your employees. Good employees often get more and more responsibility and may be asked to do things outside of the norm, like handling big problems over a weekend or being expected to answer management ASAP, even when they specifically asked off. Small projects can balloon into a big mess due to stakeholders or bad project management, which can double or triple the work they need to do, and then they get blamed when the work isn’t working. Employees who feel overworked and undervalued may quit in search of a more balanced opportunity.

Science

• In the image above you can see what four years of progress in AI image generation looks like. The crude black-and-white faces on the left are from 2014, published as part of a landmark paper that introduced the AI tool known as the generative adversarial network (GAN). The color faces on the right come from a paper published earlier this month, which uses the same basic method but is clearly a world apart in terms of image quality.

• These realistic faces are the work of researchers from Nvidia. In their paper, shared publicly last week, they describe modifying the basic GAN architecture to create these images. Take a look at the pictures below. If you didn’t know they were fake, could you tell the difference?

• The online culture of instant gratification robs us of the endorphins normally produced of effort and endurance

• He is the author of “The Art of Computer Programming,” a continuing four-volume opus that is his life’s work. The first volume debuted in 1968, and the collected volumes (sold as a boxed set for about $250) were included by American Scientist in 2013 on its list of books that shaped the last century of science — alongside a special edition of “The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and monographs by Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Richard Feynman.

• [...]

• “I am worried that algorithms are getting too prominent in the world,” he added. “It started out that computer scientists were worried nobody was listening to us. Now I’m worried that too many people are listening.”

• Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.

Hardware

• OLED Displays have become an integral part of the mobile industry. There are a number of notable advantages of using OLED displays over normal LCDs. That includes, vibrant colors, thinner display module, lesser power consumption and greater contrast ratio.

• In a report recently released by market research firm IHS Markit, in the third quarter of 2018 OLED displays dominated over 61 percent of the global market for smartphone displays (by revenue). Samsung was dominating the market in the period between July and September 2018 with a market share of 93.3%.

• Samsung’s bet with the OLED display technology is paying off big time. According to a report released by market research firm IHS Markit, the OLED panels accounted for more than 61 percent of the global market for smartphone displays (by revenue) in the third quarter of 2018. Samsung held 93.3 percent of the entire market during the three month period between July and September 2018.

Health/Nutrition

• The decision drew a dissent from three conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, who suggested that the court was ducking the cases because they involved Planned Parenthood and touched on abortion. But, intriguingly, the court’s two other conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and the court’s latest member, Brett Kavanaugh, sided with the court’s liberals in rejecting the case.

• What are we to make of it?

• It’s not easy to read the tea leaves here because the cases didn’t pose a direct challenge to the constitutionality of abortion restrictions. Instead, they centered on whether those states could exclude Planned Parenthood from providing contraception and other health services in the Medicaid program. Those states object to Planned Parenthood providing access to abortion outside Medicaid, which does not cover the procedure. Had the court accepted the states’ arguments, tens of thousands of indigent women could have lost the health care they receive from the group.

Security

• Australian law enforcement agencies have pushed for the encryption law which passed on 6 December because they don’t know that there is no need for access to encrypted content in order to solve crimes, world-renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier says.

• Though the malware has already been named as a version of Shamoon, sources in the cybersecurity industry have cautioned against attributing it to Iran. It’s unclear whether it’s the original creators of Shamoon or some other nation state trying to implicate Iran as part of a flase flagging operation, said one source who’d been actively responding to the incident. (Multiple sources were granted anonymity for this story as they weren’t permitted to go on record by their employers.)

• Researchers who have tracked Shamoon for years say that the new variant has similarities to its predecessors, which were attributed to Iranian state-sponsored hackers. This doesn’t definitively mean that this new malware was created by the same actor, but so far analysts say that the new Shamoon attacks recall past assaults.

