In this video, I take a quick look at the recently released versions of Ubuntu 21.04 codenamed "Hirute Hippo." I will briefly look at the flagship Ubuntu Linux distribution as well as: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu MATE.
Is edge part of the cloud, is cloud a part of edge or are they completely separate but slightly related environments?
What makes something a data center vs what makes something an edge device?
How enterprises think of edge vs how Telcos think about edge.
This week we’ve been playing Subnautica and living off BitCoin. We discuss the re-introduction of the Ubuntu Community team and round up our favourite picks from the tech news.
It’s Season 14 Episode 07 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
The University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science and Engineering announced that it's looking into a ban on contributing to the Linux kernel that was issued after its research attracted the ire of the stable release channel's steward.
That ban was issued on Wednesday by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer responsible for the stable channel's release due to a project that intentionally added bugs to the Linux kernel in the name of security research.
"We take this situation extremely seriously," UMN computer science and engineering head Mats Heimdahl and associate department head Loren Terveen said in a statement, adding that they "immediately suspended this line of research" after the ban was announced.
Computer scientists who submitted supposed security patches that actually added security vulnerabilities to the Linux kernel have been placed under investigation by their university.
Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu ran the experiment with so-called ‘hypocrite commits’ to establish that they could act a vector for stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software.
More specifically, the University of Minnesota duo successfully offered use-after-free vulnerabilities that were accepted as seemingly beneficial commits to the Linux kernel.
The researchers argued the exercise offered evidence that the Linux patch-review process is flawed.
Kernel developers ain’t no lab rats
The research attracted criticism back in December while the work was still ongoing, although the drama only escalated over recent days with the publication of the research (PDF). According to the researchers, all of the “bug-introducing patches stayed only in the email exchanges, without being adopted or merged into any Linux branch”, so no harm to users resulted from the exercise.
A couple of computer scientists at the University of Minnesota riled up veteran Linux kernel developers by intentionally submitting questionable code to the mainline kernel.
The scientists introduced what are known as use-after-free bugs into the kernel for the purposes of their research, aptly titled, "On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits."
The paper describes how the authors submitted dubious code that would introduce error conditions into the kernel. The researchers claim they subsequently contacted Linux maintainers to prevent any of their code ending up in the official kernel release.
The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel by one of its maintainers after researchers from the school apparently knowingly submitted code with security flaws.
Earlier this year, two researchers from the university released a paper detailing how they had submitted known security vulnerabilities to the Linux kernel in order to show how potentially malicious code could get through the approval process. Now, after another student from the university submitted code that reportedly does nothing, kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a statement calling for all kernel maintainers to reject any code submissions from anyone using a umn.edu email address.
In addition to not accepting any new code from the university, all of the code submitted in the past is being removed and re-reviewed. It seems like it will be a massive amount of work, but Kroah-Hartman has made it clear that the developer community doesn’t appreciate “being experimented on” and that all of the code from the university has been called into question due to the research.
Speaking for the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, Kees Cook has posted a brief statement on the controversy over patches submitted from the University of Minnesota.
Recently, we have been using Perfetto to successfully profile Apitrace traces in crosvm through VirGL renderer. We have now added perfetto instrumentation to VirGL renderer, Mesa, and Apitrace to see what happens precisely in a frame.
Even more progress towards having a layer that will translate Direct3D 12 nicely over to Vulkan, as the VKD3D-Proton project just had a fresh release out. This is the official project for Valve's Steam Play compatibility layer Proton, with performance and compatibility with Windows games running on Linux as the main focus.
The VKD3D-Proton 2.3 release headline feature is early support for DXR (DirectX Raytracing), with it being hooked up to the newer vendor-neutral Vulkan Ray Tracing support. They say the current DXR compatibility is a work in progress "but it is good enough to run some real content". It's also NVIDIA only right now, as they're waiting for AMD drivers to catch up and the recent Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 does not work. Games that work include Control and Ghostrunner.
VKD3D-Proton 2.3 is now available as the latest release of this Steam Play (Proton) component for running Direct3D 12 games over Vulkan.
Most significant with VKD3D-Proton is early, work-in-progress support for Direct3D 12's DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR) implemented atop Vulkan ray-tracing. For those with a GPU/driver supporting Vulkan ray-tracing, VKD3D-Proton is beginning to work with "real content" albeit still work-in-progress and a limited number of games working. The Radeon Software Linux driver released this week with Vulkan ray-tracing also isn't working so for the moment is just the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
With this release the project replaced the autotools build system with Meson and Ninja and re-designed the user interface to eliminate the menu bar
Just ahead of the Fedora Workstation 34 release where it will be the first major Linux distribution using PipeWire as a modern alternative to PulseAudio and JACK, PipeWire 0.3.26 is now available as the newest big feature release for this audio/video stream server for the modern Linux desktop.
PipeWire 0.3.26 features many Bluetooth audio support improvements, including support for hardware volumes. PipeWire 0.3.26 also now has support for 64 channel devices. There is also I18n support now for translations with the initial translations being ported over from PulseAudio.
