Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 29/6/2019: EU Approves IBM-Red Hat, RC3 of FreeBSD 11.3

GNU/Linux

  • Delphi RAD tool (remember that?) gets support for Linux desktop apps – again

    Hands On Texas software house Embarcadero Technologies has said it will license FmxLinux for Delphi, allowing developers to compile desktop applications for 64-bit Linux. FmxLinux is a toolchain for compiling Linux desktop applications using Embarcadero’s Linux compiler for Delphi, which is also part of the RAD Studio bundle. FmxLinux was developed by a third party, Eugene Kryukov. It has been licensed under “a long term distribution agreement,” says Embarcadero’s Marco Cantu in the announcement this week. Embarcadero is a division of Idera Software. RAD Studio is already a cross-platform development tool, with support for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. RAD Studio 10.2, released in 2017, included an LLVM-based Linux compiler for server applications, but not desktop. The new agreement completes the picture by adding desktop GUI (Graphical User Interface) applications.

  • EU approves IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat

    The European Commission has unconditionally approved IBM's $34 billion takeover of open-source software maker Red Hat. In a statement, the European Commission said that following an investigation, it concluded that the proposed deal "would raise no competition concerns". Since IBM doesn't stand among the top two companies in the cloud computing market, and isn't dominant in any sector in which Red Hat is also present, there was no reason for regulators to believe that the merger would raise competition concerns. "During its investigation, the Commission assessed the impact of the proposed transaction on the markets for middleware and system infrastructure software, where the activities of IBM and Red Hat overlap," the Commission said in its statement.

  • Long-term Device Use

    It seems to me that Android phones have recently passed the stage where hardware advances are well ahead of software bloat. This is the point that desktop PCs passed about 15 years ago and laptops passed about 8 years ago. For just over 15 years I’ve been avoiding buying desktop PCs, the hardware that organisations I work for throw out is good enough that I don’t need to. For the last 8 years I’ve been avoiding buying new laptops, instead buying refurbished or second hand ones which are more than adequate for my needs. Now it seems that Android phones have reached the same stage of development. 3 years ago I purchased my last phone, a Nexus 6P [1]. Then 18 months ago I got a Huawei Mate 9 as a warranty replacement [2] (I had swapped phones with my wife so the phone I was using which broke was less than a year old). The Nexus 6P had been working quite well for me until it stopped booting, but I was happy to have something a little newer and faster to replace it at no extra cost. Prior to the Nexus 6P I had a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 for 1 year 9 months which was a personal record for owning a phone and not wanting to replace it. I was quite happy with the Note 3 until the day I fell on top of it and cracked the screen (it would have been ok if I had just dropped it). While the Note 3 still has my personal record for continuous phone use, the Nexus 6P/Huawei Mate 9 have the record for going without paying for a new phone. A few days ago when browsing the Kogan web site I saw a refurbished Mate 10 Pro on sale for about $380. That’s not much money (I usually have spent $500+ on each phone) and while the Mate 9 is still going strong the Mate 10 is a little faster and has more RAM. The extra RAM is important to me as I have problems with Android killing apps when I don’t want it to. Also the IP67 protection will be a handy feature. So that phone should be delivered to me soon. Some phones are getting ridiculously expensive nowadays (who wants to walk around with a $1000+ Pixel?) but it seems that the slightly lower end models are more than adequate and the older versions are still good.

  • Full Circle Magazine #146
  • Desktop

    • Linux computer seller System76 is having a massive summer sale

      Do you need a new laptop or desktop, but don't know what to buy? Don't worry; this is a pretty common dilemma. While you can, of course, look into a Mac or Windows 10 computer, you should consider Linux too. A computer running, say, Ubuntu, can be great for productivity, education, creation, and more. Best of all, many top-tier Linux programs, such as GIMP and LibreOffice are totally free. And yes, your favorite web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome will run on Linux too. If you are open to the idea of buying a computer running a Linux-based operating system, you should definitely check out System76. Not only are its laptops and desktops of high quality, but its customer service is unrivaled. If you ever need help, you can contact an actual human being that is based in the USA. The support representatives aren't just reading off a script either -- these people are truly knowledgeable.