• “On Oct. 23, 2018, NASA cybersecurity personnel began investigating a possible compromise of NASA servers where personally identifiable information (PII) was stored. After initial analysis, NASA determined that information from one of the servers containing Social Security numbers and other PII data of current and former NASA employees may have been compromised. Upon discovery of the incidents, NASA cybersecurity personnel took immediate action to secure the servers and the data contained within. NASA and its Federal cybersecurity partners are continuing to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals. This process will take time. The ongoing investigation is a top agency priority, with senior leadership actively involved. NASA does not believe that any Agency missions were jeopardized by the cyber incidents.”

• Anyone worried about anyone having their device compromised with a fake head, either through our method or others’, should perhaps consider not using facial recognition at all. Instead, use a strong alphanumeric passcode, recommended Matt Lewis, research director at cybersecurity contractor NCC Group.

• As the world still tries to find a really good alternative to passwords, there’s bad news for those that thought that facial recognition was the key, after a journalist from Forbes was able to fool most phones with a 3D printed head.

• KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Web sites for the global top 100 companies by market value, and found just five percent of top 100 firms listed a chief information security officer (CISO) or chief security officer (CSO). Only a little more than a third even listed a CTO in their executive leadership pages.

• The reality among high-tech firms that make up the top 50 companies in the NASDAQ market was even more striking: Fewer than half listed a CTO in their executive ranks, and I could find only three that featured a person with a security title.

• Twitter today announced that the platform’s support form had been hit by a data breach exposing user data to IP addresses from Saudi Arabia and China.

• The leaked data contains the country codes of the phone numbers linked to users’ accounts. In an official statement, the social media platform said that phone numbers and other confidential user data had not been exposed in the attack.

• Occasionally, I test the few security tools that exist in Linux distributions, to see what they offer and whether they really have merit. One such tool is Chkrootkit, and so far, I’ve reported not one but two false positives over the years – including lkm warning and suckit infected message. And now I’ve stumbled upon another dud, and this is one called Linux/Ebury – Operation Windigo.

• I came across this result while testing the Ubuntu-based Robolinux 9.3, and given its strong focus on security, the finding is doubly alarming. But as I suspected right away, it seems to be another false positive, and so I did a little more testing and checking. Let me show you what gives.

• We all have been in a situation where we are stuck on a shady website that hits us with a barrage of ads and suspicious content. And no matter how many times you hit the back button, you remain trapped.

• This annoying issue is called “history manipulation” which is done by websites to prevent from you going back to the original page where you began.

• Pivoting is the unique technique of using an instance (also referred to as a ‘plant’ or ‘foothold’) to be able to move around inside a network. Basically using the first compromise to allow and even aid in the compromise of other otherwise inaccessible systems. In this scenario we will be using it for routing traffic from a normally non-routable network.

• For example, we are a pentester for Security-R-Us. You pull the company directory and decide to target a user in the target IT department. You call up the user and claim you are from a vendor and would like them to visit your website in order to download a security patch. At the URL you are pointing them to, you are running an Internet Explorer exploit.

• Microsoft today emitted an emergency security patch for a flaw in Internet Explorer that hackers are exploiting in the wild to hijack computers.

• The vulnerability, CVE-2018-8653, is a remote-code execution hole in the browser’s scripting engine.

• Visiting a malicious website abusing this bug with a vulnerable version of IE is enough to be potentially infected by spyware, ransomware or some other software nasty. Thus, check Microsoft Update and install any available patches as soon as you can.

• Any injected code will run with the privileges of the logged-in user, which is why browsing the web using Internet Explorer as an administrator is like scratching an itch with a loaded gun.

Defence/Aggression

• The statement was released after the Senate passed a resolution via voice vote last week holding bin Salman responsible for the death of Khashoggi, who was killed after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

• The U.S. Senate delivered a rare double rebuke to President Donald Trump on Saudi Arabia last week, voting to end U.S. military support for the war in Yemen and blame the Saudi crown prince for the murder of journalist Khashoggi.

• The number of people killed fighting in the war in Yemen jumped to 3,068 in November, the first time it has exceeded the 3,000 mark in a single month since the start of the four-year conflict. This is about the same number as were being killed in Iraq at the height of the slaughter there in 2006.