Do you use Ubuntu and want to set up the Tor Browser Bundle but are unsure how to go about doing it? We can help! Follow along with this guide as we go over how to download and set up the Tor Browser Bundle on Ubuntu!
Is your Arch Linux system’s Grub bootloader broken? Need to re-install it to make your Arch system bootable again? As it turns out, with a quick trick in the Arch Linux installer ISO, you can! In this guide, we’ll show you how!
In Ubuntu, the PPA is defined as Personal Package Archive, which is used to add or remove packages on a Debian-based system. PPA’s are built by individual persons to develop and update packages for Linux. There are several reasons why one might need to use PPA on a Linux system. Sometimes you would not find the official package of an item on the web, but you might find a personal package archive of that package. If you’re a software developer, you can contribute to the open-source community through the PPA. Using PPA’s is not harmful, and you can avoid harmful PPA’s with basic computing knowledge. You can use PPA to add or remove packages on the Ubuntu system.
When systems encounter issues, as they sometimes will, you need to know your way around the problem and restore them back to a normal and functioning state. In this section, we focus on fundamental network troubleshooting skills that any Linux systems administrator should have.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Google Chrome on Deepin 20.2.
Today we are looking at how to install Jelly Drift by Dani on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MYKI Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MYKI is a free and cross-platform password manager and authenticator that is used to securely store and manage your password locally across multiple devices. Myki is available as browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and MS Edge. And also in the standalone desktop app for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the MYKI Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Manual operations lead to human errors. Adding and removing Cronjobs frequently can be a very time-consuming task. In this article, we will create Shell scripts that automate the addition and deletion of Cronjobs from Ubuntu EC2 instances on AWS. To perform these operations you will need access to the EC2 instance. The user you will use needs to have sudo access so that the user can switch to root and perform addition and deletion of Cronjobs.
When you have numerous Linux servers in your data center, you need to be able to efficiently (and effectively) gather data. Said data will probably require the inclusion of network data. This is especially so when something is going awry on your network.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu 21.04.
One of the most important aps I have ever needed in Linux was ack. With it you can search the whole system or a folder for a specific text and it searches it in file and folder names and in them.
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Ack is designed as a replacement for 99% of the uses of grep.
Ack searches the named input FILEs (or standard input if no files are named, or the file name – is given) for lines containing a match to the given PATTERN . By default, ack prints the matching lines.
Ack can also list files that would be searched, without actually searching them, to let you take advantage of ack’s file-type filtering capabilities.
It is important to keep your Linux server up to date with security updates. Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Debian release updates on a daily basis, so keeping the system up-to-date can become a tedious task. Fortunately, there is an option to install security updates automatically. Here are the steps to enable automatic security updates in Ubuntu 20.04 and later versions.
Sometimes you might have to remove an existing GPT partition table from a hard disk. E.g. when you install another OS like Windows which can't cope with GPT. Or like in my case, when you want to add an HDD into a RAID where the other disks use the traditional MBR partition table.
This tutorial shows you step by step how to add a user to a group on Linux with several examples using the Linux command-line. It also explains how to add users and groups on Linux. The commands should work on any Linux Distribution and have been tested on CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.
This guide shows you how to solve the error message "Connect to MySQL server 127.0.0.1: Too many connections". The error can appear in any log file of a service that connects to the MySQL server. This may e.g. be the /var/log/mail.log file if your email system uses a MySQL database. The error means that the maximum number of connections limit in MySQL has been reached. The same applies to MariaDB servers as well.
Krita is in the Epic Store! Epic already had support Krita with an Epic MegaGrant, so when Epic expanded their store to also offer applications, they approached us, asking whether we wanted to be part of the launch, we said yes!
Prefer Plank dock launcher? Dash-to-Plank is the GNOME Shell extension to integrate it in Ubuntu.
Besides Dash-to-Dock and Dash-to-Panel, this is the third ‘Dash-to’ extension I’ve heard about. It’s Gnome Shell integration for Plank, the simplest dock on the planet.
LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 2 is released! bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.0 (including additional fixes) to LibreELEC users. Changes from LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 1 are listed here. As discussed in the recent Upcoming Changes blog post it, the 10.0 release is a disruptive and limited hardware release. If you have not read the blog post – please do – because we are not releasing images for all hardware. In summary: this is a stable release for Generic (x86_64 PCs). Stable-Beta for Allwinner and Rockchip. Stable “Alpha” for Raspberry Pi 4 as the code is still very new. RPi 2/3 are still in development targetting an LE10.2 release. RPi 0/1 are discontinued. All others hardware is still in development and not in a state for formal releases.
GNOME 40 is the latest iteration of the vaunted desktop but has yet to reach the majority of Linux distributions. Fortunately, those anxious to give the desktop a try need to look no further than openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is the rolling-release distribution that includes the latest-greatest software updates. And although Fedora 34 will also default to GNOME 40, that release is still in beta.
