• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Managing devices in Linux

There are many interesting features of the Linux directory structure. This month I cover some fascinating aspects of the /dev directory. Before you proceed any further with this article, I suggest that, if you have not already done so, you read my earlier articles, Everything is a file, and An introduction to Linux filesystems, both of which introduce some interesting Linux filesystem concepts. Go ahead—I will wait.

Great! Welcome back. Now we can proceed with a more detailed exploration of the /dev directory.

Open source has won, and Microsoft has surrendered

I have covered Microsoft’s interference with FOSS [free and open-source software] for over a decade and carefully studied even pertinent antitrust documents. I know the company’s way of thinking when it comes to undermining their competition

The pattern of embrace and extend (to extinguish) — all this while leveraging software patents to make Linux a Microsoft cash cow or compel OEMs to preinstall privacy-hostile Microsoft software/apps with proprietary formats (lockin) — never ended. What I see in the Linux Foundation right now is what I saw in Nokia 5 years ago and in Novell 10 years ago — the very thing that motivated me to start BoycottNovell, a site that has just turned 10 with nearly 22,000 blog posts. It is a saddening day because it’s a culmination, after years of Microsoft ‘micro’ payments to the Linux Foundation (e.g. event sponsorship in exchange for keynote positions), which will have Microsoft shoved down the throats of GNU/Linux proponents and give an illusion of peace when there is none, not just on the patent front but also other fronts (see what Microsoft’s partner Accenture is doing in Munich right now).

Desktop

• Pinebook crams ARM CPU and Linux support into an $89 laptop

  Last year Pine64 debuted a tiny little Linux computer that packs an Allwinner A64 ARM processor inside a small, clear shell. The big deal with that tiny computer was that it cost only $15 or starters. Pine64 is back and this year it has a new laptop that is impressively cheap called the Pinebook.

  This laptop packs in the Allwinner quad-core, 64-bit processor and pairs that processor with 2GB of RAM. Internal storage is 16GB and the Pinebook features WiFi and Bluetooth built-in. The machine has dual USB 2.0 ports, a microSD card slot, a mini HDMI output, and a headphone port. It’s not going to be a powerhouse machine, but the hardware isn’t bad considering that the 11.6-inch screen version sells for $89.

Server

• Docker 1.13.0 RC2 Supports Building of Docker DEBs for Ubuntu 16.10 on PPC64LE

  Two weeks ago, we discussed here the upcoming features of the Docker 1.13.0 open-source and cross-platform application container engine as part of the new version’s first Release Candidate build.

  And now, Developer Victor Vieux announced the availability of the second RC version for the Docker 1.13.0 release, which appears to bring lots of improvements and bug fixes. Notable changes include support for labels on volumes, the ability to filter volumes by label, along with the ability to purge data from a deleted volume using the “–force” parameter in the “docker volume rm” command.

• AWS Launches Amazon Linux Container Image

  AWS recently launched a Docker container image for its Amazon Linux operating system, complementing the EC2 specific Amazon Linux AMI with a versatile deployment option for custom cloud and on-premise environments. The image is available through the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and also as an official repository on Docker Hub.

  The Amazon Linux AMI is a “supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services” that is designed to “provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2″. It has long been the base image for most of AWS’ Linux based offerings, such as the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platforms, the Amazon Elastic MapReduce releases, and the Amazon EC2 Container Service instances.

• 3 Emerging Cloud Technologies You Should Know

  In previous articles, we’ve discussed four notable trends in cloud computing and how the rise of microservices and the public cloud has led to a whole new class of open source cloud computing projects. These projects leverage the elasticity of the public cloud and enable applications designed and built to run on it.

  Early on in cloud computing, there was a migration of existing applications to Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft’s Azure. Virtually any app that ran on hardware in private data centers could be virtualized and deployed to the cloud. Now with a mature cloud market, more applications are being written and deployed directly to the cloud and are often referred to as being cloud native.

  Here we’ll explore three emerging cloud technologies and mention a few key projects in each area. For a more in-depth explanation and to see a full list of all the projects across six broad categories, download our free 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud report.

• Why the fuss about serverless?

  To explain this, I’m going to have to recap on some old work with a particular focus on co-evolution.

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.9-rc7

  Still on the regular Sunday release schedule, here’s rc7.

  I think we got all the silly problems I was aware of fixed, and on the
  whole things are looking pretty good. In fact, if next week ends up
  being very quiet, this _might_ be the last rc, although honestly I
  strongly suspect I’ll end up doing an rc8. It’s been a big release,
  and rc7 could have been quieter. We’ll see.

  I basically reserve the right to make up my mind next weekend.

  The changes in rc7 are mainly drivers, architecture and networking. In
  fact, most of the driver updates are networking drivers, so I guess I
  could say “mostly networking and architecture updates, with a
  smattering of other driver updates” (the main other driver areas being
  usb, gpu, hid, i2c, iommu). And we’ve got the usual small random
  stuff all over (core kernel, a eBPF fix, some filesystem fixes etc).

  The appended shortlog gives a reasonable view into what’s up.

  Linus

• Linus Torvalds Outs the Seventh RC for Linux Kernel 4.9, Might Be the Last One

  It’s Sunday here is the US, and, for hardcore Linux users, this means that they test drive yet another RC (Release Candidate) build of the soon-to-be-released Linux 4.9 kernel.

  That’s right, Linus Torvalds just made his weekly announcement to inform the Linux community on the immediate availability of the seventh Release Candidate (RC7) development milestone for the upcoming Linux kernel 4.9 series, which has been delayed for a week due to the size of the patch.

• Linux 4.9-rc7 Kernel Released: Final In 1~2 Weeks

  The Linux 4.9-rc7 test kernel is now available although it’s yet undecided whether there will be an RC8 before declaring it gold.

• Shhhhh! If you’re quiet, Linus Torvalds might release new a Linux

  The world almost certainly needs to wait another week for Linux 4.9, says the operating system’s overlord Linus Torvalds.

  In his weekly post on the progress of the next kernel release, Torvalds announced release candidate seven of Linux 4.9, saying “ I think we got all the silly problems I was aware of fixed, and on the whole things are looking pretty good.”

• Linux Kernel 4.4.35 LTS Hits the Streets with x86 Improvements, Updated Drivers

• Linux Kernel 4.8.11 Improves Wireless and AMDGPU Drivers, Fixes AArch64 Issues

• Graphics Stack

  • VK9, the open source project to implement d3d9 over Vulkan continues to improve

    VK9, formerly known as ‘SchaeferGL’ is an open source project that aims to implement d3d9 over Vulkan.

  • Mesa 13.0.2 Released, Includes Many Intel/RADV Vulkan Driver Fixes

    For those riding the stable Mesa release train, Mesa 13.0.2 is now available as the newest Mesa 13.0 point release.

    As covered last week, the 50+ changes in this version include many fixes to VC4, i965, Radeon, and RADV drivers. There are also a number of Vulkan WSI (windowing system integration) fixes plus driver specific work, more smoke-testing, and memory leak fixes. The Intel Mesa driver also has received its share of support for Intel Geminilake hardware coming out in 2017.

  • Mesa 13.0.2 Adds Intel Gemini Lake Support, Great Improvements to Vulkan Drivers

    Today, November 28, 2016, Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced the release of the second maintenance update to the stable Mesa 13.0 3D Graphics Libray for Linux-based operating systems.

  • Qualcomm Adreno A5xx Open-Source Driver Bringup For Freedreno

    There’s now patches for bringing up open-source graphics driver support in the Freedreno stack for Qualcomm’s latest-generation Adreno graphics hardware.

    The Adreno 505, 506, 510, and 530 GPUs are found in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs like the Snapdragon 820, 821, 650, and 430. The Adreno 500 series is fully Vulkan 1.0 compliant, supports OpenGL ES 3.1/3.2, and has full support for OpenCL 2.0.

• Benchmarks

  • 20-Way NVIDIA/AMD GPU Darktable OpenCL Photography Performance

    With the holiday season in full swing, whether you are just a casual photographer or professional, Darktable is easily one of the best photography workflow applications and it’s free software! Darktable has offered OpenCL acceleration for providing faster performance on GPUs and with the imminent Darktable 2.2 release there is even better OpenCL results. For those curious about the OpenCL performance of Darktable, I’ve done some Darktable 2.2-RC1 benchmarks on a variety of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Ubuntu Linux.

  • More Darktable GPU/CPU Benchmarks – 27 Different Setups

Applications

• anytime 0.1.1: More robust

  CRAN just accepted the newest release 0.1.1 of anytime, following the previous five releases since September.

  anytime is a very focussed package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to POSIXct (or Date) objects — and to do so without requiring a format string.

• FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” Multimedia Backend Gets Its First Point Release, Adds Fixes

  It’s been almost a month since the major FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” open-source, free and cross-platform multimedia framework was officially unveiled, and now the first point release arrives for all supported platforms.

  FFmpeg 3.2 “Hypatia” brought us many goodies, including OpenH264 decoder wrapper, libopenmpt demuxer, alias muxer for Ogg Video (.ogv), VP8 support for Ogg muxing, the True Audio (TTA) muxer, as well as the crystalizer, maskedclamp, hysteresis, lut2, yuvtestsrc, vaguedenoiser, weave, avgblur, gblur, and acrusher audio filters.

• Alduin is an Open-Source Desktop RSS Reader for Linux

  On the look out for a clean, modern and open-source desktop RSS reader app for Linux? I know I am, so I was excited to come across Alduin. Alduin is a simple RSS (and Atom) feed aggregator that’s billed as having an “ergonomic, complete and easy to use interface, which will be suitable for all types of user.”

• Gluqlo is a Flip Clock Screensaver for Linux

  Looking for a nifty screensaver for Ubuntu? Check out Gluqlo, a Linux version of the popular Fliqlo screensaver for Windows and OS X.

  Ubuntu no longer bundles a screensavers with the default build. Instead, when you leave your computer idle for a set period Ubuntu blanks the display to conserve power.