  • Server

    • How to explain service mesh in plain English

      In short, service mesh tools like Istio can reduce the operational burden of managing microservices-based applications, and in particular traffic between services, which could otherwise involve significant and often unsustainable manual work. As Red Hat CTO Chris Wright wrote earlier this year, “Alongside serverless, we see the service mesh concept taking off. A service mesh is essentially platform-level automation for creating the network connectivity required by microservices-based software architectures.” That’s a good, concise definition. We asked a variety of other IT leaders and practitioners to share their own clear-cut definitions to help boost your service mesh IQ, in part because it’s likely to come up in more discussions around containers, microservices, hybrid cloud, and other topics. Let’s start with some quick definitions:

    • How to write a sysadmin job description
  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • A Look At What's On The Table For Linux 5.3 Features

      With the Linux 5.2 kernel due to be released in a few weeks and that marking the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window, here is a look at some of the likely features coming to this next version of the Linux kernel. Based upon our close monitoring of the different "-next" Git branches of the Linux kernel and mailing lists, here is a look at what you're likely to see merged with Linux 5.3 in July. Linux 5.3 will then debut as stable in September.

    • Systemd Now Allows Custom BPF Programs To Be Loaded On Cgroups

      Systemd now allows loading of custom BPF programs for network traffic filtering that are applied to all sockets created by processes of a given systemd unit. The motivation for this stems from a feature plan drawn up last year for having systemd install BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) programs into cgroups. The benefit of this is associating a BPF program for IP filtering with a unit file so systemd can install them once a cgroup is setup.

    • Linux 5.3 To Support The $1,500 Wacom MobileStudio Pro Tablet

      In addition to the latest Wacom Intuos Pro Small drawing tablet to be supported by the Linux 5.3 kernel, the high-end (circa $1,500 USD) Wacom MobileStudio Pro tablet is also set to now be supported by this next kernel cycle. MobileStudio Pro support on Linux with the existing Wacom driver ended up being incredibly quite simple and just adding the new device IDs. That support is now queued into the "-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.3 merge window opening in July. At $1,500, the Wacom MobileStudio Pro ends up being an actual premium tablet computer as opposed to just a drawing tablet device as is most Wacom products.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Waypipe Offers A Transparent Wayland Proxy For Running Programs Over The Network

        Waypipe is a transparent Wayland proxy and the latest of several different projects aiming to make it easy running Wayland clients over a network similar to X11's capabilities. Waypipe runs both on the client system and the "server" system and takes up the job of emulating shared files on each end of the connection, parsing and forwarding of protocol messages, etc. Waypipe supports shared memory and DMA-BUF.

      • It's Becoming Easier To Develop New Wayland Extensions For Mir

        The Mir 1.2 release was aiming to make it easier to develop Mir servers with custom Wayland extensions easier, but in dog feeding the work, Canonical's long-time Mir developer Alan Griffiths realized some shortcomings in the experience.

  • Applications

    • Cook: package hardening asymptote

      On his blog, Kees Cook looks at some graphs of package hardening efforts in Ubuntu and Debian, noting that they have nearly completely flattened out over the last few years. He wonders what might be the next hardening feature on the horizon and speculates some on that: "What new compiler feature adoption could be measured? I think there are still a few good candidates… How about enabling -fstack-clash-protection (only in GCC, Clang still hasn’t implemented it). Or how about getting serious and using forward-edge Control Flow Integrity? (Clang has -fsanitize=cfi for general purpose function prototype based enforcement, and GCC has the more limited -fvtable-verify for C++ objects.) Where is backward-edge CFI? (Is everyone waiting for CET?)"