What's the hype about? Although the latest release of GNOME isn't exactly mind-blowing, it does deliver a much more efficient workflow, thanks to a horizontal flow within the Activities overview. The workspaces are now at the top of the overview, making it much easier for users to drag application windows to a specific space. GNOME 40 also makes it easier for you to open the Applications launcher and then open an app directly to the workspace you want to use. Again, thanks to the horizontal workflow, this is a significant improvement over the previous iterations of the GNOME desktop.
One of the top modernization initiatives for IBM Z across industries (especially in banking and financial services) is making the IBM Z part of a hybrid cloud deployment using open source. Opening up the mainframe allows businesses to leverage and monetize the wealth of data it harbors in unique, new ways with modern, containerized applications. Bringing Rancher and Kubernetes value to IBM Z and LinuxONE is a major leap to a transformative platform.
Rancher Continuous Delivery, available since Rancher version 2.5.x, brings the ability to perform GitOps at scale on Rancher-managed clusters. Continuous Delivery, powered by Fleet, allows users to manage the state of their clusters using a GitOps based approach. Canary release is a popular technique used by software developers to release a new version of the application to a subset of users, and based on metrics such as availability, latency or custom metrics, can be scaled up to serve more users. In this blog, we’ll explore using Continuous Delivery to perform canary releases for your application workloads.
With the amount of data today growing ever faster—from sources ranging from device edge to offsite facilities and public and private clouds—organizations must somehow keep pace with that growth as they complete their digital-transformation journeys.
One challenge is having the right quantity and quality of data—and at the right time. With fresh, relevant data, businesses can learn quickly and adapt to changing customer behavior. However, managing vast amounts of data ingest and preparing that data to make it ready as fast as possible—preferably in real time—for analytics and AI/ML, is extremely challenging for today’s data engineers.
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To achieve goals like these, Red Hat uses a combination of automated S3 object bucket notifications, a feature of the Ceph RADOS gateway (RGW) in OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage, data-streaming services available in Red Hat AMQ, and serverless capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift.
As soon as data is ingested, the RGW sends a bucket notification to Red Hat AMQ, which creates an Apache Kafka topic that in turn delivers the notification to OpenShift Serverless. Next, OpenShift Serverless invokes the assigned function to process and apply any transformation on the incoming data.
This process can be scaled to operate on multiple incoming data streams, with each stream invoking a different serverless function. Once the data is processed, it’s stored in a data lake where data engineers and data scientists can access it.
Earlier this week was a surprising Linux kernel networking commit that removed an IBM engineer as one of the driver maintainers for the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver. Seemingly at issue with this VNIC driver work was the developer using his personal email address in working on the driver in his off-hours. IBM has now clarified their stance on such work.
The VNIC maintainer updating patch yielded much attention for carrying the following quoted message, "As an IBM employee, you are not allowed to use your gmail account to work in any way on VNIC. You are not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby". You are an IBM employee 100% of the time. Please remove yourself completely from the maintainers file. I grant you a 1 time exception on contributions to VNIC to make this change."
In the past, IT operations (ITOps) teams were run by independent departments. With the advent of DevSecOps (Development, Security, Operations), integration of development and ITOps has made it easier for teams to work across departments. The growing popularity of hybrid cloud environments accelerated the growth of applications and rapid agile deployments. The increase of hybrid cloud environments in an enterprise generates significant sources of diverse data, including version control systems, code commits, CI/CD operations, automatic scans, policies, test automation systems, change requests, infrastructure and inventory, application logs, among others. In complex IT operations settings, failures are guaranteed to occur unexpectedly, making it difficult for teams to identify the root cause.
One would expect these diverse data sources to provide insight into ITOps from multiple angles. The reality is that the data from varied sources is not necessarily organized, correlated, or centralized, which makes incident resolution challenging. Site reliability engineers (SRE) who are responsible for IT operations deal with analyzing crowded dashboards populated by disparate monitoring tools and diverse data sources without a correlated and centralized source of truth. Despite having a well architected monitoring framework, it can be a herculean task to detect issues that eventually contribute to customer-impacting incidents.
Gartner’s definition of AIOps: AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations (ITOps) processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination.
ITOps teams are beginning to explore how automation can improve business outcomes through scalable artificial intelligence (AI). Gartner found that 10 times more business leaders will rely on AIOps platforms for automated insights in the next three years. Without it, IT organizations can experience a lack of observability, become overwhelmed from manually managing data, and end up focusing on infrastructure rather than an application-centric approach. The ITOps teams of tomorrow will experience full visualization and observability of their IT environments with insights derived from various tools that focus on critical applications to support business performance.
Sometimes, choosing a Linux distribution is a challenge. Given how many options are available, anyone faced with the selection could find their head spinning in a dizzying display of confusion. For certain types of users, the selection gets a bit more focused. A particular type of user is one who either places a higher priority on security and/or those who require a particular security-focused toolkit for their daily job.
Within the world of Linux, there are a few particular distributions that give security considerably more attention. One such distribution is Parrot OS. Before we get into this, know there are two different flavors of Parrot OS—a general desktop distribution (the Home edition) and one purpose-built for security. It's the latter I want to examine today.
