Crikey, folks: it’s December, and that means Christmas is shortly to be thrust upon us, whether we’re ready or not!
It can be tricky to come up with gift ideas for Linux users in your life. And since you’ve probably got more than enough turkey on your plate this holiday season — ho, ho, ho — we thought we’d be swell and save you from getting snowed under trying to find something to buy.
Or to put it in a less breathy sentence: we’ve got some top Linux gift ideas to help make festive shopping a little easier this season.
Last month I shared that Linux tests of the 2016 MacBook Pro would be coming and now I've finally managed to complete a few, but I highly encourage you not to get the new MacBook Pro if you plan on using anything other than macOS as the experience is a wreck. This is one laptop I don't mind seeing returned!
Oracle might be pulling the plug on the Solaris operating system, at least according to some new rumors.
It's easy to think of containers and VMs as a binary choice -- deciding whether to use a VM or a container (not both) for your use case. In his keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Brandon Philips, CTO at CoreOS, talked about a case study for using VMs and containers together to take advantage of the strengths of both.
Is it ever too early for a Year in Review column? Didn’t think so. For this attempt, let’s take a look at the exciting trends in network virtualization (NV), as a mixture of open and proprietary technologies battle to be the cloud networking foundation of the future.
On the competitive front, we took a detailed look at the market in our “Future of Network Virtualization and SDN Controllers Report,” released in September. The market continues to grow, with a dynamic mixture of NV incumbents and startups gaining market traction.
Docker and Canonical on Wednesday announced a commercial agreement to integrate support for Docker Engine. The partnership gives Canonical customers a single path for support of the Ubuntu operating system and CS Docker Engine in enterprise Docker operations. It provides a streamlined operations and support experience for joint customers by splitting the service obligations in four ways. First, Docker will publish and update stable snap installation packages on Ubuntu, which will enable direct access to the Docker build for all Ubuntu users.
Mirantis, focused on the OpenStack cloud computing platform and ecosystem, has expanded its OpenStack training efforts in big ways over the past couple of years. But cloud deployments are increasingly becoming integrated with container technologies, and now Mirantis is expanding its training scope in recognition of that fact.
After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.8.12, renowned kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman informed us about the availability of the thirty-sixth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
The Linux 4.4 LTS branch is currently used in various long-term supported operating systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Linux Mint 18 "Sarah," as well as the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" release, and in rock-solid and widely-used server-oriented GNU/Linux distributions like Alpine Linux. Linux kernel 4.4.36 LTS is here to change a total of 32 files, with 236 insertions and only 94 deletions.
A few moments ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the twelfth maintenance update of the Linux 4.8 kernel series, as well as the availability of Linux kernel 4.4.36 LTS.
Earlier this week I wrote about a release schedule coming out for Mesa 13.1 that culminates with this next big Mesa update being out in February. Some Mesa developers have now shared the work they still hope to see in this next release.
Rob Clark has landed his code for supporting EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync in Mesa and his Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first in-tree Mesa/Gallium3D driver to support the native fence FD support, even beating out the Intel driver.
A set of 27 patches published this week for GBM and the Intel Mesa driver provide for significant bandwidth savings.
Intel's Ben Widawsky published the set of patches enabling renderbuffer decompression for the i965 driver plus the necessary GBM modifications. With these patches there is the potential for massive bandwidth savings. Results shared by Widawsky on a Skylake GT4 GPU show the compression dropping the read bandwidth from 603 MiB/s to 259 MiB/s and the write bandwidth dropping from 615 MiB/s to 337 MiB/s, when using a modified version of kmscube for testing.
The Khronos Group made a brief announcement on Thursday, stating popular PC gaming peripheral maker Razer is now a Contributor Member. The Khronos Group is the non-profit consortium behind the new open-source Vulkan Application Programming Interface (API) that is becoming more commonly used in PC gaming. It’s an alternative to the long-used DirectX and OpenGL graphics APIs.
