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Links 20/11/2019: HONOR MagicBook With GNU/Linux, Coreboot 4.11, GNU Health Patchset 3.6.1



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop

      • HONOR MagicBook 15 finally revealed with Linux as main operating system

        MagicBook is the first laptop series that was released by HONOR in 2018. After that, subsequent models were being launched in China without any global launch. Although the laptop series is not among the popular ones, but they are definitely the above-average laptops you can purchase at an affordable price. Recently, a new model from the series is spotted in a listing of devices that appeared on JingDong Mall.

        The new HONOR MagicBook 15 is only going to come with an Intel variant unlike what they did with the previous version which also offered another AMD Ryzen variant. It is also said to be having two storage options which are 256GB and 512GB SSD storage. There will be a fingerprint sensor on the power button as well for security.

        For aesthetic, it seems like the laptop still maintain its MacBook-like design while taking a different direction on the colour scheme. The HONOR MagicBook 15 we can see from the pictures below show that the laptop will come with a silver body that adds a touch of blue to the edges. The colour of the edges also somehow assembles the colour of their logo which will appear on the laptop as well.

    • Server

      • IBM

        • SystemTap 4.2 release
          The SystemTap team announces release 4.2!
          
          

          support for generating backtraces of different contexts; improved backtrace tapset to include file names and line numbers; eBPF support extensions including raw tracepoint access, prometheus exporter, procfs probes and improved looping structures

          = Where to get it

          https://sourceware.org/systemtap/ - Project Page https://sourceware.org/systemtap/ftp/releases/ https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID... git tag release-4.2 (commit 044a0640985ef0)

          There have been over 110 commits since the last release. There have been over 25 bugs fixed / features added since the last release.

          = SystemTap frontend (stap) changes

          - When the -v option is set along with -L option, the output includes duplicate probe points which are distinguished by their PC address.

          - Now it is possible to issue a backtrace using user specified pc, sp, and fp which can be used to generate backtraces of different contexts. This was introduced to get backtraces of user code from within the go runtime but it can also be used to do things like generating backtraces of user code from within signal handlers.

          - The automatic printing implementation now differentiates between pointer and integer types, which are printed as hex or decimal respectively.

          = SystemTap backend changes

          - Initial support for multi-dimensional supports has been added to the stapbpf backend. Note that these arrays cannot be iterated upon with a foreach loop.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports sorting by value in foreach loops.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports the concatenation operator for userspace probes.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports the target() function and -x option.

          - The gettimeofday_* functions are now provided for the stapbpf backend.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports order parameterization for begin and end probes.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports stap-exporter extensions.

          - The stapbpf backend now supports procfs probes. The implementation uses FIFO special files in /var/tmp/systemtap-$EFFUSER/MODNAME instead of the proc filesystem files.

          - The eBPF backend now uses bpf raw tracepoints for kernel.trace("*") probes. These have target variable arguments that match the arguments available for the traditional linux kernel modules tracepoints. Support for the older bpf tracepoint arguments can be forced with a --compatible=4.1 option on the command line.

          - The compiler optimizes out probes with empty handlers. Previously, warnings were issued but, the probe was not internally removed. For example, this script now outputs a warning and an error as the only probe handler is empty:

          probe begin {}

          Additionally, probe handlers that evaluate to empty are also removed. For example, in this script, the begin probe is elided as $foo does not exist, however, an error won't be outputted because atleast one probe with a non-empty handler exists (probe begin):

          probe begin { print("Protected from elision") }

          probe end { if (@defined($foo)) { print("Evaluates to empty handler") } }

          - The sys/sdt.h file changes the way i386 registers operands are sometimes named, due to an ambiguity. A comment block explains.

          = SystemTap tapset changes

          - New backtracing functions print_[u]backtrace_fileline() have been added to the tapset. These functions behave similarly to print_[u]backtrace(), the only difference being that file names and line numbers are added to the backtrace.

          = SystemTap sample scripts

          All 180+ examples can be found at https://sourceware.org/systemtap/examples/ .