Parrot OS Security edition is all about penetration testing and Red Team operations, such as computer forensics, reverse engineering, attack and cloud penetration testing. The security edition of Parrot is geared toward anonymous usage and has a plethora of tools available. All of this is wrapped up in a user-friendly desktop operating system, based on Debian.
Ubuntu MATE 21.04 is here and it has a new look thanks to the collaboration with the Yaru team. This release marks the start of a new visual direction for Ubuntu MATE, while retaining the features you’ve come to love Read on to learn what we’ve been working on over the last 6 months and get some insight to what we’ll be working on next.
Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu 21.04, it includes native Microsoft Active Directory integration, a Flutter application development SDK, and Wayland switched on by default replacing the X Window System which is now 36 years old. Ubuntu 21.04 comes with the Linux 5.11 kernel meaning newer hardware is supported but Canonical decided not to include the latest GNOME 40 just yet.
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 21.04.
Xubuntu 21.04, codenamed Hirsute Hippo, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until January 2022. If you need a stable environment with longer support time we recommend that you use Xubuntu 20.04 LTS instead.
The final release images are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/download/.
As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.
Xubuntu Core, our minimal ISO edition, is available to download from unit193.net/xubuntu/core/ [torrent, magnet]. Find out more about Xubuntu Core here.
We’d like to thank everybody who contributed to this release of Xubuntu!
Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04, featuring Wayland enabled by default plus a Flutter SDK and native Microsoft Active Directory integration. Meanwhile, Linux 5.12 will drop on Sunday.
Unlike last October’s Ubuntu 20.10 LTS (“Groovy Gorilla”), the newly released Ubuntu 21.04 (“Hirsute Hippo”) is not an LTS release and it lacks major embedded news like 20.10’s full-featured Raspberry Pi 4 support. Yet, Ubuntu and its variants and derivatives continues to be the leading distribution on embedded products by a long shot. (Yocto Project and distros based on it are perhaps equally cited, but Yocto is not a distribution, but rather a collection of consistent layers, libraries, and tools.)
We also thought it worth noting that Ubuntu’s long road to the Wayland display server is finally complete. The now fully mature Wayland graphics support is available by default.
Ubuntu 21.04 has been released, and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
This version of Ubuntu — the 34th release since 2006, fact fans — is a short-term release that comes with 9 months of security updates, critical fixes, and select software updates.
Users can download and install Ubuntu 21.04 directly, or upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04 from 20.10. Users of this release will be able to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 later this year.
The Ubuntu 21.04 release is out, and so are new versions of Ubuntu’s family of official flavours.
To bring you (and me) up-to-speed on what’s improved in each flavour with zero waffle I’m going to do it in a mere 2 paragraphs a piece!
Don’t worry, there are screenshots and the relevant download link you will need should you want to try a particular flavour out first hand, for yourself.
Like Ubuntu proper all of the flavours in this list get 9 months of core app updates, security fixes, and bug patches. They all feature the same graphics drivers, the same Linux 5.11 kernel, and have access to the same rich set of software.
But what don’t they have in common? Let’s see…
Ubuntu 21.04 “Hirsute Hippo” is officially out now. The latest version has a new default display server, native support for Microsoft Active Directory domains, and updated theme.
Ubuntu 21.04 is a regular short term release that will be supported for nine months. It will only receive updates until January 2022. Ubuntu usually uses regular releases to introduce new developments that it hopes to stabilize by the time the next long term release (LTS) rolls around.
Above all, Ubuntu 21.04 biggest change is a change from Xorg display server to Wayland. The developers at Canonical say this will bring smoother graphics, better support for fractional scaling on displays with high pixel density, and improved security. Although Wayland is set to default, be cautious that things might breaks, especially if you have Nvidia hardware. Ubuntu tried using Wayland by default back with Ubuntu 17.10, before reverting to Xorg for subsequent releases.
By switching to Wayland now, Canonical can work out any issues by the time of the next long-term support Ubuntu release.
Ubuntu 21.04, codenamed “Hirsute Hippo”, is here. This release continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, partnering with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs.
Ubuntu Desktop 21.04 uses Wayland graphics by default, strengthening security while enhancing performance. 21.04 comes with improved AD (Active Directory) integration where user authentication, with Group Policy enabled, works out of the box to allow administrators to manage Ubuntu workstations and simplify developer compliance with company policies. Ubuntu 21.04 also adds the ability to configure system settings from an Active Directory domain controller. Using a Group Policy Client, system administrators can specify security policies on all connected clients, such as password policies and user access control, and Desktop environment settings, such as login screen, background and favourite apps.
Ubuntu Server 21.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects like Openstack Wallaby, Rails 6, QEMU 5.2, libvirt 7.0, Kubernetes, and Ceph with advanced life-cycle management tools for multi-cloud and on-prem operations from bare metal, VMWare and Openstack, to every major public cloud.
The Ubuntu Kernel has been updated to the 5.11 based Linux kernel, our default toolchain has moved to gcc 10.3.0 release with glibc 2.33, and we’ve also updated to openssl 1.1.1.