Razer joining The Khronos Group looks to be a VR/AR play, but will hopefully help further push Vulkan and other Khronos standards to gamers. The brief announcement at Khronos.org reads in part, "...Razer co-founded OSVR, an open-source platform that integrates VR, AR and mixed reality hardware and software APIs that support a universal VR ecosystem."
Razer has been a big proponent of Open-Source development for a while now, with its biggest push for open standards coming from OSVR, an open-source virtual reality initiative founded by Razer and supported by quite a few studios. Now, Razer is getting involved with open-source graphics technology by joining the Khronos Group, which maintains Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL.
With today's PHP 7.1 release, performance isn't highlighted as much as language improvements to this first major update to PHP7, but I decided to run some PHP 7.1, PHP 7.0, PHP 5.6, PHP 5.5, and HHVM benchmarks of our open-source Phoronix Test Suite code-base.
These self-tests of the Phoronix Test Suite aren't the conventional PHP workload of just a CMS, blog, or other web application that can be cached, etc, but effectively of a PHP CLI application. So keep this in mind when looking at the results and that your mileage may vary depending upon use-case.
When benchmarking Intel's Clear Linux distribution earlier this year we found its Intel graphics performance to be quite good and slightly faster than other Linux distributions even when Clear was using an older version of Mesa. Now with Clear Linux having switched to Mesa 13, I decided to run some fresh Intel OpenGL benchmarks on it compared to other distributions.
One of the world's best open-source and cross-platform DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software, Ardour, has been updated to version 5.5 on the first day of December 2016, as announced by developer Paul Davis.
Ardour 5.5 comes exactly two months after the 5.4 release, and it's now considered the most stable and advanced version, further sustaining its position as a mature Digital Audio Workstation application that can be successfully used for amateur and professional music making.
Neofetch 2.0 has been released, and is available to install on Ubuntu. The CLI system info tool adds bug fixes, cleaner code, and improved ASCII handling.
Astervoid 2000 [Steam, Official Site] was sent in by the developer and I've been testing out this multiplayerââ¬â¹ space brawler to see if it's worthy. It's surprisingly great actually! Mixing some lovely pixel art with sick tunes makes for an explosive experience.
I'm surprised by this one, as it has a single-player wave-based survival mode, as well as the multiplayer mode. In the single-player you are facing off against others on the high-score board as well and I've managed to hone my skills enough to get to #18.
It seems Topware Interactive are continuing their Linux push with their classic games and I've noticed a few more that seem to be coming.
The game was funded on Kickstarter where it was given $18,708 towards development. Linux was a stretch goal, but it was set at $15,000 so they gathered well over what they requested for a Linux version.
On the last day of November 2016, Valve pushed the SteamOS brewmaster update 2.98 to the brewmaster_beta channel for public testing, addressing a regression with some Intel Wi-Fi adapters.
With the start of the new month comes updated statistics from Valve with their Steam Survey.
For November 2016, the Steam Survey shows Linux with a 0.88% marketshare, or a decrease of 0.01%. Ubuntu 16.10 gained ground while the other popular Linux distributions saw no change to slight drops. Steam meanwhile saw 95.4% of users on Windows and 3.59% on macOS.
The fourth maintenance update to the Enlightenment DR 0.21 stable series of the lightweight, modern, and open-source window manager and desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions has been released on the last day of November 2016.
As expected, Enlightenment 0.21.4 is a bugfix release that addresses numerous of the issues reported by users since the previous maintenance update, namely Enlightenment 0.21.3, which was released more than a month and a half ago, in an attempt to further improve the overall stability of the desktop environment.
"This is another bugfix and stability release for the Enlightenment 21 Release series. It addresses a number of issues as listed below. While there has been many changes since the last release most changes are related to Bryce and Wayland as such they won't affect most users," said Simon Lees in the release announcement.
A new maintenance version of the GNOME Software package manager has been released on the first day of December 2016, versioned 3.22.3, for the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.
We (the gtkmm developers) have started work on an ABI-breaking gtkmm-4.0, as well as an ABI-breaking glibmm, target GTK+ 4, and letting us clean up some cruft that has gathered over the years. These install in parallel with the existing gtkmm-3.0 and glibmm-2.4 APIs/ABIs.
