● 03.05.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 5/3/2022: RPCS3 Has New Release, Plan 9 Liberated

Posted in News Roundup at 1:12 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Star Labs is a UK-based company focused on delivering a premium Linux laptop experience. Star Labs was started in 2016 with the notion that no organizations were trying to create the “experience that macOS and Windows users had” for Linux users was a problem that had to be solved. Star Labs StarBook Mk V is one of their latest attempts to solve that problem.

• Starting out leveraging Clevo prebuilt systems, as most Linux targeting laptop vendors do, they realized after only a few iterations that the products were lacking compared to competing laptop vendors. Given that Linux can run on virtually anything, any laptop manufacturers were essentially direct competitors.

Games

• With the Steam Deck now out in the wild, there’s a lot more people finding issues and so Valve are moving quickly to get as many quirks fixed as possible. A new system update rolled out late last night.

• As is often the case for disruptive new consumer devices, there are several ways to categorize Valve’s Steam Deck. A gaming PC in a handheld form factor? Yes! An expensive but rugged Steam controller for gaming on an external display? Sure, that works. A Switch-like portable console? Absolutely! An impossibly affordable computer you can use as your everyday laptop or desktop PC? Well, that functionality is baked right in thanks to the Deck’s “Desktop Mode.” But the $399 question is this: is it just a novelty feature for edge cases, or is the Steam Deck truly viable as your daily driver PC for work, play, and everything in between?

• The folks behind RPCS3 have published a new release tag for the popular PS3 Emulator. There is no official changelog for this “release”, but since these tags are usually 3 months apart, you can expect significant changes since 0.0.20.

• It’s worth noting that RPCS3 actually gets a build for pretty much every commit, so these release tags are a bit “artificial” and it’s likely most users are already up to date, but a new release tag is a good opportunity to talk about RPCS3

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Of the challenges humanity faces in its struggle to power modern-day civilization, energy conservation is one of the more difficult to achieve. But it is also the most worthy of pursuing, as ultimately many of the current sources of energy we depend on are finite.

• That is why reducing the amount of energy we consume is a priority for KDE Eco. All KDE projects are Free Software, and Free Software entails transparency and user autonomy. The first has always provided users the opportunity to inspect and learn from how software runs; today, this transparency has been extended to include software’s energy consumption when in use. The second allows Free Software users to install what they need on the devices they want, bypassing unnecessary and battery-draining spyware and bloatware while extending the lifespan of their hardware. Both combined give KDE Eco and Free Software developers the means to develop energy-saving improvements for applications and frameworks, to continue support for otherwise unsupported devices, and deploy exactly what people want and need.

Distributions

• With the release of the new Solaris, Oracle wants to make the Unix operating system attractive to software developers and home users: the Common Building Environment (CBE) available to them free of charge. Otherwise it is based on the same version 11.4 as the commercial variant of the system originally developed by Sun Microsystems.

• However, the move entails another fundamental change in Solaris: Oracle says it’s saying goodbye to small and large releases, and future users will receive updates via Support Repository Updates (SRUs) and so-called small releases. The CBE version is a beta version of these updates.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• “We were already aware that it was going to be bigger than expected,” says Upton. “We had this idea of doing 1,000 or 10,000 or something… we had a couple of thousand units on order with our first contract manufacturer in China.

• “Around Christmas time, when we got the first beta boards back, we put an operating system [based on Debian] online… and it had 50,000 downloads. And all you could do was run it in QEMU (there was a QEMU config you could build that was similar enough to a Raspberry Pi).

• “50,000 people downloaded this really primitive operating system for a machine that you couldn’t buy!” he exclaims.

• And that was when realisation dawned that demand for the hardware would be far higher than a run of 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 units.

• Upton tells us that approximately 46 million units have been manufactured to date. Although getting hold of one in 2022 is a bit of challenge. More on that later.

• While the final iterations of those first Raspberry Pi computers, the Pi 1 Model A+ and B+, can still be purchased, for Upton it was the Raspberry Pi 2 that marked the biggest step change, despite the relatively short period before the 3 arrived in 2016.

• The original Raspberry Pi micro-computer was a smash hit, combining an open Linux-powered ARM system with a super-cheap price point (roughly $35). There have been many models since then, but now the tiny computer that started it all is 10 years old, as of today (February 28).