          - Several sample scripts have been enabled to run on the stapbpf backend:

          apps/libguestfs_log.stp network/sk_stream_wait_memory.stp memory/mmfilepage.meta memory/mmwriteback.meta general/ansi_colors.meta

          - New stap-exporter sample script for the stapbpf backend:

          syscallsrw.stp Tallies the read and write syscalls.

          = Examples of tested kernel versions

          2.6.32 (RHEL6 x86_64) 4.15.0 (Ubuntu 18.04 x86_64) 4.18.0 (RHEL8 x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x) 5.0.7 (Fedora 29 x86_64) 5.3.8 (Fedora 30 i686) 5.3.9 (Fedora 31 x86_64) 5.4.0-rc (Fedora 32 x86_64)

          = Known issues with this release

          - The array dump macros which are used with prometheus probes do not entirely work with stapbpf as the macros use foreach loops which cannot be used with multi-dimensional arrays yet.

          - The user_string() function in the BPF tapsets uses the BPF probe_read_str() helper, which only works correctly when there is no address translation between user and kernel address spaces. It has been restricted to x86_64 only until the BPF infrastructure provides separate helpers for reading user and kernel data.

          = Coming soon

          - More stapbpf functionality including full statistics aggregate support and try-catch blocks.

          = Contributors for this release

          *Carlos O'Donell, Frank Ch. Eigler, Jafeer Uddin, *Richard Purdie, Ross Burton, *Sagar Patel, Serhei Makarov Stan Cox, *Wenzong Fan, William Cohen

          Special thanks to new contributors, marked with '*' above.

          Special thanks to Sagar for assembling these notes.

          = Bugs fixed for this release &tl;https://sourceware.org/PR#####>

          9922 need to configure with --disable-pie on ubuntu 25174 string auto-concat doesn't work in @var / @cast module parameter 25169 strcpy overlap between transport arg and string on-stack 25133 stapbpf foreach loop crashing 24953 foreach (v = v1,v2) syntax not behaving correctly in stapbpf 24812 stapbpf: support order-parametrized begin/end probes 25113 Explanation and "code" mismatch in section ⁠2.3.1.2. File Flight Recorder 25107 need -L variant that doesn't merge duplicate probe points 23285 stapbpf procfs probes 24946 printing hex sequences causes crash 24947 valid hex and octal sequences not checked for 24926 non-ascii characters not printing on stapbpf 24934 stapbpf stack-smash on EXIT message processing 23879 print_ubacktrace can not print function name 24875 VMA tracker is broken on Fedora 29 24904 stack_trace struct undefined on kernel 5.2 23858 sorted iteration on bpf arrays can't sort values 24885 add test_{,install}check_dyninst tag to check.exp 23866 dissonance between kernel tracepoint parametrization, lkm vs bpf 24811 stapbpf segfault: nested foreach loops can corrupt sorted key data when limit==0 11353 elide side-effect-free probes 24528 stapbpf-next housekeeping: bpf-translate.cxx should distinguish codegen for kernel/userspace targets 24543 stapbpf breaks when cpu0 is disabled 12025 Have appropriate selection of hex and decimal formatted output for automatic output 24639 "next" statement not recognized by stap bpf backend 24343 Some syscall.*.return missing name and retstr variables
        • Celebrating KEDA 1.0: Providing an event-driven scale capability for any container workload [Ed: Red Hat works with and for Microsoft, even gives Microsoft all the code]

          Today the community celebrates KEDA 1.0, an open source project aimed at providing event-driven scale capabilities for container workloads. Introduced earlier this year, Red Hat is contributing to KEDA both via the upstream project and by bringing its utility to customers using enterprise Kubernetes and containers with Red Hat OpenShift. We celebrate this milestone with Microsoft and the wider community.

        • We're all on a journey to cloud-native adoption together

          The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is hosting its core conference for the fifth year running. It’s official title is KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, but it’s most importantly the home for Kubernetes. Adopters, contributors, and Kubernetes-curious attendees add up to a record-breaking 12,000 people.