• The difference is that the Iraqis were not starving to death as is happening in Yemen. Aid organisations have long warned of mass starvation as 14 million hungry people are on the verge of famine, according to the United Nations. In a ruined economy, many Yemenis do not have the money to buy the little food that is available.

• But at the last moment, just as millions of Yemenis were being engulfed by the crisis, a final calamity may have been averted.

• Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of cities across the West African country of Togo on December 8, as part of a recently revived wave of nationwide protests demanding political reforms. At the center of their demands is the reinstatement of the 1992 constitution, which included a two-term limit on the presidency before being stripped away by former president Eyadéma Gnassingbé, father of current president Faure Gnassingbé.

• Mass protests first erupted in August 2017, forcing the government into internationally-moderated negotiations, which — in an attempt to resolve the decades-long political crisis — led to the reinstatement of the two-term limit. However, outrage was soon reignited when it was discovered that past presidential terms would not apply, thereby allowing Faure Gnassingbé — already in his third term — to run for president in 2020 as if it were his first time. Negotiations broke down soon after that, leading to the revival of protests last month.

• “Nobody is willing to take that in Togo,” said Togolese Civil League executive director Farida Nabourema. “After 51 years of the Gnassingbé, asking us to give them an additional 10 years, starting 2020, is basically asking us to commit suicide. It’s something we cannot let happen, and it’s the reason we are back on the streets.”

• After first allowing protests in pre-approved zones, the government outright banned large demonstrations before the December 8 mobilization. When upwards of 500,000 people turned out in Lomé, the capital city, the regime deployed heavy military force, wounding dozens of civilians and killing at least three — including an 11-year-old boy.

• A coalition of 14 opposition parties, known as C14, have been one of the major forces driving the protests and what’s known as the Faure Must Go movement. Since negotiations with the government ended last month, they have called for the cancellation of the legislative elections on December 20 and urged their members not to participate. According to movement leaders, the government has been engaging in voter fraud — by enrolling minors, as well as disenfranchising eligible voters through coercive tactics — in preparation for Faure Gnassingbé’s 2020 presidential bid.

• Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.

• Founded in 1994 as an online book seller, Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer, with more than 300 million customers worldwide, and net sales of $178 billion in 2017.

• Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.

• As of the October 12, 2018, deadline for submitting proposals for JEDI, Amazon is the betting favorite for the contract, which will go to just one bidder, in spite of protests by competitors, chief among them Microsoft and IBM. The Pentagon appears likely to select a winner for the contract in 2019.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Inspector General for the Intelligence Community is finally implementing long-resisted whistleblower-related reforms. The IG has previously buried reports indicating whistleblowers were being greeted with retaliation for going through the proper channels. Despite this, government officials continue to claim the only whistleblowers they’ll recognize are those who use the internal options — options that allow the government to control the narrative and, in many cases, do as little as possible to address complaints.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• We have a bit of internal conflict within the federal government these days, to put it mildly. On the one hand, there’s our climate-denying president, not to mention a solidly red Senate that’s not exactly jumping at the chance to take action on climate change. On the other, we have a now blue House of Representatives, and the 13 federal agencies that in late November issued the country’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, a grim report on how climate change is already impacting the daily lives of Americans. And then we have the courts, which have become battlefields for many a climate fight these days, as youth sue the federal government, cities sue oil companies, and nonprofits sue, well, both, in an effort to move the bar forward on climate action.

• International climate negotiations have failed to curb runaway greenhouse gas emissions since the first UN treaty on emission reductions was adopted in 1992. Consumer-focused solutions to climate change such as eating less meat or reducing food mileage, though important, simply won’t be enough to address the systemic nature of the crisis. So what needs to be done to halt global warming? Truthout spoke to Simon Pirani about his newest book, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption, and the prospects for transitioning to a post-fossil fuel world.