• Eben Upton, one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, wrote in a blog post, “Almost exactly ten years ago today, thousands of you set your alarms, and woke on leap-day morning to discover that we’d started selling Raspberry Pi computers. By the time our all-volunteer team gathered in the pub that evening for celebratory drinks, our licensees Farnell and RS Components had taken over 100,000 orders (despite struggling to keep their websites online under the load); we had (briefly) out-trended Lady Gaga; and Raspberry Pi was on the road to becoming a little larger than we’d planned.”

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Forty years ago Bell Labs was a center of technology innovation. Researchers from Bell are credited with developing technologies like the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, and radio astronomy. In the area of software, Bell researchers created Unix and languages like C and C++. It has been roughly fifty years since Unix was first conceived and developed at Bell Labs for DEC PDP-11 computers.

curl

• Welcome to the 206th curl release, 59 days since we shipped curl 7.81.0. The extra three days because I was away on the day the release would normally have been done. (I call it Impartial Content as a little play on the HTTP 206 response code message.)

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• -Imply, the company founded by the original creators of Apache Druid®, today unveiled at a virtual event the first milestone in Project Shapeshift, the 12-month initiative designed to solve the most pressing issues developers face when building analytics applications. The announcement includes a cloud database service built from Apache Druid and the private preview of a multi-stage query engine for Druid. Together, these innovations show how Imply delivers the most developer-friendly and capable database for analytics applications.

Programming/Development

• The real goal here isn’t to teach R, but to teach the basic concepts that all programming depends on. R in is used in this lesson because: something has to be used for examples; it’s free, well-documented and runs almost everywhere; it has a large and growing user base among scientists and it has a large library of external packages available for performing diverse tasks.

• While working on qml-lsp, I took a tangent to write a DAP implementation for QML. This ended up being a very long tangent, but it’s worth it: being able to debug QML without needing Qt Creator available. The DAP protocol is the debugger equivalent to LSP: it’s a cross-editor and cross-language protocol that allows debuggers to implement DAP and get support for a bunch of editors, and allows editors to implement DAP and get support for a bunch of debuggers.

Java

• I’ve recently explored some of the differences between Java and Groovy when creating and initializing lists and building lists at runtime. I observed the simple facilities provided by Groovy for these purposes in comparison to the complexity required in Java.

• In this article, I examine creating and initializing maps in Java and Groovy. Maps provide the ability to develop structures you can search by key. And if the key gets found, that returns the value associated with that key. Today, maps are implemented in many programming languages, including Java and Groovy, but also Python (where they are called dictionaries), Perl, awk, and many others. Another term commonly used to describe maps is associative arrays, which you can read about in this Wikipedia article. Java and Groovy maps are nicely general, permitting keys and values to be any classes that extend the Object class.

Leftovers

Hardware

• Intel has updated its vPro PC management platform, created a less capable edition, and brought the product to Chromebooks.

• The “vPro Essentials” package is aimed at SMEs and smaller IT services providers who want management tools for their PC fleets but lack the resources to tool up for enterprise-grade kit.

• The Essentials package is a subset of full vPro – which is now known as vPro Enterprise. At the time of writing, Intel had not provided The Register with a list of features omitted from the Essentials package.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• Just months after Nat Friedman quit as CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, his Xamarin co-founder has also ejected from the Windows giant.

• Miguel De Icaza joined Microsoft when it acquired Xamarin in 2016, which marked the beginning of a change in Redmond’s mobile strategy. He has spoken to The Reg before about how different Microsoft is today from its notoriously FOSS-averse past.

• De Icaza has long been a pivotal figure in the areas of Linux and Linux-Microsoft interoperability. He was the original founder of the GNOME desktop project in 1997, along with Federico Mena. A couple of years later, he started Helix Code with Nat Friedman. Subsequently renamed Ximian, the company developed the GNOME email client Evolution and the Ximian Connector, which enabled Evolution to talk to Microsoft Exchange Server.

• Aside from GNOME apps and its own, more polished version of GNOME, Ximian also developed Mono, an open-source version of Microsoft’s .NET. Ximian got bought by Novell in 2003, and a few months later Novell also bought SUSE.

• Veritas Technologies, a provider of multi-cloud data management software, is releasing the latest version of NetBackup powered by Cloud Scale Technology, laying the foundation for Autonomous Data Management and multi-cloud data protection at scale.