          I attended to cover the show for our community (full disclosure: my ticket was provided as an industry analyst). Here’s what I heard on day 1.

        • Container reality checks and more industry trends

          As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

          [...]

          The impact: Another container reality check that also drives home why going through the trouble of standards can be worth it in the long run.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • man-pages-5.04 is released

        I've released man-pages-5.04. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

        This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from 15 contributors. The release includes approximately 80 commits that change just under 30 pages.

      • Google outlines plans for mainline Linux kernel support in Android

        This is an extremely long journey that results in every device shipping millions of lines of out-of-tree kernel code. Every shipping device kernel is different and device specific—basically no device kernel from one phone will work on another phone. The mainline kernel version for a device is locked in at the beginning of an SoC's initial development, so it's typical for a brand-new device to ship with a Linux kernel that is two years old. Even Google's latest and, uh, greatest device, the Pixel 4, shipped in October 2019 with Linux kernel 4.14, an LTS release from November 2017. It will be stuck on kernel 4.14 forever, too. Android devices do not get kernel updates, probably thanks to the incredible amount of work needed to produce just a single device kernel, and the chain of companies that would need to cooperate to do it. Thanks to kernel updates never happening, this means every new release of Android usually has to support the last three years of LTS kernel releases (the minimum for Android 10 is 4.9, a 2016 release). Google's commitments to support older versions of Android with security patches means the company is still supporting kernel 3.18, which is five years old now. Google's band-aid solution for this so far has been to team up with the Linux community and support mainline Linux LTS releases for longer, and they're now up to six years of support.

        Last year, at Linux Plumbers Conference 2018, Google announced its initial investigation into bringing the Android kernel closer to mainline Linux. This year it shared a bit more detail on its progress so far, but it's definitely still a work in progress. "Today, we don't know what it takes to be added to the kernel to run on a [specific] Android device," Android Kernel Team lead Sandeep Patil told the group at LPC 2019. "We know what it takes to run Android but not necessarily on any given hardware. So our goal is to basically find all of that out, then upstream it and try to be as close to mainline as possible."

      • Graphics Stack

        • Intel's Graphics Driver DoS Fix Last Week Has Hurt Power Consumption

          While the patches overnight about "substantial" improvement in power usage for Intel graphics on Linux were exciting on first look, it's less so now as it turns out last week's graphics driver security fixes is what regressed the Intel graphics power-savings.

          During last Tuesday's round of Intel security disclosures where there was a fix for denial of service in the Intel graphics driver, it turns out that the CVE-2019-0154 fix is what regressed power usage. The potential Denial of Service vulnerability was about unprivileged users being able to cause a DoS by reading select memory regions when the graphics hardware is in certain low-power states.

        • vkBasalt 0.2 Released With SMAA, Other Vulkan Post Processing Layer Enhancements

          The open-source vkBasalt project was started as a layer implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (akin to Radeon Image Sharpening) for any Vulkan-using GPU/driver/software. The vkBasalt project then picked up FXAA support for this Vulkan post-processing layer while now a new release is out with more functionality added.

          The vkBasalt 0.2 release is out today and adds support for enhanced sub-pixel morphological anti-aliasing (SMAA) for higher-quality anti-aliasing than FXAA. SMAA is an image-based implementation of MLAA. This release also allows for multiple visual effects to be activated at once where as previously only any one of these image enhancing features could be active at a time.

        • Flax Engine Ported To Linux + Vulkan Rendering Support

          Flax Engine is the latest game engine seeing native Linux support and in the process the renderer also picked up Vulkan support.

          Flax Engine is a lesser known game engine that now works on Linux alongside Windows and Xbox One. After two years in development, the open beta release of Flax is expected soon.

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Haswell To Ice Lake Laptop Performance Benchmarks On Ubuntu 19.10

        With the many Intel Ice Lake Linux benchmarks we began publishing over the past month since picking up a Dell XPS with Core i7-1065G7, there have been many benchmarks compared to the likes of the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. For those curious how the performance stacks up going further back, here are some Ubuntu 19.10 laptop benchmarks putting it up against the likes of Core i7 Haswell and Broadwell processors.