• Phoronix Test Suite 6.8 Milestone 3 Provides A Final Early Look At “Tana”

• Proprietary

  • Vivaldi 1.5.676.6 Web Browser Snapshot Introduces Easier Tab Selection by Domain

  • Microsoft enables Linux desktop users to send SMS text messages with latest Skype Alpha [Ed: Missing the fact that Skype already had GNU/Linux support before Microsoft bought it and then abandoned it]

  • Microsoft Updates Skype for Linux with SMS Support

  • Skype Linux users can now send SMS messages straight from their desktops

  • Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) OS Linux help users to send SMS text messages via Skype Alpha

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Network monitor

  • Learning Rust

  • Writing Docker Microservices in COBOL

  • Health Checking Your Docker Containers

  • Fedora 25 upgrade made easy, like how we are upgrading our smartphone now a days

• Games

  • X-Plane 11 Beta Now Available, Demo Too

    Laminar Research has released their first public beta of the massive X-Plane 11.0 flight simulator update. It’s a huge update and expect some bugs at this stage, but should be a very exciting release.

  • X-Plane 11 now in beta, also has a demo available

    X-Plane 11 is nearing release, so the developers have put up a beta and a demo of the beta for you to try before you buy.

  • ‘Battle Chasers: Nightwar’ is a visually stunning RPG inspired by a comic, that might be released next year

    I can count with the fingers of a single hand the number of comics I read in my whole life, and the Battle Chasers aren’t the exception; though, if this upcoming game is being loyal to their style and tone, I have to say I would be more tempted to do so. Personally, I don’t expect for games to have state-of-the-art technology behind their graphics, but I care a lot about the artistic design, and this one truly seems to deliver on that. Plus, if you check this news on the official site, after a successful Kickstarter campaign they announced to be completely funded by Nordic Games without sacrificing the creative control of the project, so basically the quality of the game now simply relies on how talented they are and how well they spend the budget on the game.

  • Find the meaning of life in ‘Sisyphus Reborn’, an atmospheric short free adventure on Steam

    If you’re looking to play an adventure game but you don’t have a lot of time, then you may be interested to check out Sisyphus Reborn, a lightweight (300 MB) and short existential adventure that will only take you 40 minutes to finish (and that includes getting all the achievements). It was released for Linux exactly two months ago, as indicated in this announcement, where you can also find the person who made the port credited.

  • The Station, the first-person narrative sci-fi game has been Greenlit and reached it’s Kickstarter goal

  • Space colony sim ‘Maia’ updated, creatures will invade your base and more

  • Feedback needed for our ‘Linux Game Of The Year Award’ that will start soon

    We’ve run a GOTY award for the last two years and this year will be no different! I am requesting feedback!

    The page is currently open, with the categories adjusted from last year: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/goty.php

    If you have a suggestion for a category, please let me know, but I don’t want too many more as I think we already have a good selection going from feedback last year.

  • Valve seems to have removed the SteamPlay logo from Steam

    Something that didn’t go unnoticed was that Valve has removed the SteamPlay logo from Steam store pages.

    This is interesting, as it was a partial source of confusion amongst SteamOS/Linux gamers. Plenty of us know how to easily identify games that have Linux support, but there was plenty who didn’t. People were genuinely getting confused about it all and I don’t blame them.

  • 2016 Holiday Gift Ideas For Linux Enthusiasts, Gamers

    If you are looking for any gift ideas this 2016 holiday season for a Linux gamer/enthusiast or just a casual user looking for some friendly PC hardware, here are my favorites for this holiday season.

  • Vendetta Online 1.8.398 MMORPG Adds Better Game Controller Support for Gear VR

    Guild Software announced a new update to their cross-platform, multiplayer Vendetta Online 1.8 MMORPG, versioned 1.8.398, which ships only a few days after the 1.8.397 maintenance update.

    As you might imagine, Vendetta Online 1.8.398 is a small patch addressing various issues reported by users from the previous point release, but also adding significant improvements to analog stick sensitivity for various game controllers made by Razer, Moga, SteelSeries, and Nyko, when playing the game with the Samsung Gear VR headset.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Chakra GNU/Linux Users Get KDE Plasma 5.8.4, Apps 16.08.3, and Frameworks 5.28.0

    On November 27, 2016, Chakra GNU/Linux developer Neofytos Kolokotronis informs the community about the availability of a set of new software updates for the rolling distro originally based on Arch Linux.

    A week ago, we reported on the availability of the cups 2.1.4-3 and pepperflashplugin 23.0.0.207-1 packages in the Chakra GNU/Linux repositories, which required manual intervention from the user. And, after some issues with their hosting provider, the promised KDE goodies are finally here, along with numerous other updates.

  • Google Code-in begins soon; KDE mentors welcome students

    The KDE community will once more be participating in Google Code-in, which pairs KDE mentors with students beween the ages of 13 and 18 to work on tasks which both help the KDE community and teach the students how to contribute to free and open source projects. Not only coding, but also documentation and training, outreach and research, quality assurance and user interface tasks will be offered.

  • KDE Developer Guide needs a new home and some fresh content

    As I just posted in the Mission Forum, our KDE Developer Guide needs a new home. Currently it is “not found” where it is supposed to be.

    We had great luck using markdown files in git for the chapters of the Frameworks Cookbook, so the Devel Guide should be stored and developed in a like manner. I’ve been reading about Sphinx lately as a way to write documentation, which is another possibility. Kubuntu uses Sphinx for docs.

    In any case, I do not have the time or skills to get, restructure and re-place this handy guide for our GSoC students and other new KDE contributors.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • This week in GTK+ – 26

    In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 40 commits, with 1551 lines added and 1998 lines removed.

  • Linux communities, we need your help!

    There are a lot of Linux communities all over the globe filled with really nice people who just want to help others. Typically these people either can’t (or don’t feel comfortable) coding, and I’d love to harness some of that potential by adding a huge number of new application reviews to the ODRS. At the moment we have about 1100 reviews, mostly covering the more popular applications, and also mostly written in English.

  • Work Underway for GTK+ 4 Toolkit, Graphic Tablet Support Was Improved on Windows

    Emmanuele Bassi, senior software engineer at Endless and GNOME/GTK+ collaborator, reports today, November 28, 2016, on the work that happened this last week for the cross-platform and open-source GTK+ GUI toolkit.

    With 1551 lines added and 1998 lines removed, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 40 commits since Emmanuele Bassi’s last report, and it appears that the first GTK+ 4 development snapshot is now ready for public testing, versioned 3.89.1. According to the current GTK+ road map, all deprecated APIs have now been removed.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Developer Toolset 6 released

    On the one hand, businesses want the most stable operating systems. That’s why Red Hat has Red Hat Enterpise Linux (RHEL). On the other, developers want the newest and fastest development tools. That’s why Red Hat also puts out the community Fedora Linux distribution. But what if you want both? Red Hat has you covered with Red Hat Developer Toolset 6.

  • For HPC, Red Hat Offers Much More than just Linux

    In this video from SC16, Dan McGuan from Red Hat Inc. describes the company’s wide range of software offerings for the HPC market.

  • Finance

    • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) PEG Ratio At 2.03

    • FCF Score Check on Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • UBS Asset Management Americas Inc. Increases Position in Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

    • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Research Coverage Started at Rosenblatt Securities

    • Brokerage Analysts Set Their Aim on Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Jose Bonilla: How do you Fedora?

      Bonilla first got involved in the Fedora community when he was studying for the RHCSA (Red Hat Certified System Administrator) exam. He felt using Fedora was the best way to prepare for the exam. “One criteria I use when choosing any open sourced software is to examine the community.” Jose looks at the number of users, forums, blog posts, and issue resolution all as part of the community. The Fedora community exceeds all his expectations.

      Jose would like to see more development of Cockpit. “I feel that web-based server administration tools are the future and perhaps the gateway for new interest in Linux administration.” Bonilla did not credit any single person for influencing his decision to contribute to Fedora. It was a “multitude of people and their stances,” he said. Bonilla commented that his “goal is to convince people, by example, that open source projects such as the Fedora Project are important and viable solutions to anyone’s computing needs.”

    • Where has puppet gone in EPEL-6 (and when will it be back?)

    • Abiword for EL-7

      Over Thanksgiving break, I decided to go through a long list of emails that were marked “when you have a spare moment”. I really didn’t have one but I realized that many of those emails were crufty and old. One was some people asking about getting abiword together for EL-7. This looked like a straightforward enough task so I got into it and started working out all the packages that would need to be branched to say EPEL and what would be needed to compile them.

• Debian Family

  • The Systemd-Free Debian Fork Celebrates Its Second Birthday

    Devuan, the Debian fork that frees the system of systemd, is now two years old.

    Yesterday marked two years since the announcement of the systemd-free Debian fork, Devuan.

    Two years going, this Linux OS that aims for “Init Freedom” isn’t the most vibrant distribution out there. When’s the last time you’ve heard of Devuan or even used it yourself? This year much of the systemd “hate” seems to have calmed down compared to prior years, although new features continue to be tacked onto systemd. Here’s an interesting Google Trends comparison for those interested.

  • Debian with three monitors under low cost graphics interface

    Since 2008 I use two monitors in my desktop. Yesterday I bought a new graphics interface and a third monitor. Some time I was looking for a low cost graphics interface. Ok, I am using GeForce GT 740 which has three output ports: VGA, DVI and HDMI. In Brazil this interface card can be found around R$ 400 (US$ 117, but my card was US$ 87 in Brazilian Black Friday). In Amazon.com, it is between US$ 51 and US$ 109. The chosen manufacturer was Zotac, but all GT 740 and 750 will work fine (I tested the GT 750 too).

  • Derivatives

    • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 (Nev) and 8.10 (Erik) Get New Security Updates from Debian

      Today, November 27, 2016, the developers of the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux distribution announced the availability of new security updates for the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik” and 8.15 “Nev” releases.

      While the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.15 “Nev” release is still in the works, it gets the same security update as Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 “Erik,” which are being ported from the upstream repositories of Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” (a.k.a. Debian Stable) to Parsix GNU/Linux’s own repos.

      It’s been a week since our previous report on the security updates pushed to the stable Parsix GNU/Linux repositories, and we’re seeing updated versions of the Vim text editor, Apache Tomcat 7 and 8 Java Servlet Containers, as well as Wireshark network protocol analyzer.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Announces the Availability of Ubuntu Advantage VG on AWS Marketplace

        Canonical, through Udi Nachmany, head of the Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud program, was proud to announce the availability for purchase of Ubuntu Advantage Virtual Guests on the AWS marketplace.

