Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup and what a wonderful week we had!
We have plenty of Linux Distro releases and LibreOffice 6.3 RC1.
The Linux distros with releases this week are Q4OS 3.8, SparkyLinux 5.8, Mageia 7.1, ArcoLinux 19.07.11, Deepin 15.11, ArchBang 2107-beta, Bluestar 5.2.1, Slackel 7.2 "Openbox" and Endeavour OS 2019.07.15.
I looked at most of these Linux Distros, links below, I will look at some of them in the new week and some I will unfortunately not have a look at, for download links and more, please visit distrowatch.com
Well, this is this week's Linux Roundup, thank you so much for your time! Have a great week!
couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the user revolts against GNOME 3, KDE 4, and Unity had resulted in a dislike of innovation on the Linux desktop. Nothing could have proven my point better than the comments on the article. Almost universally, innovation is considered the opposite of usability. However, I can’t help thinking that this position is a false dichotomy. In fact, I can think of at least one example of successful innovation that is already widespread.
Many of the comments on my last article seemed full of false dichotomies. One comment asked why developers felt the need “to scramble things up and remove features people use, and move things to different parts of the system all in the name of ‘innovation.'” Another characterized innovation as “tinkering with looks, and trying to become the next iOS or Android/tablet UI.” One commenter spoke for many of the others when defining innovation as “change for change’s sake …just to get something ‘new,’ or to make things look flashier instead of actually making things better, more functional, more usable.”
People have been dealing with Windows 10 issues since the OS was first introduced in 2015. There are many die-heart Windows fans who prefer to deal with these issues rather than looking for other platforms.
Well, Linux has been around for years but many people are still reluctant to adopt Linux.
Recently, YouTuber Chris Titus Tech published a video to discuss the matter. The video discusses why Windows 10 keeps getting worse with each passing day.
I have recently made the decision to retire as the SUSE CEO and subsequently to leave SUSE. I care very deeply for the SUSE business and its employees, and this difficult decision is based entirely on personal reasons. My step down from the SUSE CEO role will be effective August 5. My decision comes at a positive point in time for SUSE, where the business has completed its journey to becoming standalone and has a solid foundation to continue to accelerate its success and growth as an independent company. For me personally this means I will have more time to devote myself to other important things in my life. In FY18, the SUSE business saw record-breaking revenues. This level of growth has only been realized through the whole SUSE Team showing huge commitment to working together to deliver great outcomes. I am extremely proud of what we have achieved collectively over the last eight years, and I have every confidence that SUSE will exceed all future expectations. I will naturally be following the SUSE journey closely during my retirement, and my positive wishes will always be with the company and all connected with it. As we look to the future I am delighted and, of course, reassured to be passing the SUSE CEO baton to such a talented and accomplished leader as Melissa Di Donato. Melissa has an outstanding track record of growth, leadership and transformation in the tech sector, having enjoyed enormous success as the chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP. Prior to SAP, she held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognized for her contribution to growing global organizations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management.
Melissa Di Donato has been appointed CEO of SUSE. From the press release: "Accomplished technology executive and former SAP leader, Melissa Di Donato, has been named chief executive officer of SUSE in a move that will herald the next phase of growth and momentum for the world's largest independent open source software company....Di Donato is highly regarded for her forward-thinking leadership style and is a passionate advocate for workplace diversity. This includes her role as Technology Group chair of the 30% Club—an organization with the goal of achieving 30 percent female directors on S&P 100 boards by 2020. She also holds prominent positions in other organizations, including Notion Capital, and is a trustee for charity Founders4Schools."
Accomplished technology executive and former SAP leader, Melissa Di Donato, has been named chief executive officer of SUSE€® in a move that will herald the next phase of growth and momentum for the world’s largest independent open source software company. Di Donato has a proven track record in sales, business operations and leadership focused on high growth and transformation. Prior to SUSE, Di Donato was chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP where she was responsible for the worldwide revenue, profit and customer satisfaction of the company’s digital core solutions. She also held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognized for her contributions to growing global organizations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management.