    • <16 Best Free Linux Chemistry Tools/a>

      Chemistry is the study of matter and the changes it undergoes. It is an extremely vivacious science which deals with a molecular scale and atomic interpretation of the world we live in, helping us to understand that world. Chemistry is regarded as the central science, given its close links with physics and engineering, with biology and medicine, and with geology and earth science. There are a number of different branches of chemistry. These include organic chemistry which studies the structure, properties, reactions, and composition of carbon-based compounds, and inorganic chemistry which deals with non-carbon compounds. Another important subdiscipline is physical chemistry which deals with the relations between the physical properties of substances and their chemical formations studying, in particular, atomic, subatomic, macroscopic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems. Chemistry is found in many different areas including all spheres of industry, research, teaching, forensic science, public health and much more. Moreover, at a fundamental level we are all chemists. Each time we breathe, boil a kettle, or strike a match, a chemical reaction takes place. We develop and function as a consequence of chemical processes taking place in our body. Chemistry therefore plays a significant role in everyone’s lives. Science really prospers and advances when individuals share the results of their experiments with others in the scientific community. There is a certain logic that scientific software should therefore be released under an open source license. This article focuses on selecting the best open source software for chemistry. Hopefully there will be something for interest here for all budding chemists.

    • Proprietary

      • History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive

        But history will not be kind to Ive, to Apple, or to their design choices. While the company popularized the smartphone and minimalistic, sleek, gadget design, it also did things like create brand new screws designed to keep consumers from repairing their iPhones.

        Under Ive, Apple began gluing down batteries inside laptops and smartphones (rather than screwing them down) to shave off a fraction of a millimeter at the expense of repairability and sustainability.

      • Apple has a generational succession problem, and Jony Ive's departure is the tip of the iceberg

        Jony Ive's coming departure from Apple underscores the firm's attempts to shift from hardware to software. [...]

        [paywall]

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Slimbook & Kubuntu - Combat Report 9

        My overall impression of the Slimbook and its Kubuntu Beaver operating system remains unchanged. I'm rather happy with my choice. That said, there are some glaring bugs and rather annoying niggles that should be fixed. It's the kind of things that can really ruin the experience and harm the user's loyalty long-term. Not being able to print (which usually happens when you DO need to), or having your phone connectivity not work are exactly the problems that block the adoption of Linux among ordinary folks. No one wants to put up with system errors, especially when other operating systems out there offer a more streamlined experience. I'm not saying Windows is flawless, but in general, I have fewer problems with my production Windows machines than with my Linux ones. Small things. But important things. Plasma is constantly getting better, but some of the improvements do need to trickle back into the LTS release, because having good features for five years is awesome, but having long-term bugs is dreadful. That would be all from yours humbly this time. Stay tuned for future chapters in this neverending adventure.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Zorin OS Review

        Zorin OS is an Ubuntu based Linux distribution. Zorin OS has one ultimate goal in mind of providing a Linux alternative to Windows users. Zorin OS is also a very good Linux distribution for people who are new to Linux. Zorin OS is fast, powerful, secure. Zorin OS also does not track your activities. Zorin OS respects your privacy.

    • New Releases

      • Project Trident 19.06 Available

        This is a significant package update for the repository, not just for applications, but also for some of the base system packages. There are a lot of changes from upstream FreeBSD and TrueOS in this release, from additional “-bootstrap” base packages to the renaming of the “zol” flavor of base packages to “nozfs”, as the “zol” version of the ZFS packages was also renamed to “openzfs”. In addition to this, a ton of the default settings from upstream TrueOS were changed. We have tried to track down and re-enable every setting which Project Trident needed from TrueOS, but if you find some functional regression (particularly when it comes to which kernel modules are loaded by default), please let us know so that we can track that down and re-enable any additional settings as needed.

    • Fedora

      • Update on EPEL-8 Status

        EPEL packages are built inside of the Fedora Projects’ build infrastructure. This is done by downloading the packages from Red Hat’s public Content Delivery Network (CDN), and then having the Fedora artifact build system (koji) use the release as an external build channel. Koji looks at packages in a different way than other build commands like ‘mock’ do. Where mock is meant to just build packages, koji is designed about auditing the entire lifecycle of a package. In other words, if you want to know how a package in Fedora 12 was built and all its children interacted over time in the buildroots… you can do that with enough work and the koji databases. With mock you have a couple of log files which tell you what was pulled into a buildroot but how those were built would require you finding their log files, etc etc. A developer can also download those packages and look at them to see what was in them and how they were built. The strength of koji is that you can have a credible chain of builds to know where things came from. However this doesn’t work too well with building packages for EPEL where koji doesn’t know where the RHEL kernel came from. Koji uses mergerepo to look at the external packages provided, determines the src.rpm they would come from and determines what the latest version it would use from each. From this it creates a ‘buildroot’ which it will use to build packages from. This has worked pretty well for building packages from RHEL-5,6, and 7. The major downside has been where someone built a package with the same src.rpm name which koji then decides is the master no matter if a newer version shows up in RHEL.