      • Mir is not only about Unity8

        Mir is a project to support the management applications on the display(s) of a computer. It can be compared to the more familiar X-Windows used on the current Ubuntu desktop (and many others). I’ll discuss some of the motivation for Mir below, but the point of this post is to clarify the relationship between Mir and Unity8.

      • Mir/Ubuntu Developer Talks Up Mir Outside Of Unity 8

        Most talk these days of Ubuntu’s Unity 8 next-gen desktop experience and their Mir display server goes hand-in-hand since the change-over is planned in-step before Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, but there’s a new Ubuntu Insights blog post up working to promote Mir as more than just tech for the Unity 8 desktop.

        Canonical engineer Alan Griffith has written a blog post today about Mir outside of Unity 8. Mir’s abstraction layer is providing libmiral.so as a stable library to Mir providing window manager, the miral-shell providing both traditional and tiling window manager, and miral-kiosk as a sample “kiosk” with basic window management.

      • What’s New in Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) – Overview

        Ubuntu 17.04, code named Zesty Zapus, is the future release that will succeed Ubuntu 16.10, and even though it’s End of life date has been scheduled for January 2018, the development team aims to bring a lot of upgrades, fixes, and additions in this release.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Maui 2.1 “Blue Tang” ISO Fixes Installer Issues, Includes Updated Packages

          It’s been almost a month since the Maui 2 “Blue Tang” Linux distro arrived based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, and now the first ISO respin is here.

          Maui 2.1 is a refreshed installation medium for those who want to install the Ubuntu-based distribution on their personal computers, including various updated packages, but it mainly focuses on fixing various issues reported by users with the Calamares installer since Maui 2.

Devices/Embedded

• 3.5-inch Apollo Lake SBC supports extended temperatures

  The AECX-APL0 supports the three Atom-branded Apollo Lake processors instead of the related Celeron and Pentium models. No OS support is listed, which is also the case for the other Litemax/WynMax embedded boards, which are mostly Mini-ITX boards, with a sprinkling of 3.5-inch SBCs, based on Intel and AMD processors. Running Linux should not be a problem.

  The 146 x 102mm AECX-APL0 supports up to 8GB DDR3L RAM, and offers SATA III and mSATA, with the latter made available via one of the two mini-PCIe slots. The other is paired with a micro-SIM for wireless expansion.

• Build Your Own Netflix and Pandora With Raspberry Pi 3

  Do you have a huge collection of movies, TV shows, and music that you purchased over the years but it’s collecting digital dust on your hard drives? How about creating your very own Netflix- and Pandora-like setup using the free Plex Media Server software? No, you don’t have to buy an expensive, bulky PC. All you need is a Raspberry Pi 3, a hard drive, an SD card and a mobile charger. It should all cost less than $100.

• The Raspberry Pi Hits Important New Milestones

  As we’ve noted here before, when it comes to top open source stories of the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The diminutive, credit card-sized Raspberry Pi, which has been priced at only $25 and $35, has grabbed most of the headlines in this space, and has recently hit some new milestones.

• Phones

  • Linux-based YunOS To Beat Apple’s iOS In China

    The chances are slim that you might be knowing about YunOS, the mobile operating system developed by China’s Alibaba group. In a recent development related to YunOS, this relatively newer OS is on the track to gather a 14 per cent share of phone shipments in mainland China.

    According to forecasts made by analysts, by the end of this year, YunOS will beat iOS to become the second-largest mobile operating system in China. This forecast falls in line with Alibaba’s previous claims that YunOS has already passed iOS.

  • Apple iOS Is Losing to a Homegrown Competitor in China

    As sales keep dropping. Apple iOS sales will be topped by Alibaba’s YunOS in what was once the U.S. tech behemoth’s growth engine. YunOS is set to take 14% of the smartphone shipments in mainland China…

  • Ten years anniversary of Openmoko

    In 2006 I first visited Taiwan. The reason back then was Sean Moss-Pultz contacting me about a new Linux and Free Software based Phone that he wanted to do at FIC in Taiwan. This later became the Neo1973 and the Openmoko project and finally became part of both Free Software as well as smartphone history.

    Ten years later, it might be worth to share a bit of a retrospective.

    It was about building a smartphone before Android or the iPhone existed or even were announced. It was about doing things “right” from a Free Software point of view, with FOSS requirements going all the way down to component selection of each part of the electrical design.

  • Tizen

  • Android

    • 2017 Android Smartphone Of Nokia Will Have 2K (QHD) Display

      HMD Global, the company behind the rumored upcoming Nokia Android phone, has confirmed that it will attend Mobile World Congress in February 2017. A handful of mid-range and top-end Nokia Android smartphones have already been spotted on benchmark sites and has been analyzed by some tech people. Now, there is a new name to be added to the list of the leaked Nokia Android smartphones, an entry-level device to be detailed about it.

    • Six open source Android games – Offering flexibility to users

      With the invention and gaining momentum of smartphones, Android users have a huge variety of apps and games almost at our fingertips. However, something that is very irritating for the users is that some games have too many advertisements, in-app purchases and various other features which diminish the stellar experience of the games.

      Although the world of open source games isn’t exactly well-known for its good quality games, there is always a wide array of Android games which you would get at F-Droid repository and which are almost new and playable. A majority of these games are actually duplicates of their computer-playable counterparts but can still be enjoyed in every form.

    • Android 7.1.1 Update: Latest Nougat Release Date And Download Expected Dec. 5

    • This is Nougat on the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

    • Insta360 Air looks to bring affordable 360 video to Android phones

    • Cryptography professor warns about Android security, says some of it is six years behind the iPhone

    • Android 7.0 Nougat Beta 3 Available For Samsung Galaxy S7 And Galaxy S7 edge: Are We Inching Closer To Release?

    • Report: Android 7.1 rollout to Nexus devices will begin Dec. 6

    • This is the No. 1 mistake Android users make when creating a passcode

    • How to send GIFs with the Google Keyboard in Android Nougat

    • Rumor: Meizu Is Working On An Android Tablet

      The Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Meizu may not be a huge name outside of its home country, but that doesn’t mean the Guangdong-based company isn’t delivering some quality Android smartphones of all tiers. Earlier this year, Meizu caught a lot of positive headlines with the Meizu PRO 6, a powerful 5.2-inch phone which punched well above its weight. Now, if the latest rumors from China are to be believed, Meizu may soon take the spotlight in the consumer electronics industry once again as the company is seemingly planning to enter the Android tablet market.

    • Android Nougat Now Available in Nexus And Pixel Phones

    • Android 7.1.1 set for Dec 5 release on Nexus + Pixel devices

    • Android encryption limitations revealed by cryptography professor

    • Android 7.0 Nougat Rolls Out On Non-Pixel Phones Moto Z, Z Droid, Z Droid Force and Z Force; Sprint Begins Launch For LG G5 In US

    • Lenovo Yoga Book (Android) review: A unique 2-in-1 for note-taking, drawing, and more

      Lenovo’s Yoga Book is really great at being a tablet. As far as playing games and watching movies goes, I was as comfortable using the Yoga Book as I am with my iPad Air 2.

      As far as productivity goes, this device wasn’t for me. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not for anyone. My version of productivity involves a keyboard (I type a lot, if you haven’t guessed), while for others, it might involve switching between a keyboard and pen input, and for those people, the Yoga Book is nearly perfect.

      Ultimately, Lenovo’s Yoga Book is a truly innovative device, offering a number of features that aren’t seen anywhere else. It is, of course, a first-generation product, and if Lenovo stays the course, the second-generation model will be a real winner.

      I’d say that it’s worth buying, as long as you know what you’re getting. It’s an excellent consumption tablet, and it’s also fantastic for taking notes and drawing, as well as a bit of light typing.

Productivity hacks: Optimizing your workflow with open source

Communication with your team is key.

For chat, IRC or Mattermost are great ways to stay in touch in real time. But chat can be a productivity killer if you feel like you have to be present at all times. Structure your day so that you only focus on necessary chat converstions; log off of chat when you need to focus on another task and set expectations with your team. Also, talk to your team about what types of things will be discussed on chat and what discussions are better for a different method, like a meeting.

For meetings, talking with people in person can be necessary and very helpful for getting things done, but meetings can also be a time sink. Try to set them for only 30 minutes and stick to it. If you need more time, then take it as needed. If you set an agenda (try Etherpad for this), stick to it. Use your calendar to track your time—check out these open source Google calendar alternatives.

15 JavaScript frameworks and libraries

JavaScript’s open source stance is also one of the best. Contrary to popular belief, JavaScript is not a project, but a specification with an open standard where the language is evolved and maintained by its core team. ECMAScript, another fancy name of JavaScript, is not open source, but it too has an open standard.

You can easily see evidence of JavaScript’s popularity when you look at both at GitHub. JavaScript is the top programming language when it comes to the number of repositories. Its prominance is also evident on Livecoding.tv, where members are diligently creating more videos on JavaScript than any other topic. At the time of this writing, the self-dubbed edutainment site hosts 45,919 JavaScript videos.

Yelp offers up Kafka tools to open source

Yelp saved itself US$10 million by building out its Apache Kafka-based Data Pipeline, and now it wants to spread that love to other enterprises. Just before the holidays, Yelp open-sourced its Data Pipeline and assorted utilities used to maintain and build out this streaming data platform.

Data Pipeline is now available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Using Data Pipeline, developers can tie their applications into the constantly flowing stream of Kafka data. The company detailed this in a blog entry.

Nomulus: Google’s open-source TLD registry platform

In mid-October, Google open-sourced the core software behind their TLD registry: Nomulus. This software allows creation and management of new top-level domains (TLDs) in the cloud, enabling current businesses in the Internet real-estate market to expand into the new, rapidly growing generic TLD (gTLD) space, as well as reducing the technological barrier for prospective newcomers.

Nomulus provides a wealth of core features out of the box. Because it is designed to run on Google App Engine, Nomulus is cloud-based and can scale quickly and efficiently as domains leased increase in popularity and number of registrations or inquiries.