It is an incredible honor to join SUSE as the new CEO and to be part of an inspiring group of innovators, challengers and disruptors. As I reflect on the proud history of this great company, I am excited and energized. As one of the trailblazing companies to recognize the power of open source, SUSE was first in the 90s to bring Linux to enterprise customers. With each milestone – from launching SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to forming breakthrough alliances with the world’s leading technology vendors – SUSE has remained steadfastly true to its mission of innovation and open source. This company never stopped daring to be different. As I have spoken with customers, users and partners in the community, they have talked about SUSE’s innovative products and passion for open, open source as being the core on which this company has been built. This will continue to drive our success. I have Nils to thank for such a strong foundation. Today, SUSE is the world’s largest independent open source software company. We’ve had eight years of continuous growth. We hit record revenues in FY18, and we are now, as an independent company, in a position to accelerate our growth and move at a speed like never before.
Prior to SUSE, Di Donato was chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP where she was responsible for the worldwide revenue, profit and customer satisfaction of the company’s digital core solutions. She also held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognized for her contributions to growing global organizations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management.
Sysadmin Appreciation Day is coming up this Friday, July 26. To help honor sysadmins everywhere, we want you to share your best gift ideas. What would be the best way a team member or customer could show their appreciation for you? As a sysadmin, what was the best gift you've ever received? We asked our writers the same question, and here are their answers:
"Whilst working in the Ubuntu community on Edubuntu, I took it upon myself to develop the startup/shutdown sound scheme, which became the default in Ubuntu for, from what I can understand, the next decade. Whilst people had a love-hate relationship with my sound scheme, and rightly so, I had a love-hate relationship with my sound card during the development.
At the time I had recorded all my sound samples using one sample rate, but my new sound card, as my motherboard had exploded a few days earlier, did not support it. I had two choices, resample all my samples (which I didn't really want to do) or buy a new sound card.
Red Hat Ceph Storage is popular storage for Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Customers around the world run their hyperscale, production workloads on Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This is driven by the high level of integration between Ceph storage and OpenStack private cloud platforms. With each release of both platforms, the level of integration has grown and performance and automation has increased. As the customer's storage and compute needs for footprints have grown, we have seen more interest towards running compute and storage as one unit and providing a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) layer based on OpenStack and Ceph.
[...]
Continuing the benchmarking series, in the next post you’ll learn performance insights of running multi-instance MySQL database on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage across decoupled and hyperconverged architectures. We’ll also compare results from a near-equal environment backed by all-flash cluster nodes.
Announcing a new -ck release, 5.2-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.193. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.
Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has released his newest "ck1" patch-set for the recently released Linux 5.2 kernel code-base. Complementing these kernel changes is his primary focus: the MuQSS scheduler that continues to aim for better interactivity and performance on mobile/desktop systems.
As it's been a few weeks since last hosting any Linux distribution comparison and now with the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed enabling LTO by default, here are some fresh Linux distribution comparison results plus tossing the newly-released Debian 10.0 into the mix as well. This round of testing included Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 19.04, Fedora Workstation 30, openSUSE Leap 15.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Clear Linux 30450, and Debian 10.0.
This round of benchmarking was done on an Intel Core i9 7980XE with ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics, and Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe solid-state drive.
The Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Clear Linux, and Debian releases were all tested following clean installations with all stable release updates present as of testing. Manjaro/Arch isn't in this round of testing due to Manjaro running into issues with Nouveau on the GTX TITAN X present in this test system. Unfortunately I didn't have any very recent openSUSE Tumbleweed benchmark results handy pre-LTO-by-default and with not being aware of any other way to roll-back/archive the Tumbleweed system state, there are just Tumbleweed tests from the latest build after they began defaulting to Link Time Optimizations on their packages. System details below in full for this default/out-of-the-box Linux performance experience comparison.
I've already published my thoughts on AMD's new 7nm Navi graphics card lineup. Both the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT punch above their weight class on Windows and are a compelling alternative to Nvidia's new SUPER series. But how is their performance looking on Linux? Well, that's a bit more difficult to answer since widespread Linux support is still largely absent.
Still, I wanted to fire up the RX 5700 XT on my Ubuntu 18.04 and Ryzen 9 3900X test bench and see how things are shaping up.