Pseudo-Open Source

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

• The Linux Foundation has announced the publication of “Census II of Free and Open Source Software – Application Libraries” which identifies more than one thousand of the most widely deployed open source application libraries found from scans of commercial and enterprise applications.

• The rationale is that this information can be used to decide which open source packages, components and projects warrant proactive operations and security support.

Security

• Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could potentially be abused to escape a container in order to execute arbitrary commands on the container host.

• The shortcoming resides in a Linux kernel feature called control groups, also referred to as cgroups version 1 (v1), which allows processes to be organized into hierarchical groups, effectively making it possible to limit and monitor the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network.

• The highest scoring category, with 30.9 per cent, was those who understood the concept but with only a modest level of knowledge, and not far behind on 24.9 per cent are those who are one step up and feel that they could have a stab at implementing it. Trailing in at the end we have the 10.5 per cent who’ve heard of ZT but don’t know much about it, 5.3 per cent who have a highly detailed knowledge and understanding, and 11.3 per cent who’ve some experience of using it. All of which means that fewer than a fifth – 17.2 per cent – have actually implemented ZT at all.

• Passwords, long a weakness in the tapestry of defenses designed to keep enterprises and individuals more secure, continue to be a problem due in large part to the same issue that has haunted them for years: the users themselves.

• If you thought you were being extremely romantic by making all your online passwords “Iloveyou,” we’re sorry to say that you should probably be a little less basic in the future—when it comes to devising passwords, that is.

• Security researchers with Cisco’s Talos division this week disclosed six critical-severity vulnerabilities affecting Gerbv, an open source file viewer for printed circuit board (PCB) designs.

• A native Linux application, Gerbv is found on many common UNIX platforms, with a Windows version available as well. Gerbv has been downloaded from SourceForge more than 1 million times.

• The software is designed for viewing file formats that display layers of circuit boards, including Excellon drill files, RS-274X Gerber files, and pick-n-place files, and can be used either as a standalone application, or as a library.

• Infamous ransomware group Conti is now the target of cyberattacks in the wake of its announcement late last week that it fully supports Russia’s ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine, with the latest hit being the leaking of its source code for the public to see.

• This disclosure comes just days after an archive leaked containing more than a year’s worth of instant messages between members of Conti, believed to be based in Russia: we’re talking 400 files and tens of thousands of lines of internal chat logs written in Russian. The internal communication files include messages that run from January 2021 to February 27 of this year.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Earlier this year, major technology companies, non-profits, and government agencies convened for an urgent meeting at the White House to discuss how best to address the security concerns posed by free and open-source software (FOSS)—software that is developed by a distributed community rather than a centralized company. For years, tech companies and security experts have made the case for greater investments in the security of the FOSS ecosystem, as it has become an increasingly important part of critical digital infrastructure. The importance of doing so was highlighted by the recent Log4Shell vulnerability in the log4j FOSS package. Deployed across a vast range of digital applications, log4j exposed a huge amount of software to a devastating security vulnerability and illustrated the urgent need to improve security in open-source software.

Privacy/Surveillance

• We have sent our comments as part of the public consultation exercise for the Draft India Data Accessibility & Use Policy, 2022. Under the policy, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology aims to enable interdepartmental data sharing as well as sale of public data to support the government’s economic goals. In light of the glaring privacy (& other) concerns arising from the policy, we have recommended an immediate recall.

• India’s latest round of bans on Chinese apps has taken down a Singaporean company’s apps – and share price – reportedly leaving government officials asking some pointed questions.

• India has banned hundreds of apps the government alleges are controlled by Chinese companies, send data to China, or use infrastructure located in China. A new round of bans, announced on February 14, listed 54 more apps on grounds they endangered users’ privacy by sending data to servers in China.

• Some of those apps are owned and operated by Singaporean company SEA, which on the day of the new bans warned players of the popular game “Free Fire” that the software had been pulled by Indian app stores.

• Fitbit recalled all models of its Ionic smartwatch on Tuesday after a small number of wearers were left with burns when the gadgets’ lithium-ion batteries overheated.

• Fitbit Ionic was made between 2017 and 2020 and comes in a variety of colors, including burnt orange, charcoal, and smoke gray. On top of monitoring things like heart rate and sleep, the Ionic supported contactless payments, provided guidance to stay fit and healthy, and it boasted of a four-day battery life, longer than most smartwatches of the time.