The newest Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu are also being released today.
Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 21.04 has been released. With the codename Hirsute Hippo, Lubuntu 21.04 is the 20th release of Lubuntu, the sixth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.
Do I need to orchestrate my network functions? Well, the answer depends on the price-performance assumptions of your infrastructure and workloads.
It seems like ages that NFV is trying to fulfill the promises of reducing CAPEX (Capital Expenditure) and OPEX (operating expenses) by decoupling Network Functions (NFs) from the hardware and ensuring stability. However, despite the huge traction it has gained, there are still obstacles that must be overcome before NFV can be part of day-to-day operations in industrial deployments. Telcos need to build complex virtualized network functions while maintaining a high quality of service (QoS) so onboarding them cost-effectively and implementing the process for management and orchestration remains one of the biggest challenges. Right now, this process can take up to weeks, and operators and vendors are striving to cut it to a day.
Network function onboarding is an automated methodology for bringing new network functions into an operational NFV environment so that they can be instantiated, scaled in and out, and fully utilized to deliver features. It includes modeling the network function so that its features and interfaces can be published to any NFV environment, interoperable with the selected MANO, and other adopted deployment and testing mechanisms by multiple VNF vendors. ETSI OSM is an operator-led community that is delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models and that meets the requirements of production NFV networks. It helps accelerate your migration to NFV with network function onboarding and then ensuring the automated orchestration of the network functions.
The PineTime smartwatch was unveiled and first launched in 2019, as a low-cost, open-source wearables development kit/platform for developers wanting to work on firmware development for the Nordic nRF52 powered device.
Progress was made on various solutions such as ATCwatch Arduino firmware, and as time passed, the PineTime slowly became more like an “enthusiast-grade” end-user product. This is basically what it has become with the first stable release of InfiniTime firmware, which was selected as the default firmware in September 2020.
SiFive announced that AI chip startup Tenstorrent will license a new 64-bit SiFive Intelligence X280 CPU for its Tensix cores and that Renesas will adopt SiFive Intelligence for its automotive processors.
Tomorrow at the Linley Spring Processor Conference, RISC-V IP designer SiFive will unveil the X280, the first of the SiFive Intelligence family of processors announced last September. Meanwhile, SiFive has announced two early adopters of SiFive Intelligence. AI chip and software startup Tenstorrent will license the SiFive Intelligence X280 as a platform for its Tensix NPU. Renesas says it will license SiFive Intelligence for its automotive processors but did not specify the X280. (See farther below for more on the Tenstorrent and Renesas news.)
The Sony Xperia 10 II is a smartphone with a 6 inch, 2520 x 1080 pixel OLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. Originally released in early 2020, like most Sony smartphones, it originally shipped with Google Android. But like a handful of other Sony devices, you’ll soon be able to run the Linux-based Sailfish OS on it instead.
The developers at Jolla have announced that Sailfish OS for the Sony Xperia 10 II is coming soon. Users will have the option of installing a free version from the Jolla Shop, or they can pay 49.90 € for a full license to get long-term support, software updates, and other features, including the ability to run some Android apps.
Following up on our report for Linux 5.11 this summarizes the progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 phone and its development kit during the 5.12 development cycle.
In order to maintain support for the devkit and the phone, we continuously update the mainline hardware description and default configuration. This category even forms the bulk of our contributions during the latest development cycle. The following changes also finally make it possible to run the mainline arm64 default kernel on the devkit with the display working. Running an unmodified upstream kernel is not only incredibly powerful for kernel development as it removes various uncertainties and reviews overhead. It’s also a big step towards ensuring long-term support of the hardware. Working on our changes together with the community is far more pleasant than being on our own. We keep working on reaching the same point for the Librem 5 phone...
Methods: In response to the call for participation in the 2020 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook theme issue on Medical Informatics and the Pandemic, the IMIA Open Source Working Group surveyed recent works related to the use of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) for this pandemic.
Results: FLOSS health care projects including GNU Health, OpenMRS, DHIS2, and others, have responded from the early phase of this pandemic. Data related to COVID-19 have been published from health organizations all over the world. Civic Technology, and the collaborative work of FLOSS and open data groups were considered to support collective intelligence on approaches to managing the pandemic.
Conclusion: FLOSS and open data have been effectively used to contribute to managing the COVID-19 pandemic, and open approaches to collaboration can improve trust in data.
Linux Professional Institute (LPI) members will elect a new Board of Directors next month. The list of nominees put forth by the nominating committee includes both new candidates and existing board members. It also provides background information for each of the 15 candidates, along with their motivation for running.
Call for Papers closes on Sunday. Join foss-north 2021 and be a part of a great speaker line-up!
When planning foss-north, we always pre-announce some speakers early on. This helps set the tone of the conference, show sponsors that we have contents, and – interestingly – also increase the number of submissions to our call for papers.
This year is a bit special due to COVID-19 and the conference will be our third virtual installment, but we are still hoping to bring together great people and contents.