The official AMDGPU 19.30 driver package (i.e. from AMD itself) only supports Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, while solid widespread support for the RX 5700 cards won't arrive until MESA 19.3. However, development is moving very quickly on this.
Your mileage may vary, but I found the "easiest" solution was to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, install the official AMD 19.30 packaged driver, then add the Oibaf PPA. A quick sudo apt update / upgrade later, and you should have Mesa 19.2-git which will enable Vulkan support. The situation may have changed over the last several days, but this is how I got mine up and running with performance that is mostly expected.
We are pleased to announce the availability of Open Build Service (OBS) version 2.10!
After more than one year of development, this new version of OBS brings a revamped web user interface, improved support for shipping your software in containers and integrating your package builds with source code management systems like GitLab and Pagure.
I’ll be honest: when Spotify arrived on the Snap store I thought: “hurrah”.
Hurrah for an easier way to install the music streaming client (no need to futz around adding the Spotify repository like in the past) and hurrah for automatic background updates that ensure I’m always running the latest release.
At least, that was the theory.
Alas, the official Spotify for Linux Snap package has not been updated since April of this year.
“Oh,” I thought, “I guess there hasn’t been an update to the Spotify Linux desktop client since then!”
But there has — several updates, in fact!
Advance to the game’s official blog for more intel on the Commanders put forth by the always-on Company of Heroes community.
Feral Interactive has just announced they've brought the Commander Update DLC for Company of Heroes 2 over to Linux (and macOS) as well.
Feral brought Company of Heroes 2 to Linux back in 2015 while now they've brought this newest expansion to the game over to macOS and Linux as well. The Commander Update for Windows debuted just last month.
Another game goes completely DRM-free on GOG, with developer COWCAT putting up Demetrios: The BIG Cynical Adventure along with the Linux version.
Yorg, an in-development FOSS racing game is nearing the release of update 0.11, with a Release Candidate now available for testing.
In the style of the classics like Micro Machines, while early it's actually quite promising. The update notes for this are quite short and to the point, the developer said they will be going into some more detail when it's out properly for everyone.
Madit Entertainment are currently crowdfunding for their new Point & Click adventure game "The Hand of Glory", as it turns out they've confirmed Linux support too.
Coming across it recently, it didn't actually list Linux support on the campaign itself. After speaking to the developer, they pointed me to this announcement that mentions "Our community has spoken and we listened! We did our tests and we can now confirm that we will be able to support Mac and Linux in the game!", so that's fantastic news. The developer told me they will be updating the campaign to list it too.
Certainly a fun sounding idea! Possession from developer Weirdfellows is a traditional turn-based roguelike, made on Linux and it just recently released. The whole idea reminds me of MidBoss, another excellent body-snatching roguelike.
Developer Orangepixel is working on another new game in addition to the upcoming Gunslugs:Rogue Tactics. Space Grunts 2 will be combining turn-based gameplay with a card-based battle mechanic.
The original Space Grunts was actually quite a good game. It felt like a turn-based Nuclear Throne and after going back and playing some more today, I couldn't be happier to see another coming.
Two surprising bits of news recently about Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite as they've managed to secure some extra funding from two big names.
Firstly, it was announced on July 15th that Epic Games awarded them $1.2 million from Epic's MegaGrants program. Quite an impressive number and good to see a company such as Epic support open source software in such a way. They don't get it all at once though, it will trickle in over the next three years, to help with Blender's "Professionalizing Blender Development Initiative".
We are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.4 Beta 1!
5.4 as a new feature version of KDevelop will among other things add some first support for projects using the Meson build system and have the Clang-Tidy support plugin merged as part of built-in plugins. It also brings 11 months of small improvements across the application. Full details will be given in the announcement of the KDevelop 5.4.0 release, which is currently scheduled for in 2 weeks.
It’s light and runs on Linux. So I could restore some old computers nobody wanted because “Windows takes 15 minutes to start” and make them into decent working stations.
enioka Haute Couture is a software development house that creates complete and tailor-made solutions. enioka strives to return ownership of the software development and innovation to its customers. To that effect, it co-creates the software with its customers' teams to allow them to retain control of their projects in complex systems or organizations.