Contribute To Open Source On #OpenCyberMonday

Today is Cyber Monday, the day when everyone in the US goes back to work after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is a celebration of consumerism, and the largest online shopping day of the year. Right now, hundreds of thousands of office workers are browsing Amazon for Christmas presents, while the black sheep of the office are on LiveLeak checking out this year’s Black Friday compartment syndrome compilations.

Pentaho’s Quentin Gallivan: Open-Source Framework, Analytics Tools Key to Agencies’ Data Integration Efforts

Quentin Gallivan, CEO of Hitachi Data Systems’ Pentaho subsidiary, has said government agencies should develop a “centralized” plan that seeks to leverage the use of business analytics tools and an open-source framework like Hadoop in order to facilitate data integration and access.

Gallivan wrote that agencies should adopt an open-source framework that includes governance practices on the use of data and works to support big data processing operations.

Bitcoin in 5 minutes

Blockstream’s Eric Martindale opened his five-minute All Things Open lightning talk with a bold claim: “Bitcoin is one on the most significant innovations of our time.”

3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The Glass Room: Looking into Your Online Life

    It’s that time of year! The excitement of Black Friday carries into today – CyberMonday – the juxtaposition of the analog age and the digital age. Both days are fueled by media and retailers alike and are about shopping. And both days are heavily reliant on the things that we want, that we need and what we think others want and need. And, all of it is powered by the data about us as consumers. So, today – the day of electronic shopping – is the perfect day to provoke some deep thinking on how our digital lives impact our privacy and online security. How do we do this?

Databases

• phpMyAdmin security issues

  You might wonder why there is so high number of phpMyAdmin security announcements this year. This situations has two main reasons and I will comment a bit on those.

  First of all we’ve got quite a lot of attention of people doing security reviews this year. It has all started with Mozilla SOS Fund funded audit. It has discovered few minor issues which were fixed in the 4.6.2 release. However this was really just the beginning of the story and the announcement has attracted quite some attention to us. In upcoming weeks the security@phpmyadmin.net mailbox was full of reports and we really struggled to handle such amount. Handling that amount actually lead to creating more formalized approach to handling them as we clearly were no longer able to deal with them based on email only. Anyway most work here was done by Emanuel Bronshtein, who is really looking at every piece of our code and giving useful tips to harden our code base and infrastructure.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Are we in a golden age of open source or just openwashing?

  We are witnessing a golden age of open source. Never in the history of the technology industry have we seen so many developers coding in the open, jointly working on common codebases that can be leveraged by any individual user or company.

  This trend is a huge step forward, with broad benefits to both the user and vendor community. It is spurring significantly greater innovation and interoperability across solutions.

• Why Apple open sourcing Mac OS X isn’t terribly exciting [Ed: Mac Asay defends Apple's openwashing, or Open Core]

• Microsoft Expands Open-Source Support by Joining Linux Foundation [Ed: This headline is wrong. It’s about E.E.E., not support]

• Microsoft tells devs: Whatever you’re doing in Linux, Windows 10 will soon do it too [Ed: This is how Embrace, extend, extinguish (EEE) works]

• Microsoft Wants All Linux Developers to Move to Windows 10 [Ed: You cannot expect to use a malware platform like Vista 10 for development and generate secure software. Visual Studio, for instance, adds telemetry to compiled code!

• Top Windows 10 alternative OS for desktop and laptop users

  First, it’s worth noting that Apple and Google operating systems are designed for more specialized desktops and laptops. The Mac OS X is the biggest platform after Windows, but it’s exclusively for Macs. Google developed the Chrome OS for Chromebook laptops. As such, you can’t install either platform on Windows desktops and laptops with a Mac OS X or Chromebook DVD. The only way you can run Chrome OS and MacOS X on Windows PC is with virtualization software such as VirtualBox. Thus, they can’t be counted as genuine alternatives to Windows 10; but these are a few of the OS alternatives for Windows desktop and laptops.

Funding

• Time is running out for NTP

  Everyone benefits from Network Time Protocol, but the project struggles to pay its sole maintainer or fund its various initiatives

• KDE End of Year Fundraising

  Have you ever felt that you wanted to give back to the KDE project? As the season of giving draws near there’s never been a better time to support KDE and help the project continue to bring free software to millions of lives worldwide.

  By participating in the end of year fundraiser, you can help us in our mission. Your donations are used to pay for transport and accomodation for developers to attend sprints as well as to support the server infrastructure required to keep the project running.

C++

• The Latest On C++17, Early Work For C++20

  There was a C++ standards meeting recently in Issaquah, Washington and a report on it is now available with the latest on C++17 and early work around what will form C++20.

  This meeting resulted in the C++17 committee draft as the first feature-complete draft of the C++17 specification.Various tweaks to the language and library were accepted at this meeting. C++17 remains on track for seeing its official spec out in 2017.

Licensing/Legal

• From Concept to License: Stewarding Your Own Open Source Project

  Are you of a mind to launch an open source project or are you in the process of doing so? Doing it successfully and rallying community support can be more complicated than you think, but a little up-front footwork and howework can help things go smoothly. Beyond that, some planning can also keep you out of legal trouble. Issues pertaining to licensing, distribution, support options and even branding require thinking ahead if you want your project to flourish. In this post, you’ll find our newly updated collection of good, free resources to pay attention to if you’re doing an open source project.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open source virtual reality, a new board for electronics testing, Fedora 25, and more news

  In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at open source virtual reality, a new board for electronics testing, Fedora 25, and more.

• Open Data

  • Switzerland to create an open food data programme

    Opendata.ch, which represents the Open Knowledge Foundation in Switzerland, has launched the Business Innovation food.opendata.ch programme, with the goal of building an open and public database on food and nutrition data. The programme is also funded by the Swiss food industry, represented by Migros – via its funding arm Engagement Migros.

Unhappy Thanksgiving in Valentina-Vlad-Nikky Family

So today is Thanksgiving and I am writing this from the GlobalRev studio in New York, while my wife Nikky and my daughter Valentina are in Madrid. I was supposed to be on the 10pm flight to Madrid today, but it was not meant to be. Yesterday, I got a call from the passport office that my passport application is going through “administrative processing” and will be delayed in issuance.

A day earlier, when i was submitting paperwork for a same day passport renewal, they canceled my existing passport, so now i don’t have a passport to be able to travel. I have been given no indication as to how long this “administrative processing” can take.

[...]

This culminated yesterday when i got that call from the passport office. I was having lunch with a friend in Union square when the call came in. The gentleman on the other side of the phone first verified my identity and then informed me that I will not be able to fly to Spain today because my passport is being held up for “administrative processing” and he has no information on when that will be done, but assured me he will call me whenever that happens.

Security

• European Commission knocked offline by ‘large scale’ DDoS attack

  THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (EC) was struck by a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Thursday, bringing down its internet access for hours.

  The EC confirmed the attack to Politico, saying that while it did fall victim to a DDoS attack, no data breached was experienced.

  “No data breach has occurred,” a Commission spokesperson said. “The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time.”

• Overclocked Wearables Can Pick Up Bio-Acoustic Signals

  The sensors incorporated into wearables can sometimes be repurposed to perform tasks beyond their intended applications. For example, it’s been shown that it’s possible to discover a victim user’s passwords and PINs by applying a sophisticated algorithm to the data gathered by wearable embedded sensors.

  Recently, researchers at the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University have overclocked the accelerometer of an LG smartwatch to extend its capabilities to more than just tracking fitness. By overclocking the off-the-shelf smartwatch via some software updates, they can now detect and process very small vibrations and audio signals.

  The new technology, dubbed ViBand, can allow different apps to understand the context of your activities by capturing bio-acoustic signals.

• The Economics of stealing a Tesla with a phone

  A few days ago there was a story about how to steal a Tesla by installing malware on the owner’s phone. If you look at the big picture view of this problem it’s not all that bad, but our security brains want to make a huge deal out of this. Now I’m not saying that Tesla shouldn’t fix this problem, especially since it’s going to be a trivial fix. What we want to think about is how all these working parts have to fit together. This is something we’re not very good at in the security universe; there can be one single horrible problem, but when we paint the full picture, it’s not what it seems.

• Config fumble left Azure Red Hat Enterprise Linux wide open

  A software engineer setting up a secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machine in the cloud discovered a serious configuration flaw that could be exploited to upload arbitrary software packages to Microsoft Azure update infrastructure.

  Ian Duffy found Microsoft had configured the Red Hat Update Appliance used for Azure in such a way that an attacker could easily get access to the content delivery servers and upload packages that client virtual machines would acquire when updating.

  Duffy was able to bypass the username and password authentication on the content delivery server by running a log file collector application. Once completed, the log file collector provided a link to a downloadable compressed archive.

• Azure bug bounty Root to storage account administrator

  In my previous blog post Azure bug bounty Pwning Red Hat Enterprise Linux I detailed how it was possible to get administrative access to the Red Hat Update Infrastructure consumed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines booted from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace image. In theory, if exploited one could have gained root access to all virtual machines consuming the repositories by releasing an updated version of a common package and waiting for virtual machines to execute yum update.

• How to add more entropy to improve cryptographic randomness on Linux

  If you have Linux servers that depend upon encryption, you owe it to yourself to beef up the system entropy. Here’s how to do so with haveged.

• Security advisories for Monday

• FutureVault Inc.’s FutureVault

  Though short of Mr Torvalds’ aim of world domination, FutureVault, Inc., has set the ambitious goal to “change the way business is done” with its FutureVault digital collaborative vault application. Described by its developer as “at the epicenter of a brand new disruptive category in the financial services world”, FutureVault allows users to deposit, store and manage important financial, legal and personal documents digitally by means of a white-label, cloud-based, SaaS platform.

• Azure glitch allowed attackers to gain admin rights over hosted Red Hat Linux instances

  A VULNERABILITY in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform could have been exploited by an attacker to gain admin rights to instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and storage accounts hosted on Azure.

• Microsoft update servers leave Azure RHEL instances hackable

• Microsoft update left Azure Linux virtual machines open to hacking

• Microsoft Azure bug put Red Hat instances at risk

• Microsoft update servers left all Azure RHEL instances hackable

  Microsoft has patched flaws that attackers could exploit to compromise all Azure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances.

  Software engineer Ian Duffy found the flaws while building a secure RHEL image for Microsoft Azure. During that process he noticed an installation script Azure uses in its preconfigured RPM Package Manager contains build host information that allows attackers to find all four Red Hat Update Appliances which expose REST APIs over HTTPS.