        This article offers a look at the Ubuntu 19.10 + Linux 5.3 performance on six different laptops including the Dell XPS 7390 Ice Lake laptop and various other laptops I had available for testing.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The sad case of Trine on Mesa and Linux in 2019

        A year or so back I was planning on writing a congratulatory article to show my appreciation to Dave Airlie for fixing a long standing bug in Mesa that prevented users of older AMD Radeon HD cards from enjoying Trine Enchanted Edition on the free graphics stack. Bug 91808 resulted in a variety of graphical artifacts which, while not interfering with the gameplay, still put me off using that version of Trine.

        After several years and a great deal of evident frustration on his part, Airlie was able to track down the root of the problem and at long last was able to push a fix to master in May 2018. Airlie and developers like him are often the unsung heroes of FOSS development, and I wanted to give him a well deserved public pat on the back for his effort in fixing a bug which would only have affected such a small number of people.

        Unfortunately my research into this led me down an entirely different rabbit hole when I discovered the report for Bug 66067. A much more subtle misrendering of the game's colours and lighting, this bug is present in both Trine 2 and Trine Enchanted Edition and affects all Mesa users. Unlike the previous instance where it was an issue in the drivers that was the culprit, this issue is present in the game binaries themselves.

      • Google Stadia is out now for early adopters, well a few anyway

        Today, the Google Stadia streaming service officially launched for those who picked up the Founder or Premier Edition.

        Well, sort of anyway. Some people have it, a lot of people don't, we certainly don't and it appears the team at Stadia give different answers to different people on when you will actually be able to access it. I've also seen plenty of people whose orders have been cancelled without warning or explanation. Even worse still, some people have been sent their hardware without an access code. Google have, so far, done a terrible job at communicating on Stadia and so the initial launch doesn't seem to have gone down well at all.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Refactoring the Length type

          Over a couple of years, librsvg's type that represents CSS lengths went from a C representation along the lines of "all data in the world is an int", to a Rust representation that uses some interesting type trickery:

          C struct with char for units.

          C struct with a LengthUnits enum.

          C struct without an embodied direction; each place that needs to normalize needs to get the orientation right.

          C struct with a built-in direction as an extra field, done at initialization time.

          Same struct but in Rust.

          An ugly but workable Parse trait so that the direction can be set at parse/initialization time.

          Three newtypes LengthHorizontal, LengthVertical, LengthBoth with a common core. A cleaned-up Parse trait. A macro to generate those newtypes.

          Replace the LengthDir enum with an Orientation trait, and three zero-sized types Horizontal/Vertical/Both that implement the trait.

          Replace most of the macro with a helper trait LengthTrait that has an Orientation associated type.

          Replace the helper trait with a single Length<T: Orientation> type, which puts the orientation as a generic parameter. The macro disappears and there is a single implementation for everything.

          Refactoring never ends!

        • Some intricacies of ABI stability

          As far as I know, there is no known real-world solution to this problem that would scale to a full operating system (i.e. all of Debian, FreeBSD or the like). If there are any university professors reading this needing problems for your grad students, this could be one of them. The problem itself is fairly simple to formulate: make it possible to run two different, ABI incompatible C++ standard libraries within one process. The solution will probably require changes in the compiler, linker and runtime loader. For example, you might extend symbol resolution rules so that they are not global, but instead symbols from, say library bar would first be looked up in its direct descendents (in this case only abi2) and only after that in other parts of the tree.

          To get you started, here is one potential solution I came up with while writing this post. I have no idea if it actually works, but I could not come up with an obvious thing that would break. I sadly don't have the time or know-how to implement this, but hopefully someone else has.

    • Distributions

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • SUSE and the IO500 @ SC19

          Back in June we announced our first set of IO500 benchmarks. Since then, we’ve upgraded SUSE Enterprise Storage to version 6, which is based on Ceph Nautilus. This alone brought some performance improvements over the prior release, especially in terms of metadata and small I/O performance. Add to this the change in the underlying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version to 15 SP1 where we have a newer kernel, and the outcome is some dramatically improved performance. With just these two, we were able to increase our score by a few points.