Finance

• “But there are consequences for that,” he added. He imagined, with dread, a retail landscape in which Amazon was one of very few options—if not the only one. He also decried Amazon’s pervasiveness in his city’s landscape: Even before the company’s Long Island City “HQ2” move, delivery trucks filled with Amazon boxes, or apartment hallways littered with the same, were practically inescapable. (It should be noted that Brickel, too, has watched the aforementioned Patriot Act episode.)

• Los Angeles teachers set out to provide a “show of force” on Saturday, with tens of thousands rallying in the city’s downtown area to illustrate the power in their numbers, ahead of a potential strike next month.

• The city’s teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), has been embroiled in contract negotiations with the school district for 18 months, with union leaders rejecting the district’s latest offer of a three percent retroactive raise starting from July 2017. The teachers are demanding a 6.5 percent raise as well as smaller class sizes and more school support staff.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In the wake of the 2016 election, Instagram — known as the home of preening influencers, artfully arranged grain bowls and Icelandic vacation photos — somehow escaped much of the scrutiny of other social networks.

• But two new reports suggest that may have been a mistake. The reports, conducted by independent groups and released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday, concluded that Instagram — which is owned by Facebook — became a favored tool of Russian internet trolls after the 2016 election.

• The tech companies’ foot-dragging was described in a pair of reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee published on Monday, in what were the most detailed accounts to date about how Russian agents have wielded social media against Americans in recent years.

• The most explosive finding in the report may be the assertion that both Facebook and Google executives misled Congress in statements. The researchers suggest that Facebook “dissembled” about the IRA’s voter suppression efforts on the platform in written responses to Congress in October, following the testimony of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in October. At the time, the company was asked: “Does Facebook believe that any of the content created by the Russian Internet Research Agency was designed to discourage anyone from voting?” Facebook responded: “We believe this is an assessment that can be made only by investigators with access to classified intelligence and information from all relevant companies and industries.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• As we noted at the time, this was an astoundingly ignorant thing to say, but of course now that Kristof helped get the law passed and put many more lives at risk, the “meh, no big deal if there are some more lawsuits or more censorship” attitude seems to be coming back to bite him.

• By now, of course, you’re aware that the Verizon-owned Tumblr (which was bought by Yahoo, which was bought by Verizon and merged into “Oath” with AOL and other no longer relevant properties) has suddenly decided that nothing sexy is allowed on its servers. This took many by surprise because apparently a huge percentage of Tumblr was used by people to post somewhat racy content. Knowing that a bunch of content was about to disappear, the famed Archive Team sprung into action — as they’ve done many times in the past. They set out to archive as much of the content on Tumblr that was set to be disappeared down the memory hole as possible… and it turns out that Verizon decided as a final “fuck you” to cut them off. Jason Scott, the mastermind behind the Archive Team announced over the weekend that Verizon appeared to be blocking their IPs:

• All posts that are currently flagged as explicit are now being hidden from view, according to Tumblr, and that includes posts that users are in the process of appealing. In addition to what’s already gone, more adult content is going to be flagged in coming weeks, Tumblr says, and it hopes that the automated tools will be more accurate at picking out what counts as explicit.

• Google’s attempts to launch a censored search engine in China appear to have been put on the backburner after the company shut down a data analysis system used for building the engine.

• After a series of backlash, Google has ceased its censored search engine project named Dragonfly. This report comes from The Intercept, which was the first to bring the very existence of Dragonfly into the light.

• This project, which aims at providing censored search results to Chinese citizens, has received a lot of criticism from Google employees as well as the White House.

• GOOGLE HAS BEEN forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned.

• The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

• Non governmental organizations have been doing what they can to bring the wrongs committed by the Nicaraguan government to light. In a bid to shut NGO cake holes, Ortega and his cronies have begun to strip the outfits of their legal status.

• The raids were the latest strong-arm actions taken by the government of President Daniel Ortega. Since popular street protests destabilized his government in April, Ortega has reconsolidated power and methodically pursued perceived enemies.

• Even as Turkish leaders call for an international inquiry into Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khassogi’s murder, the Committee to Protect Journalists found the Turkish government to be the world’s biggest jailer of journalists for the third consecutive year, according to a newly released report.