"We are excited to welcome enioka Haute Couture as a Patron of KDE. They truly understand what it means to empower people when creating software; something KDE cares deeply about", said Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V.
The second part of Milestone 1 for my Google Summer of Code 2019’s project porting KDE Connect to Windows involves enabling the SFTP plugin that ships in the linux build.
The plugin allows you to navigate through your mobile device’s files (like you do with a file manager) ON YOUR DESKTOP! It makes use of sshfs to allow mounting the remote file system on your desktop. After that, you can use any file manager you like; heck, you can even use your terminal to have a walk through your mobile’s files. Once that is done, you can do literally anything with the mobile device’s files as you would do with the local filesystem: move files, copy them to your desktop machine, delete them, rename, anything!
From friday the 19th to sunday the 21st, we had the KDE Connect sprint. It's always a nice opportunity to meet the others working on KDE Connect, since we usually only talk to each other online.
Google Summer of Code 2019 is proving to be a bumper one for KDE Connect, the open source Android-to-PC integration suite.
Last week we reported on the progress made by a GSoC student on KDE Connect for Mac. This week we bring word on a new KDE Connect Windows port.
“Wait, isn’t KDE Connect already available for Windows?”, you might (rightly) ask — and the answer is yes, kind of!
For maintainers of Java-based applications in Flathub, it's worth noting that even if you consume the Latest OpenJDK extension in your application, users will not be broken by major updates because OpenJDK is bundled into your Flatpak. The implication of this for users is that they won't see updates to their Java version until the application maintainer rebuilds the application in Flathub.
If you maintain a Java-based Flatpak application on Flathub, you can consume the latest version of your chosen OpenJDK stream (either LTS or Latest) simply by rebuilding; the latest version of that OpenJDK steam will be pulled in automatically.
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.1. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, Jul 22, 2019 through Monday, Jul 29, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Greetings from DebConf 19 in Curitiba! Just a quick reminder that I will run a Bootstrappable Debian BoF on Tuesday 23rd, at 13.30 Brasilia time (which is 16.30 UTC, if I am not mistaken). If you are curious about bootstrappability in Debian, why do we want it and where we are right now, you are welcome to come in person if you are at DebCon or to follow the streaming.
You can’t overhear what others are doing or learn something about your colleagues through gossip over lunch break when working remotely. So after being stuck for quite a bit, terceiro suggested that we try pair programming.
After our first remote pair programming session, I think there should be no difference in pair programming in person. We shared the same terminal, looked at the same code and discussed just like people standing side by side.
Through our pair programming session, I found out that I had a bad habit. I didn’t run tests on my code that often, so when I had failing tests that didn’t fail before, I spent more time debugging than I should have. Pair programming gave insight to how others work and I think little improvements go a long way.
Hi, this is basically to report outdated statements in your wiki page on I/O schedulers [1].
The main problematic statement is that BFQ "... is not ideal for devices with slow CPUs or high throughput I/O devices" because too heavy. BFQ is definitely more sophisticated than any of the other I/O schedulers. We have designed it that way to provide an incomparably better service quality, at a very low overhead. As reported in [2], the execution time of BFQ on an old laptop CPU is 0.6 us per I/O event, against 0.2 us for mq-deadline (which is the lightest Linux I/O scheduler).
To put these figures into context, BFQ proved to be so good for "devices with slow CPUs" that, e.g., Chromium OS migrated to BFQ a few months ago. In particular, Google crew got convinced by a demo [3] I made for them, on one of the cheapest and slowest Chromebook on the market. In the demo, a fast download is performed. Without BFQ, the download makes the device completely unresponsive. With BFQ, the device remains as responsive as if it was totally idle.