      • Debian Family

        • Debian Adds Another Option For Its Init System Diversity General Resolution

          A few days ago Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman laid out the proposals for the upcoming Debian General Resolution vote concerning "init system diversity" and just how much Debian developers still care in 2019 about supporting non-systemd init systems within the Linux distribution.

          The general resolution over init systems and systemd had three proposals: affirming init diversity, systemd but supporting the exploration of alternatives, and focusing upon systemd for the init system and its other facilities. Now though Debian Project Secretary Kurt Roeckx has relayed a fourth proposal.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • 3 emerging open source projects to keep an eye on

        The exciting thing about open source is that nobody needs permission to try something new. That's a formula that allows new ideas to emerge all the time.

        Here are three open source projects that are still in their early stages but show real promise.

        This Linux is utterly unapologetic in catering to technology hobbyists, enthusiasts, and power users. It's for the amateurs, in that best and most original sense of the word—those who love what they do. Awesome. So isn't Endeavour the perfect name?

        If what you want is to roll your sleeves up and level up while still enjoying a gentle start and a friendly community, this could be a great way to go about it.

      • Why AI Should Be Our Ally, Not Our Enemy

        Community-driven open source projects are at the forefront of innovation of virtually every leading technology trend. The fields of AI, ML, deep learning, predictive analysis, and neural networks are no exception.

        It’s also worth noting that HPC is a vital element for successfully delivering AI and ML. Both rely on high levels of compute capacity for fast analysis of huge datasets – and Linux is at the heart of all the top-performing HPC solutions. Just this week, the latest TOP500 list of supercomputers was released. It was no surprise to see that, yet again, every one of the world’s fastest computers run on Linux.

      • Events

        • Nick Richards: Linux Application Summit 2019

          It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud, an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is Rob’s talk on how Flathub would like to help more developers earn money from their work; Adrien on GTK and scalable UIs for phones; Robin on tone of voice and copywriting; Emel on Product Management in the context of GNOME Recipes and Paul Brown on direct language and better communication. There were also great lightning talks including a starring turn by one of my former colleagues Martin Abente Lahaye who showed off the work he’s been doing to make the Sugar educational applications more widely available with Flatpak. After a bit of review and some polish in the cafe they’re now starting to appear on Flathub. All of these videos are available to watch in the YouTube livestream playback, and I’m sure individually soon when appropriately processed.

          I gave a talk entitled Product Management In Open Source. Astute readers will recognise the title from the similar talk I gave last year at GUADEC, however the content is actually fairly different. Emel’s talk that I mentioned above covered quite a lot of the basic material so I concentrated more on how individual app developers could use Product Management techniques to make their own practice a bit more deliberate and help them guide and prioritize their work.

        • Collabora sponsoring LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara

          On November 13 more than 120 students in Ankara Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus joined the first session of the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, a course for students with interest in C++. There is a session every week, until the end of the semester.

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • GitHub Aims to Make Open Source Code Apocalypse-Proof in Arctic Vault

          One of the big risks with this plan is that code depends on a whole software stack: hardware, assembly language, and a certain form of electricity. The chips that code runs on are really incredibly complex, noted Skymind's Nicholson.

          "You would need all that underlying infrastructure to run the code GitHub stores. I hope GitHub will also include some model hardware in its vault. It would be too much to ask to include a fab," he said.

          For technology's survival, open source stands out for two reasons:

          First, you can increase the positive feedback loops between the people who write code and those who use it. That leads to much better code quality compared to closed-source projects with limited users looking over the source.

          "The importance of that cannot be understated," said Nicholson.

          Second, open source code minimizes legal risk. That is also extremely important, he added, noting that some great closed-source code probably should go into the vault.

          "But why risk a lawsuit?" Nicholson reasoned. "Open source code really is moving society forward in a lot of ways, based on the work of a few dedicated teams and a relatively small number of core committers."