• According to the global press freedom watchdog’s Annual Prison Census, 251 journalists are currently in jails around the world as of Dec. 1 for charges related to their work — 68 in Turkey, 47 in China and 25 in Egypt, collectively responsible for more than half of the journalists behind bars.

• Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been perhaps the fiercest critic of the Saudi Arabian government’s assassination of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. But he has continued his own government’s repression of dissident journalists across Turkey, which began after an ultimately unsuccessful coup in 2016, when roughly 100 Turkish media organizations were shut down and many of their employees were jailed.

• For the third year in a row, 251 or more journalists are jailed around the world, suggesting the authoritarian approach to critical news coverage is more than a temporary spike. China, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia imprisoned more journalists than last year, and Turkey remained the world’s worst jailer. A CPJ special report by Elana Beiser

• For the third year in a row, Turkey, China and Egypt were responsible for more than half of those jailed, the group found.

• The non-profit group found that least 251 journalists were jailed in 2018 — with 70% facing anti-state charges, such as belonging to or aiding groups deemed terrorist organizations.

• This represents a “new normal” as countries around the globe take an “authoritarian approach to critical news coverage,” said the report, which does an annual count of detained journalists.

• “The West that traditionally stood up to this … is missing in action,” the report’s author, Elana Beiser, told CNN. In terms of human rights, “You don’t see pressure from any kind coming from the White House, at least publicly,” she added.

• Turkey’s state-run news agency says prosecutors are seeking maximum 15-year prison terms for five journalists of an opposition newspaper, intensifying concerns over authorities’ crackdown on news coverage critical of the government.

• Collectively, Turkey, China and Egypt are responsible for more than half of all jailed journalists for the third year in a row. CPJ blamed a fresh wave of repression in those countries, as well as elsewhere such as Saudi Arabia, for the global crackdown on press freedom in 2018. The vast majority of journalists behind bars are facing anti state charges such as belonging to or aiding groups deemed by authorities as terrorist organizations. Worldwide, 28 journalists have been imprisoned on false news charges and Egypt jailed the highest number, 19.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Facebook gave unrestricted access to users’ personal data to more than 150 companies including big names like Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and Yahoo, according to a New York Times report.

• The publication obtained over 270 pages of Facebook’s internal documents from 2017. It revealed how the social media giant considered these companies business partners and exempted them from its privacy rules.

• “Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure,” he wrote, “so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions.”

• In September 1992, May and his friends Eric Hughes and Hugh Daniel came up with the idea of setting up an online mailing list to discuss their ideas. Within a few days of its launch, a hundred people had signed up for the Cypherpunks mailing list. (The group’s name was coined by Hughes’ girlfriend as a play on the “cyberpunk” genre of fiction.) By 1997, it averaged 30 messages daily with about 2,000 subscribers. May was its most prolific contributor.

• May and Hughes, along with free speech activist John Gilmore, wore masks on the cover of the second issue of Wired magazine accompanying a profile by journalist Steven Levy, who described the Cypherpunks as “more a gathering of those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for privacy, and the gumption to do something about it.”

• As Martin Tisney points out in an excellent essay in MIT Tech Review, property rights aren’t just a dysfunctional way to make sense of privacy — they’re also ineffective. Even if you never share your data, corporations and governments can still make potentially compromising inferences about you by analyzing other peoples’ data.

• The answer is that policy experts and technologists too often tacitly accept the concept of “data capitalism.” They see data either as a source of capital (e.g., Facebook uses data about me to target ads) or as a product of labor (e.g., I should be paid for the data that is produced about me). It is neither of these things. Thinking of data as we think of a bicycle, oil, or money fails to capture how deeply relationships between citizens, the state, and the private sector have changed in the data era. A new paradigm for understanding what data is—and what rights pertain to it—is urgently needed if we are to forge an equitable 21st-century polity.

• Germany’s tech watchdog says it has seen no evidence to back up claims being flung around that Chinese telecommunications equipment firm Huawei Technologies could use its products to spy for China.