Gtkmm, the project providing the de facto C++ interface for GTK+, is preparing for the GTK+ 4.0 era.
Gtkmm 3.89.1 was released today as the first release based against the GTK+ 4.0 development code and can be installed in parallel with gtkmm-3.0. Aside from basing against GTK 4.0, gtkmm now uses C++14, has removed deprecated APIs, and other changes. Gtkmm using C++14 succeeds its C++11 usage.
During November I finally took the leap and offered to become a maintainer of GJS. My employer Endless has been sponsoring work on bugs 742249 and 751252, porting GJS’s Javascript engine from SpiderMonkey 24 to SpiderMonkey 31. But aside from that I had been getting interested in contributing more to it, and outside of work I did a bunch of maintenance work modernizing the Autotools scripts and getting it to compile without warnings. From there it was a small step to officially volunteering.
During last weekend, I was very happy to attend the Core Apps Hackfest in Berlin. This is effectively the first hackfest I’ve ever been! Thanks Carlos for organizing that, thanks Kinvolk folks for hosting the event, and Collabora for sponsoring the dinner.
This event was a great chance to meet the maintainers in person and talk directly to the designers about doubts we have. Since Carlos already wrote down the list of tasks we worked on, I’m not going to repeat it. So here, I’ll report what I was able to work on.
I’ve been rather quiet recently working on new features for Builder. But we managed to just release Builder 3.22.3 which is full of bug fixes and a really new important feature. You can now meaningfully target flatpak when building your application. Matthew Leeds has done this outstanding work and it is really going to simplify how you contribute to GNOME applications going forward.
I’m really happy with the quality of this feature because it has shown me where our LibIDE design has done well, and where it has not. Of course, we will address that for 3.24 to help make some of the UI less confusing.
Refracta is a somewhat obscure Linux distribution that offers exceptional functionality and stability.
Obscurity is not always a bad thing when it comes to Linux distros. You can find some very worthwhile alternatives to your current operating system. Refracta is a big surprise in a small package.
Many look-alike desktop distros are difficult to distinguish from run-of-the-mill garden varieties. Others offer new adopters something unique that makes using them fun and productive.
Refracta is one of the few full-service Linux distros that makes an easy and more convenient replacement for pocket Linux options such as Puppy Linux. Not all Linux distros that install to a USB drive -- and have the ability to save files and system settings in a persistent mode -- work equally well.
This is a minor maintenance release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel. The release ships with the Linux kernel 4.4.34, which restores PAE support that "magically" disappeared in 4MLinux 20.0 (sorry :-). Additionally, some popular programs (Double Commander, Dropbox, Firefox, Java RE, Opera, PeaZip, Thunderbird, Wine) have been updated, too.
Both Manjaro i3 and Manjaro Cinnamon have now also been updated to 16.10.3.
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
Today is the first day of December 2016, which means that we can now download a new ISO respin image of the popular and lightweight Arch Linux operating system.
Today, December 1, 2016, openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio gladly informed the community of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system about the updated packages that landed in the repositories.
After releasing daily snapshots without interruption for 17 days, Tumbleweed did slow down a bit during the last week. As already mentioned in my last review, 1124 had been canceled due to an issue with sddm installing strange branding configurations. And later on, we ‘broke’ our own staging setup and needed to bootstrap a few of them, making the throughput much lower than you were used to. So, we ended up with 3 snapshots since my last review: 1125, 1128 and 1129.
November is over, Santa Claus elves start to stress and the YaST team brings you one of the last reports of 2016. Let’s see what’s new in YaSTland.
So starting today, some openSUSE Heroes started to spend the first December weekend in the SUSE Headquarter in Nuremberg. And they really have a lot to do, as you might imagine! That might be the reason why some of them started at 02:00 in the night to arrive at 07:00 in Nuremberg…
The number of corporate apologies has increased dramatically over the past decade. And for good reason: Failing to admit a mistake is one of the fastest ways a CEO can put themselves and their company’s reputation at risk. I’m not alone on this – 81 percent of Americans say a public apology from a CEO would be seen as a positive step during a crisis.