      • Fedora Community Blog: FPgM report: 2019-26
    • Debian Family

      • Diversity and inclusion in Debian: small actions and large impacts

        The Debian Project always has and always will welcome contributions from people who are willing to work on a constructive level with each other, without discrimination. The Diversity Statement and the Code of Conduct are genuinely important parts of our community, and over recent years some other things have been done to make it clear that they aren't just words. One of those things is the creation of the Debian Diversity Team: it was announced in April 2019, although it had already been working for several months before as a welcoming space for, and a way of increasing visibility of, underrepresented groups within the Debian project.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Devices/Embedded

    Free Software/Open Source

    • Killing four myths about open source in financial service

      Although historically competitive, financial firms have only just begun to adopt “open innovation” strategies akin to what other industries have done over the last two or three decades. But what exactly are they? To clear up the confusion, this approach really means to leverage open source technology and standards to lower costs and reduce time-to-market for products and services. It also leads to the attraction and retention of top talent. As a recent example, Goldman Sachs recently stated its plans to release proprietary code on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software developers using this technology. However, many financial services decision-makers have yet to fully grasp the power of open source collaboration for their businesses. Financial institutions on both the buy- and sell-side still suffer from ingrained misconceptions about legal issues or compete-at-all-costs mindsets across their technology stacks. This can stifle a move to a more collaborative strategy that can lead to tangible, improved long-term results. Open source is a collaborative software development model whereby code is made publicly available and maintained by a decentralised community of developers. While its origins are rooted in individual passion, this technology has risen to a mainstream commercial business model. For example, today the size of open source database market is $2.6 billion, or 7.6% of the entire market according to Gartner. And trends continue to point to an unstoppable growth with the global open source services market estimated to be at $32.95 billion by 2022, according to MarketsAndMarkets.



    • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

      • Darren Hart | Sr Director / Open Source Technology Center At VMware

        In this interview, Darren Hart, Sr Director / Open Source Technology Center at VMware talks about how Open Source has democratized the development of new platforms.

      • Microsoft Seeks To Join the Official Linux-Distros Mailing List [Ed: See the comments here. People are not as foolish as Microsoft hoped, in spite of the expensive lying campaign of Microsoft.]
      • Microsoft is seeking to join Linux private security board [Ed: EEE. Classic EEE. Who welcomes it? The Novell facilitator of Microsoft, Greg K-H. Now in the "Linux" Foundation.]

        The application was made by Sasha Levin, and if approved would allow the Redmond giant to be part of private discussions on vulnerabilities and ongoing security issues. One of the criteria for membership is to have a Unix-like distro that makes use of open source components, and Levin mentioned Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and Azure Sphere, which are still in public preview and slated for general availability in 2020.

    • BSD

      • FreeBSD 11.3-RC3 Now Available
        The third RC build of the 11.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
        
        

        Installation images are available for:

        o 11.3-RC3 amd64 GENERIC o 11.3-RC3 i386 GENERIC o 11.3-RC3 powerpc GENERIC o 11.3-RC3 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 11.3-RC3 sparc64 GENERIC o 11.3-RC3 armv6 BANANAPI o 11.3-RC3 armv6 BEAGLEBONE o 11.3-RC3 armv6 CUBIEBOARD o 11.3-RC3 armv6 CUBIEBOARD2 o 11.3-RC3 armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 11.3-RC3 armv6 RPI-B o 11.3-RC3 armv6 RPI2 o 11.3-RC3 armv6 PANDABOARD o 11.3-RC3 armv6 WANDBOARD o 11.3-RC3 aarch64 GENERIC

        Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.

        Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

        https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/11.3/

        The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

        If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.

        If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/11.3" branch.

        A summary of changes since 11.3-RC2 includes:

        o Regression fix in mountd(8) (PR 238725)

        o Regression fix in NAT64LSN.