• All three of Germany’s main mobile network operators use infrastructure provided by Huawei, Spiegel pointed out.

• As it turns out, clearing your browser history was harder to implement than Facebook expected. It’s been more than seven months since Zuckerberg’s announcement and Facebook hasn’t mentioned Clear History since.

• The attack is a byproduct of an unfortunate fact about the online space: it’s very easy to sign up for things, and very hard to quit. Services like Scruff want more users, of course, and a rigorous identity check would make sign-up a lot harder. Attacks like this don’t happen very often, so it’s rarely easy for victims to delete the account. With so many services, it’s easy to find one your target isn’t on, and never any problem finding pictures or details to fill it out. It’s a persistent problem in modern tech, and one you can find over and over again in stalking cases.

• Once it’s running, the Traveler acts as a Wi-Fi access point where any device within range can connect to it regardless of operating system—a definite advantage of a hardware-based VPN.

• The latest privacy breach at Facebook that affected nearly 7m users is being investigated by the Data Protection Commission (DPC) in Ireland under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a spokesperson confirmed to Siliconrepublic.com.

• GDPR rules came into law across Europe on 25 May this year.

• What to make of the New York Times’ latest story about Facebook’s broad data-sharing agreements? The story, which draws on internal documents describing the company’s partnerships, reports on previously undisclosed aspects of business partnerships with companies including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, and Netflix. In some cases, companies had access to data years after it was supposed to have been cut off.

• The partnerships allowed Facebook to grow, and other companies — from tech, to retail, to entertainment — could access certain data. And though the privacy policy since 2010 has disclosed shared partnerships, who its sharing with and what it is sharing are not explicitly outlined.

• Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

• The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

• Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, The Verge and Recode, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps.

• “I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.

• The Frightful Five — I think in France they’re called GAFAM — may have special power to cause harm. Certainly Facebook does. But each one is different and they’re doing things that other companies are also doing, and it’s just as bad when other companies do it. So I think it’s a mistake to focus on the especially large companies, and instead we should look at the things they are doing that are the basis for being harmful. And then we should stop anyone from doing that.

• A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, the editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion-news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.”

• But transitioning from an average Instagram or YouTube user to a professional “influencer”—that is, someone who leverages a social-media following to influence others and make money—is not easy. After archiving old photos, redefining your aesthetic, and growing your follower base to at least the quadruple digits, you’ll want to approach brands. But the hardest deal to land is your first, several influencers say; companies want to see your promotional abilities and past campaign work. So many have adopted a new strategy: Fake it until you make it.

Civil Rights/Policing

• It’s shaping up to be a very un-merry Christmas for China’s Christians. In the last four months, Chinese authorities have raided three of the country’s most-prominent underground churches, detaining nearly 100 in a wave of pre-Christmas crackdowns on houses of worship that the government claims are threats to the state.

• Lamb spent more than 20 years behind bars, including 13 years of hard labour in dangerous coal mines, for defending his faith and resisting the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a governing body overseeing official Protestant churches approved by the government.

• As we’ve noted in the past on articles discussing this topic, I recognize that people have very, very, very strong views on both Israel and the whole “BDS” movement, and (trust me) you’re not going to convince anyone about the rightness or wrongness of those views in our comments. However, even if you support the Israeli government fully, and think the BDS movement is a sham, hopefully you can still agree that an American law criminalizing supporting the BDS movement is blatantly unconstitutional.

• It is true, if horrifying, that a bunch of states have passed such laws, all of which are quite clearly unconstitutional as well. Challenges to the state laws in Kansas and Arizona have already been (easily) successful. There are other legal challenges against the other laws, and they will almost certainly be tossed out as well.

• The worldwide #MeToo movement has revealed how sexual harassment and assault are part of most women’s professional lives. However, we must not overlook other forms of violence that women suffer at work – and how this affects society at large. The experiences of emergency nurses and other health workers, a majority of whom around the world are women, shows this clearly.