This year we have four pre-announced speakers who I’m very excited about. We have everything from stories from how the Internet is kept safe, how to use open source methods in your organization, how industry verticals collaborate around open source, all the way to how to write a Linux kernel driver.
Matomo is an open source PHP/MySQL based web analytics application to track online visits to websites and displays reports on these visits. It does what Google Analytics does, but it is open source. Matomo has commercial cloud based offering for those who do not want to host their own instance but the code is there on GitHub (https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo) for anyone who is interested.
WordPress is the world’s most popular website creation platform and has been for a while now. What makes WordPress so wildly popular and successful isn’t the fact that there are no alternatives; it’s the fact that WordPress by itself is by far the simplest to use, one of the most sophisticated, and a top-tier website creation tool.
There have been many platforms diligently working to dethrone WordPress, but none have even come close. These days, WordPress powers 40% of all websites available, which is a massive number.
A platform of the size of WordPress is a monolithic one, and it has a whole community centered around it. Just like anything else in the digital sphere, it’s chock-full of trends, and the trends in twenty twenty-one dictate the future of how people will go on using the platform.
GNU Parallel 20210322 ('Ever Given') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4 No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release. An easy way to support GNU Parallel is to tip on LBRY. Please help spreading GNU Parallel by making a testimonial video like Juan Sierra Pons: http://www.elsotanillo.net/wp-content/uploads/GnuParallel_JuanSierraPons.mp4 It does not have to be as detailed as Juan's. It is perfectly fine if you just say your name, and what field you are using GNU Parallel for.
Open source software company Grafana Labs has relicensed its core open source projects from the Apache Licence 2.0 to the Affero General Public Licence (AGPL) v3.
The creator of Grafana Loki and Tempo and contributor to projects such as Graphite, Prometheus and Cortex, described the move as balancing “value creation” and “revenue creation”, while maintaining an open source philosophy.
In the past, some open source software providers have changed their licensing, such as the server side public licence (SSPL) from MongoDB, which charges cloud providers a fee for providing the software as a service on their platforms. But cloud providers have often found workarounds.
For instance, soon after MongoDB introduced SSPL, AWS introduced a compatible database, Amazon DocumentDB, which, it said, implemented the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 application programming interface (API) by emulating the responses a MongoDB client expects from a MongoDB server.
India is well-positioned to become a vibrant hub for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) innovations, due to the large number of 4G data subscribers in India, 96% of whom access the digital world via open-source-based mobile operating systems (primarily Android). Some of India's largest government projects (including Aadhaar) and many technology start-ups have also been built using FOSS. Acknowledging the huge potential of FOSS, the Government of India had issued a Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software in 2015.
To increase awareness about the usage of FOSS in governance and Government functioning, and adoption of FOSS, a virtual roundtable discussion 'Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Government' was organized by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) in collaboration with Omidyar Network India on April 22, 2021.
Speaking at the occasion, Shri Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, appraised the steps taken by MeitY like Policy for Open Source Software in 2015 to Open Source Collaborative development of Aarogya Setu. "I am delighted to see the interest in further advancing the adoption of FOSS in Government among a wide range of Government leaders, Academia and FOSS innovators. MeitYwill continues to play a key role in this journey. We are also pleased to announce the #FOSS4GOV Innovation Challenge, which will harness the innovation potential of the FOSS community and start-ups to solve critical issues in GovTech. More such efforts will be forthcoming."
In my case I typically start out by saying I’m a software engineer. (And no, I don’t use a title.)
Although the latest version on Ubuntu 20.04 of Python is 3.x, however, we still can install Python 2.7 from its official repository. Here we will show you that along with steps to update-alternatives for selecting the default Python version on your Linux.
With the entry-level and user-friendly programming language Python, you can code almost any imaginable application. But it’s just a piece of software like any other – installation and management can sometimes be complex. Well, not for Ubuntu. The syntax of Python is simple and understandable so that beginners and those switching can quickly find their way around. Object orientation is fully supported in Python, but no object-oriented programming is enforced. Python also supports various programming styles, such as imperative, structural, functional, or aspect-oriented programming.
Hosie discusses the topic of obesity in society from the perspective of various health experts, personal trainers, self-love advocates, and medical doctors. While there may be no exact correlation between weight and physical health, obesity leads to additional complications from various illnesses. At the same time, those who at least stay active and practice proper nutritional habits are less likely to experience health problems associated with obesity.
In the age of the Anthropocene, the simple act of taking a healthy breath has become a luxury. In spite of ongoing industry efforts to thwart elected officials into allowing for “business as usual” no matter the social and environmental toll, activists are no longer the only ones calling for dramatic drops in emissions: now, even corporate leaders and power companies have called on the Biden administration to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
FAIR analyzed the Sunday schedule of programs for five major media networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox—during April 2020 to determine just how many health experts and public interest groups each network’s programs featured. Of all 121 featured guests, only 21 percent were health experts and just two percent represented public interest groups. These programs also included only three foreign officials across all five networks.