        A list of changes since 11.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/11.3 release notes:

        https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.3R/relnotes.html

        Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 11.3-RELEASE cycle progresses.

        === Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

        VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

        https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/11.3-RC3/

        The partition layout is:

        ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

        The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

        Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:

        https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

        To boot the VM image, run:

        % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0

        Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

        === Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===

        FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:

        eu-north-1 region: ami-07d990eaeb497323d ap-south-1 region: ami-001b7b067fd8e781d eu-west-3 region: ami-01052697e06e3a45e eu-west-2 region: ami-0cfee448feeb2a851 eu-west-1 region: ami-0ce7400d6a08a9862 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0b16c2014116bd358 ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0818328d0efcec703 sa-east-1 region: ami-077fc22d100770c52 ca-central-1 region: ami-0c414f2c140fd13cb ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0f5fe631ff1d2578a ap-southeast-2 region: ami-06bf072735d282208 eu-central-1 region: ami-0a1cbb609ac331456 us-east-1 region: ami-05a73406ad7ece248 us-east-2 region: ami-0a21294420f709f19 us-west-1 region: ami-0bb877ce5c712ad4f us-west-2 region: ami-0a231251af9d35604

        === Vagrant Images ===

        FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can be installed by running:

        % vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-11.3-RC3 % vagrant up

        === Upgrading ===

        The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

        # freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.3-RC3

        During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

        # freebsd-update install

        The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

        # shutdown -r now

        After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

        # freebsd-update install

        It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 11.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:

        # shutdown -r now

        Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

        # freebsd-update install
      • FreeBSD 11.3-RC3 Available

        The third RC build for the FreeBSD 11.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

      • Cameron Kaiser: And now for something completely different: NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini (and making the kernel power failure proof)

        I'm a big fan of NetBSD. I've run it since 2000 on a Mac IIci (of course it's still running it) and I ran it for several years on a Power Mac 7300 with a G3 card which was the second incarnation of the Floodgap gopher server. Today I also still run it on a MIPS-based Cobalt RaQ 2 and an HP Jornada 690. I think NetBSD is a better match for smaller or underpowered systems than current-day Linux, and is fairly easy to harden and keep secure even though none of these systems are exposed to the outside world.

    • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

      • GNU Web Translation Coordination - News: Malayalam team re-established

        After more than 8 years of being orphaned, Malayalam team is active again. The new team leader, Aiswarya Kaitheri Kandoth, made a new translation of the Free Software Definition, so now we have 41 translations of that page! Currently, Malayalam the only active translation team of official languages of India. It is a Dravidian language spoken by about 40 million people worldwide, with the most speakers living in the Indian state of Kerala. Like many Indian languages, it uses a syllabic script derived from Brahmi.



    • Programming/Development

      • Bash Error Handling

        There are no try … catch blocks in bash for exception and error handling to say. So, how do you even start to handle errors in a way that none will escape and wreak havoc in the background hidden by silent a foreground that only appears okay. Finally, there is a definitive guide for bash error handling. I have outlined the foundation needed to handle any error in bash.

      • PyCharm Debugger Tutorial

        If you are a new python user and are looking for an environment specifically for Python development, integration, and debugging, PyCharm IDE can be best suited. It is available for all major operating systems, with a commercial and freemium license along with free community edition to start with.

      • Data science computation hara-kiri

        Beautiful algorithm, great results, all looks fine and seems to work, but… problem. It takes forever. We all have been through this. You may think: “it is only a proof-of-concept”. Or you may think, efficiency-wise, “python should not be used in the first place”. Well. Actually, it isn’t that bad if you know what methods you should use or rather which ones you shouldn’t.

      • ListenData: Importing Data into Python

        This tutorial explains various methods to read data into Python. Data can be in any of the popular formats - CSV, TXT, XLS/XLSX (Excel), sas7bdat (SAS), Stata, Rdata (R) etc. Loading data in python environment is the most initial step of analyzing data.

      • How to read CSV file with pandas

        This tutorial explains how to read a CSV file in python using read_csv function of pandas package. Without use of read_csv function, it is not straightforward to import CSV file with python object-oriented programming. Pandas is an awesome powerful python package for data manipulation and supports various functions to load and import data from various formats. Here we are covering how to deal with common issues in importing CSV file.