• Insults, humiliation, and discrimination have become ‘natural’ aspects of many work relationships. When attacked, many women do not report these incidents, not knowing who to turn to or out of fear of losing their jobs. Even worse, some women feel that violence is an inevitable ‘part of their jobs.’

• In Mexico, as many as nine out of 10 women who’ve experienced physical or sexual violence at work never asked their colleagues or supervisors for help or filed complaints to police or their employers.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The U.S. House still has an opportunity to side with the vast majority of the American public and overturn the Republican-controlled FCC’s net neutrality repeal, but time is quickly running out.

• With Friday, Dec. 21, marking the official deadline to restore net neutrality in this session of Congress, the House still needs 38 signatures to pass the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution that would reverse the FCC’s deeply unpopular repeal, which was crafted by agency chairman and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai.

DRM

• The anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are still a threat. The latest round of its exemptions process showed some successes, and where the work needs to continue.

• The DMCA has quite a few troubling provisions in it, but the nastiest of them all are the anti-circumvention rules. These provisions create legal penalties for anyone trying to control their own software or devices, and potential criminal risk when users try to share tools for avoiding Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). These rules are grossly unfair, and deprive users of the right to repair the devices that they own, to study or research potential security flaws, or to make or modify their own copies of works to meet their needs. As paltry compensation, Congress carved out a complicated process run by the US Copyright Office for reclaiming the ability to control your computing in narrow circumstances.

Intellectual Monopolies

• “Mr. Ribeiro is seeking his fair and reasonable share of profits Epic has earned by use of his iconic intellectual property [sic] in ‘Fortnite’ and as a result is requesting through the courts that Epic cease all use of Mr. Ribeiro’s signature dance,” Hecht added, according to NBC New York.

• This dispute comes specifically in regards to the game’s dance “Fresh” emote, which came out in January of 2018. The dance was immediately recognized by the community as the “Carlton Dance,” which Ribeiro made famous. Even the Fresh name is a clear reference to the sitcom itself.

Copyrights

• New Zealand’s National Party has won its appeal against Eminem’s publishers. The party was previously ordered to pay $600,000 for infringing the copyrights of Eminem’s track “Lose Yourself” in a 2014 election spot. But, on appeal, the damages amount was reduced to $225,000.

• Following a high-profile order at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this summer, copyright holders are facing a roadblock in their quest to demand settlements from alleged file-sharers. Referencing the August order, federal courts in districts across the US are demanding more evidence than an IP-address alone.

• After being ordered to block a number of piracy-related domains following a complaint from academic publisher Elsevier, Swedish ISP Bahnhof retaliated by semi-blocking Elsevier’s own website and barring the court from visiting Bahnhof.se. Those actions have now prompted Sweden’s telecoms watchdog to initiate an inquiry to determine whether the ISP breached net neutrality rules.

• It’s time to celebrate! For the first time in decades, new creative works such as Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 silent film, “The Ten Commandments,” Kahlil Gibran’s classic “The Prophet,” and Virginia Woolf’s third novel, “Jacob’s Room,” will enter the public domain on the first day of 2019. Please join us for a Grand Re-opening of the Public Domain, featuring a keynote address by Creative Commons’ founder, Lawrence Lessig, on January 25, 2019. Co-hosted by the Internet Archive and Creative Commons, this celebration will feature legal thought leaders, lightning talks, demos, and the chance to play with these new public domain works. The event will take place at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

• A Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a ‘sizzle reel’ to pitch a horror story collection to production companies has been hit with a takedown notice. According to Warner Bros., The Monster Book of Monsters Film Project infringes copyright by using the same title as a book featured in the series created by J K Rowling.

• This is the continuation of the battle that took over the European Parliament this summer, where accusations of deceptive and unfair lobbying, including tactics like astroturfing and spambots, played a decisive role. The voices of civil society organisations, small platforms, libraries, academics, citizens and even the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression were the collateral damage of the dispute between competing big business lobbies. Lobbyists and groups with a vested interest dominated the debate, while citizens’ opinions and interests were crowded out of the discussion.

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