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • Come together for free software

          Here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), we strongly believe that one person can make a difference. Our main task, as the principal organization in the fight for user freedom, is one of connection; to bring people together around an unwavering set of principles. We will achieve global software freedom by staying the course, by focusing on education, and by making tools and solutions available, all by working together with this passionate and diverse community.

        • GNU Health patchset 3.6.1 released !

          GNU Health 3.6.1 patchset has been released !

      • Programming/Development

        • PyCharm 2019.2.5

          A new version for PyCharm 2019.2 is now available!

        • PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #395 (Nov. 19, 2019)
        • How to do SQL Select and Where Using Python Pandas
        • Threading in Python

          Python threading allows you to have different parts of your program run concurrently and can simplify your design. If you’ve got some experience in Python and want to speed up your program using threads, then this course is for you!

        • Using cURL in Python with PycURL

          In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use PycURL, which is an interface to the cURL library in Python. cURL is a tool used for transferring data to and from a server and for making various types of data requests. PycURL is great for testing REST APIs, downloading files, and so on. Some developers prefer using Postman for testing APIs but PycURL is another suitable option to do so as it supports multiple protocols like FILE, FTPS, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, SCP, SMB, etc. Moreover, PycURL comes in handy when a lot of concurrent, fast, and reliable connections are required.

          As mentioned above, PycURL is an interface to the libcURL library in Python; therefore PycURL inherits all the capabilities of libcURL. PycURL is extremely fast (it is known to be much faster than Requests, which is a Python library for HTTP requests), has multiprotocol support, and also contains sockets for supporting network operations.

        • Faster Winter 3: Difference Lists

          Today, we will tackle the big bad memory leak that eats up my laptop’s memory.

          A quick look at the heap profile (+RTS -h) showed that the memory was filling up with lists. Not very helpful, as lists are everywhere. So I looked through the hot code of the interpreter, eval, step and instr in Wasm.Exec.Eval to see if anything fishy is going on. I found some uses of the list concatenation operator (++) – always a bad sign, as it has to traverse the list on its left completely!

          And often the solution is pretty simple: Use difference lists! It’s even simpler than the name makes it sound like. It does not require you to import anything new, and works well everywhere where you assemble a list in multiple stages, but use it, in its full form, only once at the end.

        • Fabric-licious Raspberry Pi projects - Raspberry Pi

          I’m currently (re)learning how to knit. Here are some textile-themed Raspberry Pi projects for the yarn-curious.

        • [ Perl | Raku | The ] Weekly Challenge - 2020

          It has been wonderful journey so far in the year 2019. When I started the journey in March, I didn’t know it would take this shape. All credit goes to the support of Perl/Raku community in general. It would be unfair if I pick few names. You know who I am talking about anyway. Let me share the story with you all.

  • Leftovers

    • Google Shakes Up Its 'TGIF'—and Ends Its Culture of Openness

      Pichai cited decreased attendance rates, the difficulty of running a real-time gathering across time zones, and an uptick in meetings among big product groups like Cloud or YouTube. His most resonant reason, however, was that Google employees could no longer be trusted to keep matters confidential. He cited “a coordinated effort to share our conversations outside of the company after every TGIF ... it has affected our ability to use TGIF as a forum for candid conversations on important topics.” He also noted that while many want to hear about product launches and business strategies, some attend to “hear answers on other topics.” It seems obvious he was referring to recent moments when aggrieved employees registered objections to Google’s policies and missteps—on developing a search engine for China, bestowing millions of dollars to executives charged with sexual misconduct, or hiring a former Homeland Security apparatchik. Pichai says Google may address such issues in specific town-hall meetings when warranted.

    • Health/Nutrition

      • Judge throws out most of state’s civil case against Flint water consultants

        In an opinion dated Nov. 8, Chief Judge Richard Yuille dismissed claims of professional negligence, negligence, public nuisance, fraud and a request from the state for exemplary damages -- leaving only a claim of unjust enrichment in the case against Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newnam.