  From there Duffy found a package labelled PrepareRHUI (Red Hat Update Infrastructure) that runs on all Azure RHEL boxes, and contains the rhui-monitor.cloud build host.

  Duffy accessed that host and found it had broken username and password authentication. This allowed him to access a backend log collector application which returned logs and configuration files along with a SSL certificate that granted full administrative access to the four Red Hat Update Appliances.

• Deutsche Telekom Says Cyber Attack Hits 900,000 Customers

  Deutsche Telekom (DTEGY) , Europe’s largest, said it could have been a victim of a cyber attack as 900,000 fixed-line customers face a second consecutive day of outages.

  The Bonn, Germany-based company, which has 20 million fixed network customers, said 900,000 customers with specific routers have faced temporary problems and marked fluctuations in quality, with some also receiving no service at all. It added that the problems have occurred in a wide region, not in a specific area.

• San Francisco’s Muni Hacked

  It seems that on Friday, right in the midst of busy Thanksgiving weekend holiday traffic, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency or Muni, was hit by hackers, forcing the system to offer Saturday free rides on the system’s light rail trains. The breach was apparently a ransomware attack, with the hackers demanding 100 Bitcoin, or approximately $73,000, to unencrypt the system.

  It all began when the words “You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted” appeared on Muni agents’ screens. It’s not known whether Muni paid the ransom, although that’s considered unlikely. Operations of the system’s vehicles were not affected.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Latest Wikileaks cover Three Mile Island and worried governments’ response to partial meltdown

  A deluge of 1979 U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Monday illustrate how intensely the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island grabbed the world’s attention and thrust the future of nuclear energy into question.

  Included in those communications are a series involving initial estimates of the human and environmental risks, as well as the response from world leaders to the unfolding crisis at the plant outside Harrisburg.

  In a cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Brussels to Dublin, Ireland’s days after the March 28 incident, mounting interest from European officials is evident. All cables are unedited, but in some cases they’ve been clarified.

  “Mrs. Aston, along with several other officials concerned with nuclear power situations in the ec [European Community], called DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] representative at usec brussels early this morning to request all available information on the subject incident.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Saudi Arabia tells OPEC it won’t attend non-OPEC talks on Monday

  Top OPEC oil exporter Saudi Arabia has told the producer group it will not attend scheduled talks in Vienna on Monday with non-OPEC oil producers, OPEC sources said on Friday.

• Officials suspect chronic wasting disease in Michigan deer

  State wildlife regulators say another deer in southern Michigan may have been found with chronic wasting disease.

  The Department of Natural Resources says a hunter shot the 1½-year-old buck last week in Clinton County’s Eagle Township and took it to a check station.

• Indonesia Is Burning, So Why Is The World Looking Away?

  In what is said to be one of the greatest environmental disasters of the 21st century, vast parts of Indonesia are currently on fire, burning from forest fires due to a whole range of sub-standard environmental policies.

  Due to deforestation, the land is sparse, as canals have dried up and the rain forest is set on fire to be cleared for the building of plantations. Palm oil is one of the main reasons for the clearing of the rain forests.

Finance

• Economy Minister Rehn insists PM had no conflict of interest in mine deal

  Outgoing Economic Affairs Minister Olli Rehn has come out in defence of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä following reports that an engineering company owned by the PM’s relatives won a lucrative contract from the taxpayer-funded Terrafame mine in eastern Finland. Rehn said he is “absolutely sure” that Sipilä had no knowledge that the company owned by his uncles and cousins had won a half-a-million-euro order from the former Talvivaara mine.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Electoral College must reject Trump unless he sells his business, top lawyers for Bush and Obama say

  Members of the Electoral College should not make Donald Trump the next president unless he sells his companies and puts the proceeds in a blind trust, according to the top ethics lawyers for the last two presidents.

  Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen, Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump.

  In an email to ThinkProgress, Eisen explained that “the founders did not want any foreign payments to the president. Period.” This principle is enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which bars office holders from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”

• When is a recount a sham?

  Recounts provide a peaceful dispute mechanism to help ensure that elections will be free and fair and equal to all. But the mere act of having a recount is not what helps elections be free and fair. The recount must be accountable to the public and fully transparent.

  A recount doesn’t need a smoking gun, and never needs to be apologized for. Done correctly, recounts add validity to elections.

  There is a great deal at stake in any recount. Observers should not make assumptions that every recount is honest, or that every statement made by public officials is true. The purpose of observation is authentication, and this responsibility should be taken seriously.

• False CNN-porn report shows how fast fake news spreads

  No, despite what you read, CNN did not run porn for 30 minutes last night, as was reported by Fox News, the New York Post,Variety and other news organizations, several of which later corrected their stories.

• Trump dismisses Wisconsin recount drive as ‘scam’

  Republican President-elect Donald Trump has described an impending recount of votes in Wisconsin as a “scam”.

  Mr Trump, who narrowly won the state, said the results “should be respected instead of being challenged or abused”.

  Green Party candidate Jill Stein had initiated the recount. She also wants recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, citing “statistical anomalies”.

  Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign has said it would participate in Wisconsin’s recount.

  Results would need to be overturned in all three states to alter the outcome of the 8 November presidential election.

• Trump calls recount effort a ‘scam’

  President-elect Donald Trump blasted Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein on Saturday for pushing for a recount in several states, calling her efforts a “scam.”

  “This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing,” Trump said in a statement.

  Citing concerns that voting systems have been compromised, Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon, and has been fundraising off her vow to do the same in Pennsylvania and Michigan — all states in which Trump won or is leading.

• Donald Trump blasts Wisconsin recount effort a ‘scam’ and says election is over

  Donald Trump has blasted the recount effort launched last week by the Green Party in Wisconsin which on Saturday attracted the formal support also of Hillary Clinton.

  From his Palm Beach retreat in Florida, Mr Trump issued a lengthy rebuke of the initiative calling it “ridiculous” and a “scam” that had been launched purely to benefit the Green Party’s nominee, Jill Stein, and “fill her coffers with money”.

  So far Ms Stein has raised close to $6 million through crowdfunding to pay to petition for recounts of the election results in three states. The request for a recount was submitted to the election authorities in Wisconsin on Friday. If she reaches her goal of raising $7 million in total she will be able to make similar filings to Pennsylvania and Michigan next week.

• Paul Levy Discovers Head Of Reputation Management Company Signed Off On Forged/Fraudulent Court Docs

  As a result of a federal judge in Rhode Island taking a second look at an order he hastily granted earlier, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen has been able to confirm Richart Ruddie — the head of an extremely-sketchy reputation management company — signed off on the forged and fraudulent documents delivered to the court. The documents — a bogus lawsuit featuring the forged signatures of both the plaintiff and the defendant — are apparently just part of Profile Defenders’ reputation management work.

  Nice work if you can get [away with] it. File a bogus lawsuit. “Locate” a bogus defendant. Produce a signed admission of guilt and ask the judge to order search engines to delist the offending content. Cash checks. Repeat until caught.

  Richart Ruddie has been caught.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A Media Blacklist, Courtesy of WaPo: Now I’m Afraid for Our Democracy

  So: Clinton lost because Russia wanted Trump to win because Trump will favor Russia so Russia created fake news which influenced over 62 million Americans to overlook Trump’s flaws and vote for him. Got it.

  Proof? Stuff on Facebook. Main source of that proof? A group of unknown origin, financing, and makeup (“an independent team of concerned American citizens”) called PropOrNot, i.e., propaganda or not. The group also “strongly suspects that some of the individuals involved have violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and other related laws.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• Privacy Activists Urge Obama To Trump-Proof the NSA Before Leaving

  Terrified of Donald Trump gaining access to the world’s most powerful spy apparatus, a growing coalition of civil liberties activists, companies, and individuals are calling for President Obama to enact emergency NSA reforms before leaving office.

  Many take cues from former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden, who, after stealing a cache of documents to give to the press in 2013, warned of a surveillance apparatus so powerful it would enable “turnkey tyranny” if inherited by a president inclined to abuse it.

  And more than any major party candidate in recent memory, Trump has shaken opponents with outright promises to abuse executive power, like proposing to register all American Muslims in a database and spy on them without a warrant. He has a history of wanting to spy, too: A number of sources have previously claimed Trump would listen in on his guests’ phone calls at his Mar-A-Largo resort.

• The NSA spy fortress in the middle of New York City

  The Intercept has published a fascinating, and eerie, investigation into the iconic Brutalist tower at 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan. Built to withstand a nuclear bomb, the modern fortress has no windows.

• “A disaster waiting to happen”: Can you trust the government to digitise your personal data?

  Last week, the government’s Digital Economy Bill hit the news because of a proposed ban on pornographic websites that didn’t comply with its planned age verification rules. The news was just the right amount of shocking and yes, sexy, to grab the nation’s attention, but in the meantime other parts of the Bill remained unscrutinised. A distinctly un-sexy aspect of the Bill – Part 5, “Digital Government” – aims to completely revolutionise the way your personal data is shared.

  In essence, Part 5 allows the government to digitise your data and bulk-share it without informing you or asking for your permission. This data includes your birth, death, and marriage certificates, as well as information on your taxes, court appearances, benefits, student loans, and even parking tickets. If the Bill passes, your information will be shared with local councils, charities, and even businesses – initially, gas and electricity companies.

• Petition against ‘most extreme’ new spying laws receives enough signatures to force parliament to consider debate

  More than 100,000 people have asked Parliament to repeal new spying laws, forcing MPs to consider debating them. But they are likely to block any further discussion of the hugely controversial bill.

  A petition focusing the Investigatory Powers Bill criticises the new surveillance laws, arguing that they allow authorities “unprecedented levels of power” and that they must be revoked. It had received 120,000 signatures at the time of publication, meaning that Parliament must consider it for debate.

• EULF Guidelines for public administrations on location privacy now published

  Public administrations increasingly use location data to deliver public services such as location-enabled tools, apps for tourists, toll collection services or cadastral web applications. Location data such as addresses, GPS coordinates or camera images is key to many public services and can also be linked to all sorts of other data, generating new information that was not available before. Despite the increase consumption of location data, its potential to reveal personal information is often underestimated, especially in comparison to other sensitive data, for instance in the financial and health domains.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Dakota pipeline’s last stand

  In the Dakota language, the word “oahe” signifies “a place to stand on.”