“The threat boils down to American excess,” Jessica Moss wrote. Over the past fifty years, meat production has increased about 260 percent, mostly in the form of so-called factory farms or CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) that fulfill the US and global demand for cheap and plentiful animal protein. As Moss reported, 99 percent of US meat comes from factory farms where “[p]oor conditions and stress on the animals means that disease can emerge on the farms and spread through the herd at lightning speed—like COVID-19 in a nightclub.”
The international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday implored the United States, European Union member nations, and other rich countries to immediately end their opposition to South Africa and India’s patent waiver proposal , which would enable the mass production of generic coronavirus vaccines to meet the developing world’s dire needs .
In one posted video, Neptute claimed that a Covid-19 vaccine “does not and will not and cannot stop the infection.” Despite Facebook’s claims that it would take down any misinformation about the coronavirus, it was not until after the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published an article on this matter that Facebook take down Nepute’s content. Facebook’s action appears to have been the result of negative attention brought by the article; they were reactive instead of proactive, as they claimed to be, the Bureau’s Jasper Jackson reported.
Although a settlement agreement was filed in December, it has yet to be finalized. The finalization is contingent on several measures, including an expansion of COVID-19 testing and twice-daily temperature checks for the medically vulnerable. On May 10, 2021, the settlement will be brought to a judge who will decide whether or not to make it a court order. Until then, detainees will have the opportunity to bring their disagreements directly to the judge. If a similar lawsuit against Miami-Dade corrections is anything to go by, the success of this settlement could result in a significant decrease in the prison population, lessening the chance of another outbreak.
On 13 April, the Free Software Movement of India, a coalition of organisations promoting the adoption of free software, was allowed access to its Twitter account, almost 17 days after the social-media platform locked it out. Twitter had locked the account of FSMI on 27 March, for a tweet that referred to a data breach of customers’ details at Big Basket, an online grocery store. On 30 March, Robert Baptiste, a France-based cyber-security expert, who goes by the name Elliot Alderson on Twitter, too, was locked out of his account for a tweet referring to a data breach at Mobikwik, a digital payments platform. The next day, another cyber-security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia faced similar action by Twitter for a tweet regarding the MobiKwik breach, which affected the personal data of almost ten crore users. This was the second time in a month that Rajaharia had been locked out of his account for tweets on MobiKwik. In each instance, Twitter told the accounts that their tweets violated its rules against “posting private information.”
Baptiste and Rajaharia’s accounts were restored in less than 12 hours—both of them deleted their respective tweets. Rajaharia shared a screenshot which showed that his account was locked for 12 hours for violating Twitter’s private-information policy, but he told me his account was reinstated after about four hours. FSMI, which was locked out of its account for a tweet dated 12 December 2020, chose not to delete the post and Twitter later took down the tweet. Strangely, another tweet by FSMI, from 11 November, which refers to the same content, remained visible on the account.
In each case, it was unclear how the tweets on data breaches violated the rules against “posting private information,” and if Twitter took action on its own, or whether some other individual or organisation reported these accounts. In an email response to The Caravan on 31 March, Twitter did not answer specific questions on who reported FSMI’s account and only said, “The referenced account was correctly actioned for violating the Private information policy.” However, on 13 April, Twitter sent an email to FSMI, informing them that their account had been restored and admitted that “After reviewing your account, it looks like we made an error.”
Cybereason, the leader in future-ready attack protection, today announced the discovery of a widespread, global campaign seeking to propagate the stealthy Prometei Botnet, by targeting organizations with a multi-stage attack to steal processing power to mine bitcoin. The threat actors, who appear to be Russian speakers, are taking advantage of previously disclosed Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities leveraged in the Hafnium attacks to penetrate networks.
Prometei has a complex infrastructure designed to ensure persistence on infected machines. While Prometei was first reported on in July 2020, Cybereason assesses that the botnet actually dates back to at least 2016, a year before the now infamous WannaCry and NotPetya malware attacks that affected more than 200 countries and caused billions in damages. Prometei continues to evolve with new features and tools regularly observed.
Recently, the Cybereason Nocturnus Team responded to several incident response (IR) cases involving infections of the Prometei Botnet against companies in North America, observing that the attackers exploited recently published Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-27065 and CVE-2021-26858) in order to penetrate the network and install malware. Prometei is a modular and multi-stage cryptocurrency botnet that was first discovered in July 2020 which has both Windows and Linux versions. To achieve their goal of mining Monero coins, Prometei uses different techniques and tools, ranging from Mimikatz to SMB and RDP exploits and other tools that all work together to propagate across the network. Although Prometei was officially discovered in mid-2020, the Cybereason Nocturnus Team found evidence that Prometei might date back as far as 2016 and has been evolving ever since, adding new modules and techniques to its capabilities. The latest versions of Prometei now provide the attackers with a sophisticated and stealthy backdoor that supports a wide range of tasks that make mining Monero coins the least of the victims' concerns.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Wednesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will conduct a probe into the practices and culture of the Minneapolis Police Department. Garland’s announcement came the day after a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of all three charges he faced for the murder of George Floyd.