      • Judge dismisses state's negligence, fraud claims against Flint water consultants

        Initially filed by Republican then-Attorney General Bill Schuette, the case against Veolia and LAN is the only civil case initiated by the state on behalf of Flint residents in the wake of the water crisis. When Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel took over the case, she said the engineering firms allegedly played “a seminal role” in the Flint water crisis and chided the companies for “denying and shifting responsibility” in recent court filings.

      • Lead-tainted water: How to keep homes, schools, daycares and workplaces safe

        Scientists have found that lead — a metal so toxic that the World Health Organization said, “there is no safe level” — elevates the risk for various health problems. A pregnant woman who has too much lead in her blood is more likely to deliver her baby preterm. Minute amounts of lead diminishes a child’s ability to learn. An uptick in a man’s lead exposure reduces his fertility.

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availabilitiy)

      • Official Monero website compromised with malware that steals funds

        Official Linux CLI binary for the Monero cryptocurrency compromised with malware that steals users' funds.

      • New ACBackdoor Malware Targeting Both Linux and Windows Systems [Ed: This relies on a system already being compromised]

        They had more success with the Windows variant of the malware, however.

      • Meet ACbackdoor malware targeting Linux and Windows devices [Ed: They call it "backdoor" but it targets machines that are already compromised some other way]

        Furthermore, the Linux variant comes across as more complex with extra capabilities such as process renaming. This is also evident through a search of the Linux binary on VirusTotal where it is detected by only one anti-malware scanning engine whereas the Windows version yielded a significantly higher detection rate of 37/70.

      • US student was allegedly building a custom Gentoo Linux distro for ISIS [Ed: ZDNet -- the CBS tabloid -- now associating "Linux" with terrorism. And it was composed by their biggest troll, Catalin Cimpanu. Fact: most terrorists use Microsoft Windows. Shall we deduce Windows is the "operating system of terrorists"?]
      • Servers Running Linux May Get Riskier for Enterprises Next Year [Ed: GNU/Linux FUD to increase next year. Or this year. Say people who sell security as a product]

        Enterprises using Linux for their cloud or data center servers may be faced with a larger threat from advanced security attackers in the near future. Based on the Linux Foundation’s estimates back in 2014, 75% of enterprises reported using Linux for the cloud and 79% for application deployments.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Man jailed for 10 years for plotting ‘terrorist attack’ on Geert Wilders

        Junaid I., a 27-year-old Pakistani national, travelled to the Netherlands in August last year after Wilders announced a competition for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. In the video, recorded in Urdu, I. pledged to do everything in his power to stop ‘the dog’ Wilders.

      • Man sentenced to 10 years in jail for plotting assassination of Dutch politician

        A 27-year-old Pakistani, Junaid I., was sentenced on Monday to 10 years in jail for plotting to assassinate Dutch politician Geert Wilders, leader of the right-wing populist PVV party.

      • Erdogan: “Our God commands us to be violent to the kuffar”

        On October 25, a leader of a NATO member nation openly incited violence against non-Muslims.

        On that day, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended the Friday prayers at the Great Çamlıca Mosque in Istanbul. He was accompanied by Istanbul’s governor Ali Yerlikaya, mayor Ekrem Ä°mamoÄŸlu, Istanbul’s chief of police Mustafa Çalışkan and the head of the Istanbul branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Bayram Åženocak.

        After the prayers, the hafiz of the mosque recited the Koranic Verse Al-Fath, which means “victory, triumph, conquest” in English. Then Erdogan took the microphone, reciting a part of the verse in Arabic and then in Turkish. He told the congregants:

        “Our God commands us to be violent towards the kuffar (infidels). Who are we? The ummah [nation] of Mohammed. So [God] also commands us to be merciful to each other. So we will be merciful to each other. And we will be violent to the kuffar. Like in Syria.”

    • Environment

      • Tribe to argue against expansion of Dakota Access pipeline

        North Dakota regulators will hold a hearing in Linton, a town of 1,000 along the pipeline’s path. The Public Service Commission will take comments from tribe members and other pipeline opponents in the community near where a pump station would be placed to increase the line’s capacity from 600,000 barrels per day to as much as 1.1 million barrels. A barrel is 42 gallons.