  And that’s what the Standing Rock Sioux and its allies in the environmental and activist movements say they are doing: using Lake Oahe in North Dakota as a place to take a stand by setting up camps and obstructing roads to block the controversial $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline.

  Their confrontations with police — who have responded with water cannons, pepper spray and rubber bullets — have steered attention to the 1,170-mile-long oil pipeline project and its owner, Energy Transfer Partners. But the real source of Native Americans’ grievance stretches back more than a century, to the original government incursions on their tribal lands. And those earlier disputes over their rights to the land, like the one over the Dakota Access pipeline, pitted the tribes against a persistent force, the Army Corps of Engineers.

• Amid a media blackout of the Standing Rock protests, law enforcement targets the rare journalists on the scene

  Unicorn Riot is a media collective that formed in response to the lack of media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tar Sands Blockade; their news comes direct from the front lines of some of the most significant and under-reported conflicts in the world, in the form of unedited livestreams from the conflict zone, and edited highlight reels after the fact.

  Unicorn Riot’s reporters are among the most targeted by Morton County Sheriff’s Deputies — the same law enforcement officers whom Unicorn Riot have outed for the sadistic use of water-canons in subzero temperatures and of firing tear gas cannisters directly into the protesters’ crowds, activities the deputies lied about when they denied doing either.

  The Morton County cops say that because Unicorn Riot has a point of view, they are protesters, not reporters (this is the same argument they used when they fabricated charges against Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in October). This is wrong on its face: protesting is a thing you do, not a thing you believe. As Unicorn Riot’s Lorenzo Serna says, “I’m not participating. I’m not building the barricade. I’m not pushing off against the police. I’m not going to pray at the water ceremony. I’m literally there observing.”

  Discriminatory policing against journalists based on their political beliefs raises significant First Amendment questions, and they will only get more grave: the rise of crowdfunded, independent media; the decline of commercial, traditional news organizations; the practice of blacking out coverage of significant protests; and the coming, press-hostile, human-rights-hostile Trump years will put police and journalists into more conflict than ever.

• Shariah laws already affect non-Muslims, SIS says

  Politicians’ argument that Shariah laws do not affect non-Muslims is disproved by existing interfaith custody battles, the Sisters in Islam group said today when urging the rejection of a Bill to enhance Shariah punishments.

  Citing the cases of M. Indira Gandhi and S. Deepa who both underwent high-profile custody battles with Muslim convert ex-spouses, SIS said this was just one of many reasons not to “bulldoze” through PAS president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang’s private member’s Bill.

  “While proponents of RUU355 insist that the Bill will not affect non-Muslims, reality shows that existing syariah laws are already impacting non-Muslims in Malaysia,” the group said.

• Gang shootings start weekend in Malmö and Gothenburg

  At around 7pm on Friday evening a 20-year-old man was shot in Biskopsgården, a district of Gothenburg long plagued by gang violence. Then at 2am on Saturday morning, a man in his mid-to-late 30s was shot inside a club in Norra Grängesbergsgatan, a Malmö street known for its illegal nightclubs.

• Thai Computer Crime Law Raises Rights Concerns

  Amendments to Thailand’s controversial Computer Crime Act were debated in parliament this week, with rights groups expressing concerns that the law will bolster government efforts to restrict online freedoms and spy on users.

  The 2007 legislation was originally created to stop spam, identity fraud, hacking and other computer-related offenses.

  However, there are fears the military junta will use these new amendments to help in its bid to suppress dissent in the country, which it often does by using the ancient lese-majeste law forbidding criticism of the Royal Family.

  The proposed amendments, seen by Reuters, include articles 18 and 19 which say the authorities can grab user and traffic data from service providers without court approval, as well as demand computer devices from users.

  Article 20, meanwhile, apparently states that any website deemed to threaten national security or “offend people’s good morals” can be removed or suspended.

Intellectual Monopolies

• On Eve Of WIPO Traditional Knowledge Negotiations, Nations Swap Experiences

  A seminar was organised by the World Intellectual Property Organization to provide a discussion platform on the eve of this week’s meeting on the protection of traditional knowledge, and as a way for countries to share systems of protection. Panellists presented views on possible graduated protection for different sorts of traditional knowledge.

• Copyrights

  • EU Council Agrees To Remove Geo-Blocking Barriers To E-Commerce

    The European Union Council of member states today agreed on draft regulations to prevent blocking of cross-border e-commerce, but appears to retain copyright restrictions.

    “Geo-blocking is a discriminatory practice that prevents online customers from accessing and purchasing products or services from a website based in another member state,” the Council explained in a press release. The draft regulation will form the common position to start negotiations with the European Parliament and Commission, it said.

  • Book Review: Copyright Beyond Law

    This Kat was very excited when she heard about “Copyright Beyond Law: Regulating Creativity in the Graffiti Subculture” by Mart Iljadica with Bloomsbury Press. The perfect opportunity to top up her hipster street art card with some proper knowledge.

    The book begins with a notice that there are no images contained within the text, precisely because the author argues that graffiti is copyright protected. Iljadica invites readers to explore street art on their own (N.B. For London-based IPKat readers, I highly recommend the Alternative London walking tours near Liverpool St.) The book’s focus is instead on the creative process of graffiti making.

  • EU law forbids the resale of non-original tangible copies of computer programmes

    Last month the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its decision in Microsoft, a reference for a preliminary ruling from Latvia concerning the principle of digital exhaustion as applied to computer programmes.

  • Streaming Cyberlockers ‘Hate’ Pirate Kodi Add-Ons

    Million of people use Kodi as their main source of entertainment, often with help from add-ons that allow them to access pirated movies and TV-shows. While these tools are a blessing for many, the streaming cyberlockers that provide the videos see the add-ons as a major threat to their business.

  • Hosting Companies Dragged into Piracy Lawsuit Alongside Cloudflare

    A lawsuit that accuses Cloudflare of providing services to alleged ‘pirate’ sites has been expanded. In an amended complaint, adult outfit ALS Scan now seeks to hold hosting providers OVH and Steadfast Networks liable for infringement, alongside operators and affiliates of several image hosting sites.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux & Open Source News Of The Week — “Cutting Edge” Fedora 25, Tor Phone, And VLC 360

Desktop

• Build Your Own Computer

  The computer’s abilities depend on the type of build-your-own system kit you have. Some computer kits intended to teach children (and other newcomers) the basics of hardware and software run on their own customized operating systems — which are often variations of the free, open-source Linux code.

  Raspberry Pi and Kano are two popular computer kits that provide beginners with the bare-bones components like low-cost motherboards and wireless-networking dongles. These computer boards can be connected to existing monitors and keyboards, or used with new equipment.

Server

• Japan Will Create a Supercomputer to Surpass China

  Japan is bound to develop a revolutionary supercomputer able to outcome China regarding technology. The costs of this new device will reach up to $173 million. The computer was planned to be ready for launching starting with next year. The program of the 130-petaflops computer looks very promising, the developers trying to overcome the technology used by China.

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.8.11

  I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.11 kernel.

  All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

  The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

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

• Linux 4.4.35

• Graphics Stack

  • Editorial: Using NVIDIA On Linux For The First Time In 10 Years

    Anyone who read any number of my reviews from a few years ago, when I interned here at Phoronix, should know that I have been a fan of AMD and their open source efforts for a very long time. I remember the years of trying to get Catalyst to work under Arch or Fedora, usually only to have it blow up in my face. I remember the struggle holding back kernel and X server updates, hoping that none of those updates contained security fixes that were pertinent to me.

  • Intel’s OpenGL Driver Gains Another Performance Optimization

  • Guillemot: Various OpenGL Tips & Tricks

  • Vulkan 1.0.35 Released, Includes VK_NVX_device_generated_commands

  • NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO vs. RadeonSI OpenGL Comparison For Holidays 2016

    If you are planning to upgrade your graphics card in a Linux system this holiday season, here are some fresh benchmarks of several different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards with various Linux gaming tests under Ubuntu. The AMD tests were done both with the latest RadeonSI Gallium3D stack as well as the AMDGPU-PRO hybrid driver.

    Tested on the AMD side was the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, RX 460, and RX 480 with both the fully-open driver stack (Linux 4.9 Git + LLVM 4.0 SVN + Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of the end of the week) and then AMDGPU-PRO 16.40.

  • You might want to avoid the Nvidia 375.20 driver, Nvidia recommend downgrading

    Just a word of warning, the Nvidia 375.20 driver seems to have quite a number of issues in certain games bringing performance down a lot.

    Not everyone will have issues, as it seems only certain people are affected. Some people have reported no issues, while others are being given black screens or outright terrible performance.

Applications

• Rspamd 1.4 has been released

  Today, after 4 months of development, we’ve released major updates for both Rspamd and Rmilter: Rspamd is updated to version 1.4 and Rmilter is updated to version 1.10. These updates include many new features, including Redis pool support, new modules, improved neural networks support, zstd compression for protocol and many other important improvements.

• stress-ng 0.07.07 released

  stress-ng is a tool that I have been developing on-and-off for a few years. It is designed to stress kernels to force out bugs, stress CPU and memory and also contains some performance benchmarking metrics too.

• Latest MiniTube 2.5.2 Version Available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  MiniTube is beautiful, lightweight and a native YouTube client. With MiniTube you can watch YouTube videos by typing keyword into the search-box and MiniTube will immediately loads the results. It offers two type of searches: channel search and keyword search. It provides endless video stream, playback on MiniTube is smooth and instant, without a noticeable buffering time, as I tested. Minitube does not require the Flash Player.

• Debian, Fedora 25, PHP, systemd, Humble Bundle, dply, Pipfile & more!

• Commix, Trigger Happy, iocage, DNS, systemd-nspawn, ACME & more!

• Photo Funnel: Drag-and-Drop Photo Copying Tool For Linux

  Sometimes you need to transfer and organize just a handful of specific photos and raw files from your camera, and a simple GUI tool can help your with that. This tool is just a short Bash shell script uses the YAD tool to generate a drag-and-drop floating palette. When you drop files onto the palette and press the Execute button, the script copies the selected files to the specified directory and organizes them using the ExifTool-based commands.