The police murder of George Floyd added jet fuel to a nationwide push to defund the police. We go to Minneapolis to speak with Kandace Montgomery, co-executive director of Black Visions Collective, about their response to the guilty verdict for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd and an update on the push to divest from Minneapolis police and invest in communities.
On Tuesday, former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges in the brutal public lynching of George Floyd. For the Floyd family, the conviction offered some solace that the courts did not allow Floyd’s life to be taken with impunity. For many of us, however, it was a hollow “victory,” not only because prisons don’t solve our problems, but because we know police don’t either.
One by one Americans have been able to return to their designated jobs since the COVID-19 outbreak, including live sports events, movie production, and even television award shows. However, due to the organization of Broadway and other live Theater venues, actors and stage crew members have yet to hear an answer on when the curtains will rise again. For many, unemployment checks have been barely enough to cover daily expenses. Some Broadway shows were forced to close their doors permanently as a result of lost profits during the pandemic.
As Luterman wrote, under a regulation in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, “disabled people can be legally paid pennies per hour.”
Over a period of about six months, the United States suffered two extreme weather events that had the same outcome: widespread energy disruptions through rolling power outages that left people dangerously vulnerable to the elements.
The US Department of Justice has filed federal criminal charges against more than 400 US citizens for rioting during the counting of electoral votes. But President Trump’s delayed call to the mob to abandon the assault and the subsequent arrests did not safeguard democracy’s integrity from bi-partisan dry rot from within.
As protesters have rallied across the U.S. over the past year against police-perpetrated violence and brutality, Republicans in state legislatures have been busy cooking up anti-protest laws. Reporting has found that, just in the 2021 legislative session, Republicans have introduced 81 bills in 34 states aimed at suppressing protests.
The rapidly changing 5G RAN and the growth forecasts for the equipment market promises to attract 5G RAN SEP monetization. The large number and diverse ownership of 5G RAN SEPs should encourage a frenzy of monetization activity.
As of January 2021, nearly 33,000 active patent families have been self-declared to 5G. Of those families, over 63% or 20,750 families have been self-declared specifically to 5G RAN infrastructure. These families comprise nearly 70,000 active patents and applications. The pie chart below developed from Unified Patents’ objective patent landscaping tool (OPAL) shows the top 20 ownership of those families.
According to new data from Unified Patents, the rise in discretionary denials at the PTAB is showing no signs of slowing down. In 2019, there were 6 denials based on co-pending litigation (so-called €§ 314(a) or Fintiv denials). In these denials, the PTAB decides not to institute an inter partes review based primarily on related litigation in the district courts or at the ITC, not based on the merits of the challenge to the patent. (In fact, in some cases, they admit that the challenge is “particularly strong”—and then still deny the challenge.)
In 2020? There were 85. And now, in just the first quarter of 2021, there have already been 43 denials. That represents a doubling of the pace of denials based on co-pending litigation from 2020, assuming the pace doesn’t increase even further during the rest of the year.
[...]
There may be light on the horizon—in a recent discussion, Acting USPTO Director Drew Hirschfeld indicated that the Office is currently reviewing the more than 800 comments they received on discretionary denials and considering what changes might need to be made to restore balance to the PTAB.
In 2019 alone, almost 14,000 patent applications were filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) in the field of medical technology.
Over the years, courts and commentators have said many thoughtful things about secondary considerations evidence and its role in the law of €§ 103, and reasonable minds have expressed significant disagreement about the value of this evidence. Consider, for example, the Federal Circuit’s fractured en banc Apple v. Samsung decision in 2016 and the never-ending debate over whether secondary considerations are best treated as rebuttal evidence to a prima facie case of obviousness based on the prior art, or whether all obviousness evidence should be analyzed holistically and at once.
My take is different: the whole primary/secondary categorization is unhelpful, especially in litigation and during post-issuance PTAB review. Let’s take one illustration. Commercial success and the skepticism of experts are both classified as “secondary considerations,” while teaching away is usually considered to be a part of the primary inquiry. However, skepticism has much more in common with teaching away, which directly tells us that the claimed invention would have been challenging to come up with, than with commercial success, which represents a market response to the invention that may indicate nonobviousness only indirectly. So what is the point of these evidentiary silos?
Over the past two weeks, about 140 schoolgirls have met with the EPO as part of Girls' Day in the Netherlands and Germany.
At each of its sites in The Hague and Munich, about 70 teenage girls participated in an online event that provided a fun, informative view at careers in science or technology. The girls learned about the patent granting process, watched a presentation on amusing inventions, met some of the Office's female leaders, and participated in various interactive and entertaining exercises.
Organised under the lead of VHTO in the Netherlands and of kompetenzz in Germany, the Girl's Day is an annual international event aimed at reducing the gender imbalance in STEM fields by encouraging young girls to become interested in the science and technology world at an early age. Technical companies, (non-)governmental organisations and research institutes open their doors to teenage schoolgirls to highlight successful women in STEM professions and show that these careers can be exciting and rewarding.
Predictions that Romag v Fossil would bolster plaintiffs in settlement negotiations have come true, but a lack of case law makes the ruling’s broader effects unclear