      • Oil pipeline dividing Michigan Democrats, unions ahead of 2020

        The disagreement is over Enbridge's plans to construct a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac to replace its Line 5 oil pipelines and attempt to prevent any catastrophe from a potential rupture.

        Environmentalists have opposed plans for the tunnel and want the line decommissioned as soon as possible, but some labor groups want the tunnel built. In the middle are Democratic lawmakers who usually have support from both sets of interests.

      • Minnesota attorney general supports Michigan suit to shut down Enbridge pipeline

        In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week with Wisconsin Attorney General Joshua Kaul and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, they argue that state law, not federal, controls the routing of pipelines.

        Ellison said in a statement that he joined the brief to support Michigan “in protecting its right to control its underwater land against the federal government’s attempt to pre-empt it. The people of Michigan, who share the Great Lakes with us, have as much of a right to control their underwater land as the people of Minnesota do. By supporting Michigan, I’m protecting Minnesotans.”

      • Opinion: Enbridge is not working to protect Michigan waters

        Enbridge Energy, which owns and operates the decaying Line 5 oil pipelines that cross in the Straits of Mackinac, has tried to buy its way into this Great Lakes-proud storyline with extensive lobbying and an aggressive statewide ad campaign.

        At the same time, Enbridge has been pursuing a scorched-earth strategy in the courts, trying to force the hand of state government to bless continued operation of its pipelines for another decade while an underwater tunnel is built — instead of sitting down and negotiating with Gov. Whitmer on a timeline to decommission Line 5 and address the real risk to Michigan’s waters and its people.

      • Amazon Rainforest Sees Biggest Spike In Deforestation In Over A Decade

        The country's National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, released data Monday revealing that 3,769 square miles of rainforest were lost to deforestation in a 12-month period ending in July. That marks the highest rate of deforestation since 2008 — and a nearly 30% spike over the rate recorded by INPE during the previous yearlong span.

      • After Venice Floods, Volunteers Wade In To Help Salvage What They Can

        "Nobody was ready for that. But at the end of the situation, well, I think we are all feeling pretty lucky because a lot of young people came here in Venice to take care of us and help us. They helped them a lot," she says.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Software Patents

          • IBM and Microsoft and Linux Foundation to fight patent trolls with 'multi-million' scheme

            IBM, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have partnered with the Open Invention Network, a company formed to protect Linux from patent threats, to take on "Patent Assertion Entities", also known as patent trolls.

            Specifically, the group will help fund the Open Source Zone of Unified Patents, an organisation which provides legal services to deter "unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions."

            The move had already been flagged, at the Open Source Summit in Lyon last month, but the identity of the participating companies was not then known. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt spoke to The Register about the announcement. Although we have had a Linux-friendly Microsoft for a few years now, Bergelt, a veteran of patent battles against Microsoft, is by the sound of it still coming to terms with how things have changed.

          • Open Invention Network Joins Forces With IBM, Linux Foundation And Microsoft

            Open Invention Network (OIN) is teaming up with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.

            The group will support Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone with a substantial annual subscription. This expands OIN’s and its partners’ patent non-aggression activities by deterring PAEs from targeting Linux and adjacent OSS technologies relied on by developers, distributors and users.

      • Copyrights

        • Pirate IPTV: Spanish Police Target €1m Supplier, 12 People Arrested

          Spain's National Police says it has dismantled a pirate IPTV operation worth an estimated €1 million to its operators. A police video shows raids on various locations which resulted in the arrest of 12 individuals, four said to have captured signals with eight more acting as resellers of the service.

        • Karl Pilkington Shares a Pirated Copy of His Own TV-Show

          The second season of the sitcom "Sick of It" will soon air on the British TV-channel Sky One. This prompted co-writer and actor Karl Pilkington to share an episode of the first season with over a million Facebook fans. A kind gesture, but since the video was indirectly sourced from a pirate group, perhaps not one that everyone will appreciate.



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