• Proprietary

  • Spotify & Local Files problems on Linux

    Roughly a month ago, I reviewed Spotify here on OCS-Mag, testing the recently revived Ubuntu version. My experience was mixed. While the media player sported good looks and a sleek interface, the overall behavior was slightly erratic, culminating in crashes when trying to play local files.

    Since, I have spent more time exploring Spotify, not necessarily because I was enamored by its features and abilities, mostly because I felt it would be a worthy exercise for all those seeking the thrills of popular media streaming on Linux. Furthermore, like my past endeavors with Steam, Sketchup and alike, it’s part of a possibly Don Quixotic attempt to bridge the application gap between Windows and Linux, and give the users of the latter system some more freedom and choice. But there’s a cost. Sometimes, things do not work right away, or they do not work at all. This article is the diary of my journey.

  • Vivaldi Browser Sees New Stable Release

    Vivaldi, the browser aimed at power users, was updated to version 1.5 today, bringing support for bulk tab commands, smart-home lighting integration, and more.

    As a reminder, Vivaldi browser is built using open source technologies, like the Blink engine, Node.js, and React.js, but is not open source software. It includes features such as tab stacks, Opera-like Speed dial which supports multiple folders, as well as built-in notes, and a tool called Quick Commands, that can be used to search through the Vivaldi history, open tabs, settings, bookmarks and more.

  • Microsoft has been working hard on Skype for Linux: v1.13 released with more improvements

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install and Customize ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  • Fedora 25 Workstation Installation Guide with Screenshots

  • Fedora 25 Workstation Installation Guide

  • Katello – Download Yum Repositories and Register clients for patching

  • Create an Active Directory Infrastructure with Samba4 on Ubuntu – Part 1

  • How to Manage Samba4 AD Infrastructure from Linux Command Line – Part 2

  • How to install and use 7zip file archiver on Ubuntu Linux

  • How to Install and Configure MongoDB on CentOS 7

  • User Managed Services

  • How to Perform Internal Redirection with mod_rewrite in Apache

  • How to extend TrueCrypt volumes – Tutorial

  • How to find a file on a Linux VPS

  • Introducing Network Speed Indicator for Ubuntu Unity

  • Introducing GNU Emacs for Complete Beginners in Ubuntu

  • Find Out All Live Hosts IP Addresses Connected on Network in Linux

  • How to Upgrade Fedora 24 to Fedora 25 Workstation and Server

  • A Collection of Reviews & Tutorials About Desktop Environments in GNU/Linux

  • Customizing indicator-multiload in Ubuntu Unity

  • Ways to Use ‘find’ Command to Search Directories More Efficiently

  • Setup and Review of SyncThing, The Open Source File synchronization tool

  • Tutorial: Zenmap is a tool used to help map out networks, ports and find connected devices.

  • Web Enabled Dryer Monitor for the Raspberry Pi

  • Installing Debian or Devuan GNU+Linux with full disk encryption (including /boot)

  • 10 free resources to learn how to use git

  • How to install wget on RHEL/CentOS 7 using yum

  • How to pair Pi-hole with an OpenVPN to block ads and increase privacy on Ubuntu / Debian Linux

• Games

  • OSVR Now Available On Steam

    Co-founders of Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), the largest open source virtual reality consortium in the world, today announced a Steam update that provides support for OSVR content on Steam. The news means that universal VR content is now accessible through a single point of distribution.

  • Open Source VR Update Coming To Steam – VR For The Masses

  • ‘Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR)’ Platform Comes To ‘Steam’, The Next Steam Update Brings It, See What Can Be Expected

  • Steam to support OSVR’s open-platform for VR games

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Gwenview Importer is back

    I spent some time over the last weeks to port Gwenview Importer to KDE Frameworks 5, as I was getting frustrated with importing pictures by hand. It’s a straight port: no new features.

    Here is a screenshot after I filled my SD Card with random pictures of my daughter and cat for the purpose of illustrating this blog post

  • Time to craft

    It’s time for KDE Emerge to emerge as Craft.

    After many years of being the KDE Windows build tool we want to make KDE Emerge more visible and a tool for all developers.

    People associate Emerge with Gentoo, and they are right about it. This was a problem for many years now.

    For that reason Emerge will be called Craft from now on.

  • Functional reactive programming at Meeting C++

    There were couple of really nice talks – some less technical like the one from Jon Kalb of CppCon to the low level ones like the Rainer’s talk about the memory model of C++. Also, seing Bjarne Stroustrup in-person was a pleasure.

  • New Supernovae Data Source in KStars!

    The initial support for Supernovae in KStars was added back in 2011, but it relied on parsing an HTML page using a Python script to extract the necessary information on the latest discovered supernovae. It was obviously a very crude and hackish way to get the data, and I longed to rely on a better source for our data.

    The Harvard page we were relying on for supernovae updates suddenly stopped posting any further updates, its last update was made in 2015. Thankfully, we discovered a new gold trove of information: The Open Supernovae Catalog project!

  • Watching org.libelektra with Qt

    libelektra is a configuration library and tools set. It provides very many capabilities. Here I’d like to show how to observe data model changes from key/value manipulations outside of the actual application inside a user desktop. libelektra broadcasts changes as D-Bus messages. The Oyranos projects will use this method to sync the settings views of GUI’s, like qcmsevents, Synnefo and KDE’s KolorManager with libOyranos and it’s CLI tools in the next release.

  • Windows installer for Kate 16.08.3 KF5.28

  • Welcome new Kubuntu Members

    Friday November 18 was a productive day for the Kubuntu Community, as three new people were questioned and then elected into Membership. Welcome Simon Quigley, José Manuel Santamaría, and Walter Lapchynski as they package, work on our tooling, promote Kubuntu and help users.

  • Testing the untestable

    Admit it: how many times you have seen “software from this branch is completely untested, use it at your own risk” when you checked the latest code from any FOSS project? I bet you have, many times. For any reasonably modern project, this is not entirely true: Continuous Integration and automated testing are a huge help in ensuring that the code builds and at least does what it is supposed to do. KDE is no exception to this, thanks to build.kde.org and a growing number of unit tests.

  • From window killing to screenshot

    Last week I concentrated most of my development work on screenshot support through spectacle in a KWin Wayland session. Now I am happy to announce that we merged support for capturing a screenshot of a window with the help of an external application like spectacle.

    To explain why this is a great achievement we first need to look at X11. On X11 taking a screenshot of a window is easy. It’s part of the X protocol to read the pixmap data of the root window and you get the position and size of each window. Thus one is able to cut out the window and have it as a screenshot. That’s the most simple variant to do it, spectacle and previously ksnapshot do it differently. More on that later on.

  • New features in Ark 16.12

    Ark, the file archiver and compressor developed by KDE, has seen a lot of development for the upcoming 16.12 release. This blog post provides a summary of the most important changes.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • List of Productive GNOME Shell Extensions for Daily Usage

    In this article I listed my favorite GNOME Shell Extensions (GSE) that I, myself, had ever used. GSE in GNOME is similar with Addons in Firefox, they add and extend desktop functionality with many features. I listed here GSE for screen recording, proxy, network indicator, and some more.

  • I spy, with my little eye, Gnome Pie

    Regardless of the factual conclusion of this article, you are already sold on it just based on the title. Anyway. Humans are really good at solving problems, especially, or possibly only, if they are linear. It is not a coincidence that we have manuals that follow through a simple top-down logic or that navigation systems use turn-by-turn instructions. Square root of 7443 anyone? But this is not a biology lesson. And yet, it is.

    Operating systems are designed to help users translate their linear thinking into instructions. When they do this successfully, we have what we call intuitive interfaces. When they don’t, we have nerdy things that no one wants to use. The system menu is probably the most important ingredient of any desktop, as it’s the gateway to all we do on a computer. Most of these solutions are linear. Things go bad otherwise. Just check my Fedora 18 review for a quick reminder. Windows 8 anyone? Now Linux wise, there’s also this thing called Gnome Pie. It’s a radical answer to the idea of a system menu, and a challenge to the whole linearity concept. Does it work?

Distributions

• AV Linux Update: Good but Not Better

  If you plan on checking out AV Linux, keep in mind that the live session ISO (which you must run in order to install or even load) requires a user name and a password to log in. You will find these necessities hidden in the ISO file name.

  For the 64-bit version, the user name is isotester. The password is avl64. The 32-bit version is similar. Use isotester with avl32. For security reasons, you can not access root accounts on the LiveISO.

• Reviews

  • Zorin OS 12 Core

  • Zorin OS 12 Overview

• New Releases

  • Maui 2.1 updated ISO

• Red Hat Family

  • Finance

    • Volatility Watch on Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

    • Today, Zacks Investment Research Downgrade Red Hat Inc. (RHT) to Hold

• Debian Family

  • Debian putting everything on the /usr

    Debian is preparing to revise its default file system mapping to bring it in in line with other major distributions (like Fedora and CentOS).

    Evidence of the shift can be found in the bootstrap option that’s arrived in its unstable branch, where Debian dev Ansgar Burchardt posted news that mailing list announcement: “debootstrap in unstable can now install with merged-/usr, that is with /bin, /sbin, /lib* being symlinks to their counterpart in /usr.”

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Distrowatch Rankings Compared: 2006 vs 2016

      • A Brief Introduction to LXC Containers

        I recently found myself needing a machine to compile binaries on for a CentOS server. I first considered actually spinning up a CentOS system on a VPS; however, that seemed a little overboard just for compiling, I then realized that this would be the perfect use for a container. I could have an identical system to the one where the binaries will be deployed on, and at little cost since it can simply be blown away when I’m done. In order to set up my compile machine I used LXC.

        LXC, or “Linux Containers”, are a set of tools for creating full-featured containers. Compared to other tools such as systemd-nspawn, LXC is much more complex, and it has been used to build projects such as Docker. Docker has since moved away from LXC, however LXC is still one of the huge players in the Linux container game. The Linux container project also brings LXD, a daemon that can be used to manage containers. LXD makes a larger use of system images, as opposed to templates, in order to allow quick deployment of containers. Together these projects allow easy deployment and management of containers, as well as as advanced features and customizability.