      • Return the highest volume of traffic during peak hour

        In this article, we are going to create a function which will return a list of tuples that consist of a particular hour and the highest traffic volume for that particular hour. The stat has been taken every 10 minutes in each hour. For example, at 4.00pm the total numbers of traffics that pass through a junction for every 10 minutes are as follows: [23, 22, 45, 66, 54, 33]. The traffic volume measurement in this example will begin at 4.00pm and end at 8.00pm. Below is the solution to this problem.

      • In Rust we trust: Brave smashes speed limit after rewriting ad-block engine in super-lang

        Software engineers working on the Brave browser have rewritten the browser's ad blocking engine in Rust and seen massive speed increases as a result. In a blog post on Wednesday, Brave Software performance researcher Andrius Aucinas and chief scientist Ben Livshits said that rewriting Brave's built-in ad blocker in Mozilla-spawned Rust resulted in an average 69x improvement in the amount of time required to process web requests. The previous iteration of its ad blocking engine was already optimized C++. The speed up was mainly due to algorithmic changes with the added bonus of Rust's low overhead and memory safety. Rust, a next-gen C/C++-like systems language designed to be fast, safe, and secure, recently celebrated four years in official release and, for each of those years, it has been the most loved programming language in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey.

    Leftovers

    • Health/Nutrition

      • Angela Merkel: Glyphosate Use Will Eventually End

        "The resulting trial focused not on ascertaining the truth regarding the state of the science, causation, and compliance with legal duties, but instead on vilifying Monsanto in the abstract," Bayer said in motions filed with the court, according to Reuters. Bayer's next glyphosate trial will start this summer in St. Louis, the former headquarters of Monsanto. The company will likely be embroiled in lengthy-litigation for years to come. Major shareholders criticized Bayer's position. They accused Bayer of mismanaging the glyphosate issue and disapproved of management, according to Reuters. Even though Bayer maintains that scientific-evidence proves glyphosate's safety and efficacy, governments around the world have started to ban its use. Therefore, Bayer has responded to the demands of the market and said it would invest more than $5.5 billion in researching alternative herbicides. "While glyphosate will continue to play an important role in agriculture and in Bayer's portfolio, the company is committed to offering more choices for growers," Bayer said, as Reuters reported.

      • Glyphosate use will eventually end, Merkel says

        Use of Bayer’s contested weedkiller glyphosate, the subject of more than 10,000 lawsuits in the U.S. over claims it causes cancer, will eventually die out, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the country’s lower house on Wednesday. Merkel’s view is seemingly at odds with that of Bayer, which acquired the pesticide along with its takeover of U.S. seed maker Monsanto, which earlier this month said it saw a future for the product.

      • Bayer Roundup Legal Adviser Known for Fighting, Not Settling

        After getting pummeled with more than $2.2 billion in damages in the first three trials over its Roundup weed killer, Bayer AG needs to step it up on defense. Enter John Beisner. The veteran lawyer who has guided companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. in their fights against multibillion-dollar product-liability lawsuits was tapped to advise Bayer executives how to up the company’s game against allegations that Roundup causes cancer.

    • Security

      • Community Impact of OpenPGP Certificate Flooding

        I wrote yesterday about a recent OpenPGP certificate flooding attack, what I think it means for the ecosystem, and how it impacted me. This is a brief followup, trying to zoom out a bit and think about why it affected me emotionally the way that it did. One of the reasons this situation makes me sad is not just that it's more breakage that needs cleaning up, or even that my personal identity certificate was on the receiving end. It's that it has impacted (and will continue impacting at least in the short term) many different people -- friends and colleagues -- who I know and care about. It's not just that they may be the next targets of such a flooding attack if we don't fix things, although that's certainly possible. What gets me is that they were affected because they know me and communicate with me. They had my certificate in their keyring, or in some mutually-maintained system, and as a result of what we know to be good practice -- regular keyring refresh -- they got burned. Of course, they didn't get actually, physically burned. But from several conversations i've had over the last 24 hours, i know personally at least a half-dozen different people who i personally know have lost hours of work, being stymied by the failing tools, some of that time spent confused and anxious and frustrated. Some of them thought they might have lost access to their encrypted e-mail messages entirely. Others were struggling to wrestle a suddenly non-responsive machine back into order. These are all good people doing other interesting work that I want to succeed, and I can't give them those hours back, or relieve them of that stress retroactively.