As for the other part of the statement, "... not ideal for ... high throughput I/O devices", a few days ago I ran benchmarks (on Ubuntu) also with one of the fastest consumer-grade NVMe SSDs: a Samsung SSD 970 PRO. Results [4] can be summarized as follows. Throughput with BFQ is about the same as with the other I/O schedulers (it couldn't be higher, because this kind of drives just wants the scheduler to stay as aside as possible, when it comes to throughput). But, in the presence of writes as background workload, start-up times with BFQ are at least 16 times as low as with the other I/O schedulers. In absolute terms, gnome-terminal starts in ~1.8 seconds with BFQ, while it takes at least 28.7 (!) seconds with the other I/O schedulers. Finally, only with BFQ, no frame gets lost in video-playing benchmarks.
BFQ then provides other important benefits, such as from 5x to 10X throughput boost in multi-client server workloads [5].
So, is there any chance that the outdated/wrong information on your wiki page [1] gets updated somehow? If I may, I'd be glad to update it myself, after providing you with all the results you may ask.
In addition, why doesn't Ubuntu too consider switching to BFQ as default I/O scheduler, for all drives that BFQ supports (namely all drives with a maximum speed not above ~500 KIOPS)?
Looking forward to your feedback, Paolo
The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default?
[...]
But in addition to wanting to correct that Wiki information, Paolo pops the question of why doesn't Ubuntu switch to BFQ as the default I/O scheduler for supported drives. Though as of yet, no Ubuntu kernel developers have yet commented on the prospect of switching to BFQ.
The Rasberry Pi is a tiny little computer board that lets students, experts, and hobbyists build innovative computing projects at a very affordable cost. Since its inception 6 years ago, it has enjoyed widespread popularity, thanks to the infinite range of possibilities this system offers. The single-board computer is now in its third major version and is being widely used for numerous tech projects around the world. If you’re looking for the best raspberry pi projects to get you started with this fantastic platform, you’re at the right place. Today, we’ll present to you 20 raspberry pi projects you can take on, starting from basic level to advanced.
MYIR’s “MYC-CZU3EG CPU Module” runs Linux on a quad -A53, FPGA-equipped Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with 4GB of DDR4 and eMMC. There’s also a MYD-CZU3EG Development Board with GbE, CAN, PCIe, SATA, and Arduino I/O.
In recent years, MYIR has spun a variety of embedded boards based on Xilinx’s Cortex-A9/FPGA hybrid Zynq 7000 SoC, including the MYC-C7Z010/007S compute module and the open-spec Z-Turn and Z-turn Lite SBCs. The company has now advanced to its first product based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, which combines 4x 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores running Linux with a more powerful FPGA and dual 600MHz Cortex-R5 MCUs. The $399 MYC-CZU3EG CPU Module can be bought as part of a $659 MYD-CZU3EG Development Board kit.
Oracle Linux 7 has been released for the Raspberry Pi 3. The release packages Btrfs as the root filesystem on the UEK-branded Linux 4.14 Long Term Support (LTS) kernel. A bootable disk image with a minimal install is provided along with a standard ISO installer.
CentOS appears to support only the "Mustang" Applied Micro X-Gene for AArch64, and it provides the older AArch32 environment for all models of the Raspberry Pi. Oracle Linux is a compelling option among RPM distributions in supporting AArch64 for the Pi Model 3.
This is not to say that Oracle AArch64 Linux is without flaw, as Oracle warns that this is "a preview release and for development purposes only; Oracle suggests these not be used in production." The non-functional WiFi device is missing firmware and documentation, which Oracle admits was overlooked. No X11 graphics are included in the image, although you can install them. The eponymous database client (and server) are absent. Oracle has provided a previous example of orphaned software with its Linux for SPARC project, which was abandoned after two minor releases. There's no guarantee that this ARM version will not suffer the same fate, although Oracle has responded that "our eventual target is server class platforms". One possible hardware target is the Fujitsu A64FX, a new server processor that bundles 48 addressable AArch64 cores and 32GB of RAM on one die, asserted to be the "fastest server processor" that exists.
The update to 7.0 for KACE Systems Deployment Appliance is primarily about bringing a scope of endpoint management capabilities with new support for Linux devices to the table.
Axiomtek’s Linux-ready “tBOX400-510-FL” transportation system has a 7th Gen Intel CPU and a 10-port managed switch with 8x M12-style 10/100Mbps PoE and 2x GbE ports. The rugged system also has 3x mini-PCIe slots and dual swappable SATA drives.