      • New snapd 2.18 release and new candidate core snap

      • What’s new in Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) – an overview

        The Ubuntu 16.10 operating system was released last month. The new version, which is also called Yakkety Yak, came around six months after Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – released version 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) of the Linux-based operating system.

        We’ve already discussed the changes that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS brought along, so in this article we’ll be covering a quick overview of Ubuntu 16.10 desktop, essentially focusing on the major new features/changes it brings to the table when compared to version 16.04 LTS.

Devices/Embedded

• What Is Rasberry Pi Project?

  The Raspberry Pi is a series of single-board, low-cost, high-performance computer first developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi 3 is the sixth and latest iteration to be released in the series and it just keeps getting better.

• Intel Compute Sticks with Apollo Lake chips coming in 2017 (leaked roadmap)

  Intel’s Compute Stick is basically a fully functional, low-power PC crammed into a device that looks like an oversized USB flash drive. Plug it into the HDMI port on a TV, connect a power source, and you can run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on a TV, monitor, or commercial display.

• Phones

  • Neo900 Prototype version 2: Last Call for Review

    On November 8, 2016, the proto_v2 schematics were updated to the current version. We finished the last few improvements and our layouter is scheduling the layout to start in one week. We repeat our invitation to give the schematics a peer review: it’s your last chance to peel your eyes on these schematics and be picky about details that our engineering team might have missed. Hopefully you won’t find anything, but as Joerg says:

  • Alibaba’s YunOS overtakes Apple’s iOS as China’s second-largest smartphone operating system

    YunOS, the mobile operating system developed by Alibaba Group, is on track to corner a 14 per cent share of smartphone shipments in mainland China by the end of this year, pulling ahead of Apple’s iOS to become the second-largest operating system for that device in the market, according to analysts.

    The forecasts would confirm Alibaba’s claim earlier this year that YunOS had initially passed iOS on the mainland in the three months ended March 31.

    Despite the strong strides made by the Alibaba platform, Bernstein senior analyst Mark Li told the South China Morning Post

  • Android

    • Tor Phone Is The “Super-secure Version Of Android”, Developed By Tor Project

      The Tor Project has released Tor Phone–a privacy-focused and secure version of Android mobile OS. It’s based on Copperhead OS, a hardened Android distribution. Tor Phone also uses OrWall to force all the connections over Tor network.

    • newsFish, nextCloud news reader for Android updated

      Spent a few days re-writing newsFish for Android, to bring it up to the same level as the SailfishOS version.

      This version is better tested, works with nextCloud 10, has better navigation and is generally all-round smoother.

      It also compiled against Qt 5.7, and uses QtQuick.controls, instead of custom made controls.

      It doesnt have many advanced features like adding feeds, folders or starring, but these may come.

    • China Lent the Smartphone Market Momentum in Q3: Gartner

    • Record your Android screen with AZ Screen Recorder

    • Samsung Pay on Gear S3 now supported on many Android phones, Pixel excluded

    • Top 5 Reasons To Turn On Android’s Developer Mode

    • 9to5Google Gift Guide: These are five affordable Android phone deals to grab this holiday season

    • Android Nougat Rollout Update: OnePlus 3, OnePlus 3T Models To Receive Android 7.0 Nougat Update Via OTA In December [VIDEO]

    • Huawei Nova Plus International Giveaway

    • Samsung Galaxy S4, S5 Update: Android Nougat Via Custom ROMs Available

    • Android 7.1.1 release with December security patch due December 6

    • Acer Chromebook 14, 15 And Asus C300 Get Android Apps Via Google’s Chrome OS Developer Channel

    • Android 7.1.1 Nougat update to roll out for Nexus devices on December 6: Report

    • Do Android and iPhone users have different personalities?

Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat securely!

End-to-end encryption gives users true privacy, preventing anyone else from eavesdropping on conversations — even the very communications services they’re using. This is incredibly important for a decentralised ecosystem like Matrix on which Riot is built, where data can span across many different servers, and users should not have to trust any of those servers.

End-to-end encryption is also a real differentiating feature from most other popular collaboration apps whose business models fundamentally rely on being able to read, analyse and profile your conversations.

Progress update for AtCore.

A few days ago we hit a milestone in our development of AtCore. We are now able to properly install the libary for general use. Not only is installing a necessary for a libary that you plan to use within other stuff it also means that we can now focus our attention mostly on Atelier. We have now entered that magical time in development when the real world usage begins to drive its development. Thanks to everyone efforts we are almost ready for the next stage. Patrick has been doing reviews on every pull request. While he has been unable to help with as many commits as he would have liked to. His advice and direction in his reviews has been really helpful and has kept our style and code quality at a high level. Tomaz has been busy fixing up AtCore to be a proper KF5 libary with all the cmake deployment parts to go along with it. Most all of the cmake stuff has been written by Tomaz. Lays has been working on Atelier setup and getting all the non AtCore parts working. Thanks to her effort we are now able to use Atcore from Atelier!

As for me i have been adding stuff to AtCore. Since our last progress update a few new things have been added. Emergency Stop this simply allows you to stop the printer using the emergency stop code.It also cleans up any the command queue. Pause/Resume when paused we store the current location of the head that that way after resume you can move your print head out of the way to access the model.Pause supports a comma seperated string of commands to be sent after pause. For my printer i use “G91,G0 Z1,G90,G1 X0 Y195″ when pause this move my head up 1 mm and then pushes my model out toward the front fo the machine. This is useful if you want to maybe put a nut into printed part or change filament durring print and even to corrrect print defects while printing. We have also started to do lay ground work for more status info being picked out from the serial chatter. Setting of the firmware plugin can be done durring connect to force a specific plugin. A progress bar for printing progress. Some cleanup for autodetection of the plugin. There is still things to add to AtCore but it should provide enough for most use cases already!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • NoScript is multi-process compatible now

    NoScript, the one must have add-on for Firefox if you ask me, has received an update recently that introduces full multi-process compatibility (e10s).

  • Firefox will only support WebExtensions by the end of 2017

    Mozilla announced a far reaching change coming to the organization’s Firefox web browser in late 2017.

    The organization plans to cut support of all extension technologies but the rather new WebExtensions when Firefox 57 Stable is released.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Conference 2016: MS Office interoperability and automated bisection of regressions

• LibreOffice 5.3 Beta Available For Beta Testing

Funding

• Money in Open Source, and How Needle & Thread Will Be Profitable

  Money is one of the most difficult subjects to talk about when it comes to open source projects. It’s a basic fundamental truth that all open source projects need money to operate, and while open source software provides a plethora of benefits, I don’t think any reasonable person would tell you that a steady stream of income is one of them. Lots of people and organizations have presented different ideas and undertaken different experiments to try and maximize the amount of money coming in, while at the same time remaining open, fair, and accessible.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD Works On EFI Runtime ABI Support, But Still Experimental

  The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support.

  DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed EFI runtime ABI support that was ported over from the FreeBSD code-base.

  This EFI runtime ABI support allows for querying and setting the time, scanning EFI BIOS variables, and more. This code was ported from FreeBSD but with various changes for DragonFlyBSD’s different kernel interfaces.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Tear the wrapping paper off the 2016 Ethical Tech Giving Guide

  Electronics are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. From surveillance to harsh rules about copying and sharing, some gifts take more than they give.

  The good news is that there are ethical companies making better devices that your loved ones can enjoy with freedom and privacy. Today, we’re launching the 2016 Giving Guide, your key to smarter and more ethical tech gifts.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Become Michael Knight with Dashbot, an AI for your car

    The Dashbot uses the C.H.I.P. Pro, essentially a miniaturized single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi. The chip runs Linux and is completely open source for your hacking pleasure.

Programming/Development

• [Older] Samsung Joins the Eclipse Foundation

  We are proud to announce that Samsung has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation is the leading open source organization whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. In tandem with Eclipse’s mission, Samsung provides an open and interoperable platform for IoT development through the Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT Platform.

• How To Start Learning A Programming Language

  Have you ever wonder how everything works? From Smartphones Operating Systems to even each and every Linux Distro and every Operating System created by Microsoft and Apple. How does it play my favorite music? How does it save my files to the cloud? How does actually everything works? All this questions are answered with one big bolded and all capital “PROGRAMMING”.

Science

• Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior

  rozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.

  Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.

  At the latitude of this deposit — about halfway from the equator to the pole — water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet’s thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick.

  “This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet’s axis was more tilted than it is today,” said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Hardware

• AMD may launch next-generation Zen processors on January 17

  The latest rumor surrounding AMD’s upcoming and much-hyped Zen architecture has it slated for a launch on January 17. Purportedly the first chips to be released will be high-end desktop components, with their initial unveiling coming a week earlier at the CES event in Las Vegas.

Security

• Azure bug bounty Pwning Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  Acquired administrator level access to all of the Microsoft Azure managed Red Hat Update Infrastructure that supplies all the packages for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances booted from the Azure marketplace.

• pledge(2) … or, how I learned to love web application sandboxing

  I use application-level sandboxing a lot because I make mistakes a lot; and when writing web applications, the price of making mistakes is very dear. In the early 2000s, that meant using systrace(4) on OpenBSD and NetBSD. Then it was seccomp(2) (followed by libseccomp(3)) on Linux. Then there was capsicum(4) on FreeBSD and sandbox_init(3) on Mac OS X.

• [Older] Why is Apache Vulnerable by Default?

  Apache is the most popular web server on Earth, with a market share of 46.4% — well above Nginx (21.8%) and Microsoft IIS (9.8%). Thanks to Linux package managers like Yum and APT you can install and get it up and running in minutes. The core installation even features powerful modules for URL rewriting, user authentication, and more.

• [Re]discovering/correcting a ThinkPad supervisor password crack

  Don’t believe it? I didn’t either; it never worked for me. It turns out that’s only because the contemporary instructions for how to do it are wrong, or rather, they’ve mutated into a form that only works on some machines. As originally discovered, the hack reliably unlocks any* ThinkPad up to and including the Ivy Bridge models.

Finance

• Uganda is shutting down schools funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates [Ed: neo-colonialism by Gates]

  The Director of Education Standards for the Ministry, Huzaifa Mutazindwa, told CNN that the nursery and primary schools were not licensed, the teachers weren’t qualified and that there was no record of its curriculum being approved.