      • Nokia disowns CTO's comments about Huawei's 'sloppy' 5G kit

        The firm's chief technology officer Marcus Weldon warned: "That means being wary of adding Chinese vendors into network infrastructure, as long as these security vulnerabilities are either provably there or likely to be there based on past practices."

        Wheldon, referring to recent research from Finite State which saw it uncover back doors in more than 55 per cent of Huawei devices, added: "We read those reports and we think okay, we're doing a much better job than they are.

      • Nokia distances itself from boss's warning over Huawei 5G kit

        In the UK, Huawei equipment has been subject to close scrutiny by a unit staffed by GCHQ. It has produced reports severely critical of the security of some software, although it has not found backdoors in the firm's products.

      • An IoT worm Silex, developed by a 14 year old resulted in malware attack and taking down 2000 devices

        Larry Cashdollar, an Akamai researcher, the first one to spot the malware, told ZDNet in a statement, “It’s using known default credentials for IoT devices to log in and kill the system.”

      • 14-year-old creates dangerous malware, starts bricking thousands of IoT devices
      • Huawei Gets ‘Green Signal’ From Trump To Resume Trade In US

        The possibly lifiting of the ban doesn’t come as a surprise. Last month, President Trump gave an unsatisfactory explanation of the Huawei ban and hinted that it could end soon. Huawei is currently on 90-day temporary license in the US which was issued immediately after the ban was announced.

      • Trump Says He’ll Allow China’s Huawei to Buy From U.S. Suppliers

        President Donald Trump said he’ll allow Huawei Technologies Co. to buy products from U.S. suppliers, in a concession to China after talks with the country’s President Xi Jinping on Saturday. “U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei,” Trump said at a news conference following the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan. “We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it.” The Commerce Department last month moved to blacklist Huawei, cutting it off from U.S. suppliers, though many companies have managed to skirt the restrictions. Trump met with Xi on Saturday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, and agreed to pause the trade war between their countries.

      • The Infrastructure Mess Causing Countless Internet Outages

        The patchwork problem was on full display with the Cloudflare incident this week. Pennsylvania steel company Allegheny Technologies uses two internet providers for connectivity. It received accidental, inaccurate routing information from one provider, a small Midwest ISP, and unintentionally passed it on to its other provider, Verizon. The smaller ISP started the routing error, but Verizon—an internet backbone behemoth with massive resources—also had not implemented the BGP filters and authentication checks that would have caught the mistake. Without these protections in place, Verizon's other customers worldwide, including Cloudflare, experienced outages and failures. Verizon did not return a request for comment about the incident.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Patently-O Software Law Bits & Bytes: Do Not Track Act of 2019 by Grant Harrison

        : Do Not Track Act of 2019 is, in its simplest form, a way to regulate data collected by big tech companies. The bill would require the FTC to create a program that, upon request by the user, sends a “Do Not Track Signal” to websites and online applications. The Do Not Track Act of 2019 is an adaptation of its formers, with the new add on of regulating this for all of the internet activity, not just web browsers. The bill would require the FTC to create a program that, upon request by the user, sends a “Do Not Track Signal” to websites and online applications

      • Apple Pay Launches in 13 More European Countries, Sparkassen and Volksbanken in Germany Later This Year

        Apple Pay now also appears to support a number of popular bank cards across Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Romania, and Slovenia.

      • The Global Data War Heats Up

        At issue is how countries view data. Do companies own the information? Does an individual own it? Does a government have access to it? The problem is that governments across China, India, the European Union, Japan, and the United States have philosophical differences on how they view these issues. These are not merely technical problems, but deep divides that may not be possible to bridge. Add to this the fact that this conversation is taking place as the United States and China are locked in a rivalry focused on technology—and, by extension, data. Taken together, this means that the rules for who controls data—and therefore harnesses their value—are part of a bigger geopolitical competition that will shape the 21st century.