Axiomtek has launched a fanless, Kaby Lake-U based transportation computer with a choice of power supplies designed for in-vehicle, marine, or railway applications. The rugged tBOX400-510-FL features a Qualcomm-driven, Layer 2 managed PoE switch with support for IP surveillance and video management applications. “Customers can connect IP cameras directly without installing an extra PoE switch, minimizing overall deployment costs and installation space onboard,” stated Axiomtek product manager Sharon Huang.
That's right! We're hosting the first ever ActivityPub Conf. It's immediately following Rebooting Web of Trust in Prague.
There's no admission fee to attend. (Relatedly, the conference is kind of being done on the cheap, because it is being funded by organizers who are themselves barely funded.) The venue, however, is quite cool: it's at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, which is itself exploring the ways the digital world is affecting our lives.
If you plan on attending (and maybe also speaking), you should get in your application soon (see the flier for details). We've never done one of these, and we have no idea what the response will be like, so this is going to be a smaller gathering (about 40 people). In some ways, it will be somewhere between a conference and a gathering of people-who-are-interested-in-activitypub.
As said in the flier, by attending, you are agreeing to the code of conduct, so be sure to read that.
While Linux is a recreation of UNIX, FreeBSD is more of a continuation. It was initially developed by students working from a Research Unix source license obtained by the University of California Berkeley – the 'BSD' bit stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. The only reason it's not called BSD Unix is that pesky trademark and licensing gremlin.
The OS runs on its own kernel, and all of its key components have been developed as part of a single whole. Linux, on the other hand, is just the kernel; the rest of it is supplied by third parties so it lacks BSD's overall coherency.
This is a highly complete and very reliable operating system, perfect both for server applications and desktop use. That said, it doesn't come with a GUI by default – the X-window system is thankfully straightforward to install, and there are ports of Linux window managers like Gnome and KDE available.
One final note: BSD forms the core of perhaps the most polished and stable desktop operating system out there in macOS, so you know you're in good hands here.
It stands for Kolmogorov–Smirnov which is named after Andrey Kolmogorov and Nikolai Smirnov. It compares the two cumulative distributions and returns the maximum difference between them. It is a non-parametric test which means you don't need to test any assumption related to the distribution of data. In KS Test, Null hypothesis states null both cumulative distributions are similar. Rejecting the null hypothesis means cumulative distributions are different. In data science, it compares the cumulative distribution of events and non-events and KS is where there is a maximum difference between the two distributions. In simple words, it helps us to understand how well our predictive model is able to discriminate between events and non-events.
KUESAâ⢠is a Qt module designed to load, render and manipulate glTF 2.0 models in applications using Qt 3D.
Kuesa provides a C++ and a QML API which makes it easy to do things like triggering animations contained in the glTF files, finding camera details defined by the designer, etc.
It is a great tool so that designers and developers can share glTF based 3D assets.
With the upcoming release of Kuesa 1.1, we are introducing a python binding for Kuesa. This provides a simple yet powerful way for programmers to integrate glTF content in their python applications with just a few lines of code.
I was born in the Dominican Republic. I finished highschool there and went to Puerto Rico to study Computer Engineering, specializing in hardware. But I’ve been writing software in some form since I can remember. My dad introduced me to IBM System 360 Basic as my first language. Go figure!
Most of my professional career (going on 17 years now) was spent doing test engineering, along with developing all the hardware and software tools required to execute those tests and maintain their infrastructure. The rest of the time I’ve held formal software engineering roles.
I like to spend some of my free time with music. My mother is a music teacher and she got me into piano early on. Though I moved into string instruments as I got older. Today I mostly play classical guitar, but I own several types of guitars and dabble in other string instruments.
This has been a very exciting week for me, with lots of progress made on my GSoC project. For the past couple of months I've been working on adding the new scipy.fft module which supercedes the existing scipy.fftpack submodule and adds a range of new features and interface improvements. Chief among these planned features was a backend system, allowing users to install their own fft libraries as implementations for the scipy.fft interface.