Defence/Aggression

• Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda says the nation’s Centre for Defence Strategies think tank has obtained the personal details of 120,000 Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine. The publication has now shared this data freely on its website.

• The Register and others have been unable to fully verify the accuracy of the data from the leak. The records include what appears to be names, addresses, passport numbers, unit names, and phone numbers. Some open source intelligence researchers on Twitter said they found positive matches, as did sources who spoke confidentially to El Reg; others said they couldn’t verify dip-sampled data.

• A few employees of VRnetio OU, a developer of virtual software for the real estate industry, spent last weekend filling empty bottles with gasoline for use as Molotov cocktails.

• “It would demoralize our army if businesspeople started to run away,” said Chief Executive Artem Batogovsky. “We need to be strong, be together and show that we support them.”

• Batogovsky was speaking to a reporter over a Zoom call at 1 a.m. local time on Tuesday as bombs exploded in the distance. His Kyiv, Ukraine-based operation was still up and running at the time, although “real estate [sales] in Kyiv have stopped because no one is looking,” he said. “All real estate companies here are bunkered right now.”

Environment

Energy

• Modern 5G network infrastructure is more power efficient than prior generations but the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) says it isn’t clear if this will deliver a cut in overall energy consumption, or whether consumption may in fact rise.

• While 5G is sold as a technology that has the potential to greatly improve the energy efficiency of mobile networks, a new paper from researchers at CREDS says the evidence behind these oft-cited claims is somewhat lacking and does not take everything into account.

• In fact, CREDS told The Register the energy consumption of mobile networks in the 5G era remains uncertain because publicly available evidence lacks peer-reviewed assessments, and there isn’t much disclosure of key assumptions that would enable scrutiny and comparison of claims regarding power usage.

Finance

• As a follow-up to the 2019 FSSR, a remote TA mission supported the RBZ with the implementation of Basel III liquidity standards. The mission reviewed the RBZ drafts of the LCR and NSFR frameworks, discussed identified material gaps with the BSD management and relevant supervisors, and provided many recommendations on enhancing the drafts of liquidity regulations, monitoring tools, reporting templates, and disclosure. Further actions for implementing Basel III liquidity standards were agreed with the RBZ.

• On February 25 the Jakarta press reported that the Indonesian Meat Slaughter and Traders Network (JAPPDI) members would be going on strike in the Greater Jakarta area from February 28 until March 4 in protest against the high price of cattle and beef supplies.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• As parents, lawmakers and activists push for stronger rules to keep children off websites meant for adults, the question of how to verify age online has taken on new urgency. More sites are asking users to certify they are over 18, and companies are rolling out innovations aimed at better age checks.

• ICANN on Wednesday rebuffed a request from Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, to revoke all Russian web domains, shut down Russian DNS root servers, and invalidate associated TLS/SSL certificates in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• Fedorov made his request because Russia’s assault has been “made possible mainly due to Russia propaganda machinery using websites continuously spreading disinformation, hate speech, promoting violence and hiding the truth about the war in Ukraine.”

• In a publicly posted reply [PDF], Göran Marby, CEO of ICANN, said his organization is an independent technical body charged with overseeing the global internet’s DNS and unique identifiers and must maintain neutrality.

• “ICANN is a facilitator of the security, stability, and resiliency of these identifiers with the objective of a single, global, interoperable Internet,” said Marby.

• British internet pioneer Cliff Stanford, founder of Demon Internet, died last week.

• Stanford also set up Redbus Investments, which put money into a number of projects including co-location and data centre facilities (Redbus Interhouse) and an early online film service (Redbus Films), and was a well-known chess enthusiast and supporter of the sport. He was also involved in the London Internet Exchange, and the Internet Watch Foundation. However, it is as the founder of Demon Internet that he found fame and fortune, as the many Britons who once had an email address which ended in “demon.co.uk” will attest.

• He was always an entrepreneur. As a child he had a paper round in his native Southend. In a bid to increase sales one of the papers offered a promotion to the kids delivering papers: whoever got the most subscriptions would win a bicycle. Cliff worked out that the cost of taking out a few subscriptions himself would win him the prize. He did this, sold the bike, and cancelled the subscriptions.

Monopolies

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