      • Govt considers switch to a homegrown chat app

        India is considering developing and using a chat application similar to WhatsApp and other homegrown secure communication networks, at least for government agencies, to insulate the country from future vulnerabilities stemming from geopolitical developments, two officials said.

      • India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

        The move to step away from foreign communication apps, if it comes to fruition, won’t be the first time a nation has attempted to cautiously restrict usage of popular messaging apps run by foreign players in government offices.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • U.S. Meteorologists 'Deeply Concerned' Over 5G Roll-Out

        U.S. weather forecasters are the latest group to sound the alarm that the race to introduce 5G technologies may have adverse consequences. In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), U.S. meteorologists called the potential for 5G mobile technologies to disrupt communication between weather satellites "deeply concerning," according to the BBC.

      • US meteorologists worried over 5G roll-out

        Signals from weather satellites could be disrupted by 5G mobile data networks in the US, meteorologists have warned. US forecasters have expressed concerns about 5G radio interference before, but now a group of scientific bodies has written to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the issue. The joint letter, spotted by news site The Register, says the situation is "deeply concerning". It asks for an auction of radio spectrum for 5G uses to be delayed. Interference caused by increased communications activity could delay the reporting of important weather information to the public - for example during hurricanes - according to the American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. They argued that the weather networks they rely on are "crucially important for public safety and scientific research".

      • "Deeply concerning": 5G mobile networks may jam weather satellite signals, meteorologists say

        A Federal Communications Commission proposal to share a radio spectrum band relied on by weather forecasting services with mobile companies has been opposed by meteorological experts.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Supreme Court Refusal to Hear Investpic Signals Death for Most Software Patent Applications [Ed: Watchtroll's latest terrible rant from Burman York (Bud) Mathis III shows that even the most radical people admit software patents are kaput in the US. They attack the courts and judges now.

        The Investpic v. SAP America case (Supreme Court Dkt. No. 18-1199), which is the 44th patent eligibility case to be considered for certiorari since the notorious Alice Corp. decision, was announced earlier this week. Cert. denied. Unlike almost any other case, the Investpic decision represents a hostility to the patent rights of software developers based on capricious foundations.

      • Earlier Start of International Preliminary Examination

        As of 1 July 2019, Rule 69.1(a) PCT will be amended to provide for the International Preliminary Examining Authority to start the international preliminary examination upon receipt of the demand, instead of waiting until the expiration of the applicable time limit for filing a demand. This means that applicants will no longer need to expressly request that the international preliminary examination should start before the expiration of the applicable time limit under Rule 54bis.1(a) PCT in Box No. IV, item 4 of the PCT Chapter II Demand Form (version valid until 30 June 2019; version as of 1 July 2019), but rather only in the opposite case, i.e. in cases where to the applicant wishes to postpone the start of international preliminary examination until the expiration of the time limit for filing a demand (3 months from the date of transmittal to the applicant of the ISR or 22 months from the priority date). In other words, if the demand is filed early, applicants can assume that the EPO acting as IPEA will be able to start with examination of the application immediately upon receipt of the demand. This can be of importance when an applicant is interested in timely receiving a Written Opinion under PCT Chapter II, e.g. in view of parallel pending application(s); or when an applicant would like to have a positive Written Opinion as soon as possible, e.g., in view of licensing negotiations. As such, this amendment will surely be welcomed by applicants.

      • Copyrights

        • 10 Best Sites To Watch Hindi Movies Online For Free In 2019 [Legal Streaming]

          Bollywood releases the highest number of movies per year among all the entertainment industries across the world. So it isn’t a surprise that the majority of Indians are movie buffs. While many of us prefer watching movies in theaters and television, others watch Hindi movies online. However, not all of them are legal as they offer pirated content or torrents that stream Bollywood movies illegally. I know that downloading pirated movies seem like a convenient option for many, but such activities can attract a penalty. Besides, you always risk malware attacks while attempting to stream or download Hindi movies from such websites. This is why I have compiled a list of the best sites to watch Bollywood movies online for free and legally in 2019. Before moving ahead, do take a look at our other lists where you can watch some more awesome movies, TV series, and songs for free to get your daily dose of entertainment!

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