Hacking is the art of exploitation, it should always be used an ethical process. There are certain tools which can ease you through the exploitation process. These tools help in performing repetitive actions & target enumeration. Nevertheless, tools should be the only refuge of any expert penetration tester. One should be able to write own tools & automate the processes in order to better float through any exploitation phase. We will discuss today the top 10 tools admired and mostly used by the Hacking Society.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, exiv2, kernel, nss, openjdk-11, openjdk-8, patch, and squid3), Fedora (gvfs, libldb, and samba), Mageia (firefox, gvfs, libreswan, rdesktop, and thunderbird), openSUSE (bzip2, clementine, dbus-1, expat, fence-agents, firefox, glib2, kernel, kernel-firmware, ledger, libqb, libu2f-host, pam_u2f, libvirt, neovim, php7, postgresql10, python-requests, python-Twisted, ruby-bundled-gems-rpmhelper, ruby2.5, samba, webkit2gtk3, zeromq, and znc), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, rh-maven35-jackson-databind, rh-nodejs8-nodejs, and rh-redis5-redis), Slackware (kernel), and SUSE (ucode-intel).
A security researcher has warned of a serious vulnerability in VideoLAN's VLC Player (VLC), a popular media playback tool, for which no patch is yet available.
GERMAN SECURITY AGENCY CERT-Bund has uncovered a critical flaw n VLC Media Player that could enable hackers to access and modify data on devices.
CERT-Bund has not yet observed the vulnerability being exploited in the wild by attackers. However, exploits will almost certainly emerge in the coming days considering that the vulnerability is now in public domain. In addition, a fix has yet to be released.
A new, translucent material made of little more than silica and air can double the solar dividend, collecting solar heat and raising temperatures to 200€°C, delivering new ways to heat homes or power industrial processes.
And other researchers in the same US city believe they may be on track to deliver much more electricity from solar cells. They have found a way to make a single photon of light dislodge not one electron but two.
A third team in Saudi Arabia has now shown that their solar arrays can not only generate electric power: they can also turn sea water into fresh drinking water at the same time.
For more than a decade he’s been creating a powerful series of images of endangered and extinct species from the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. So far his Extinction photo project has documented more than 130 different plants and animals from around the world. The images include a drawer full of extinct passenger pigeons, a close-up of the claws of a Komodo dragon, the furry tail of a red panda, a sample of a moss species that hasn’t been seen in the wild since 1860, a curled-up pangolin, and an entire collection of shells from extinct Hawaiian tree snails.
You may be shocked to learn this, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.
The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.
Of course the press and public aren't the only folks AT&T misled. To glean the support of the telecom sector's biggest union, the Communications Workers of America, AT&T apparently promised that newly acquired Time Warner (and subsidiary) workers would be able to join the union. But when the time came to actually allow those employees in, guess what?
The CFPB, the FTC, and 48 State AGS today announced a settlement with Equifax arising from the 2017 data breach that compromised personal data of 143 million Americans. The company, which offers authentication services, failed to safeguard the names, addresses, dates of birth and SSNs of 147 million Americans, and then failed to act once aware of the breach.
It's becoming a tradition. A week ago, we wrote about a Friday evening news "leak" (almost certainly from Facebook) about the FTC approving a settlement with Facebook over privacy violations. And, this past Friday evening, there was a similar news dump about a similar settlement with YouTube (though at a much lower dollar amount). In both cases, the Friday evening news dump was almost certainly on purpose -- in the hopes that by Monday, something bigger will have caught the news cycles' attention. Thankfully, we don't work that way.
Let's cut to the chase, though. No one (outside of, perhaps, YouTube/Google/Alphabet execs) is "happy" with this. Pretty much everyone will point out, accurately, that a "multi-million dollar" fine is effectively meaningless to YouTube. No one believes that this will magically lead to a world in which internet companies take privacy more seriously. No one believes this will lead to a world in which anyone's privacy is better protected.
And while I'm sure some people will complain about the amount (pocket change for Google), I'm not sure the amount really makes much of a difference. Remember, last week's angry response to the $5 billion that the FTC is allegedly getting from Facebook. That's a much higher amount (by a massive margin) the largest the FTC has ever gotten from a company.