And yet, too many leaders still struggle to publicly acknowledge when they stumble. A 2013 study by Forum Corporation found that of the nearly 1,000 global leaders and employees surveyed, only 19% of employees said their bosses were willing to apologize for mistakes.
Two days back we had a very productive meeting in the Fedora Atomic Working Group. This post is a summary of the meeting. You can find all the open issues of the working group in this Pagure repo. There were 14 people present at the meeting, which happens on every Wednesday 5PM UTC at the #fedora-meeting-1 channel on Freenode IRC server.
Using Pagure and COPR, Tim Flink and I have settled on using common infrastructure to further the inclusion of Phabricator in to the Fedora repositories (and EPEL). I’m hoping this will bear fruit and get more people on board.
This month I marked 377 packages for accept and rejected 36 packages. I also sent 13 emails to maintainers asking questions.
Noevember 2016 was my third month as a Debian LTS team member. I was allocated 11 hours and had 1,75 hours left from October. This makes a total of 12,75 hours. In November I spent all 12,75 hours (and even a bit more) preparing security updates for spip, memcached and monit.
Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most software is distributed pre-compiled to end users.
The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to permit verification that no flaws have been introduced — either maliciously or accidentally — during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
If you don’t know the history of Devuan, here’s a summary.
Back when the developers of the Debian Linux distribution made the decision to go with systemd as the init system and service manager, a group of seasoned developers said, hell, no! They’d rather fork Debian than use systemd.
And that’s exactly what the Veteran Unix Admins did – forked Debian. The result of that is called Devuan.
The second beta of Devuan 1.0 Jessie is now available for download, testing and bug-reporting. So if you think there’s a place for a Linux distribution that does not use systemd, this is your opportunity to contribute. Details of this release and links to installation images are available here.
Mark Shuttleworth just blogged about their stance against unofficial Ubuntu images. The assertion is that a cloud hoster is providing unofficial and modified Ubuntu images, and that these images are meaningfully different from upstream Ubuntu in terms of their functionality and security. Users are attempting to make use of these images, are finding that they don't work properly and are assuming that Ubuntu is a shoddy product. This is an entirely legitimate concern, and if Canonical are acting to reduce user confusion then they should be commended for that.
The appropriate means to handle this kind of issue is trademark law. If someone claims that something is Ubuntu when it isn't, that's probably an infringement of the trademark and it's entirely reasonable for the trademark owner to take action to protect the value associated with their trademark. But Canonical's IP policy goes much further than that - it can be interpreted as meaning[1] that you can't distribute works based on Ubuntu without paying Canonical for the privilege, even if you call it something other than Ubuntu.
Ubuntu parent-company, Canonical, today posted that they've been in a dispute with "a European cloud provider" over their use of their own homespun version of Ubuntu on their cloud servers. Their implementation disables even the most basic of security features and Canonical is worried something bad could happen and it'd reflect badly back on them. The post read, "The home-grown images of this provider disable fundamental security mechanisms and modify the system in ways that are unsupportable. They are likely to behave unpredictably on update in weirdly creative and mysterious ways." They said they've spent months trying to get the unnamed provider to use the standard Ubuntu as delivered to other commercial operations to no avail. Canonical feels they have no choice but to "take legal steps to remove these images." They're sure Red Hat and Microsoft wouldn't be treated like this.
Ubuntu is amazing on the cloud because we work with cloud providers to ensure crisp, consistent and secure images which you can auto-update safely. On every major cloud—AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace, SoftLayer and many more—you can be confident that ‘Ubuntu’ is Ubuntu, with the same commitment to quality that you can expect when you install it yourself, and we can guarantee that to you because we require that clouds offer only certified Ubuntu images.
Mark Shuttleworth has written a new blog post where he's outlining a dispute Canonical is having with a European cloud provider over a breach of contract and "publishing insecure, broken images of Ubuntu" for its cloud customers.
With these Ubuntu Cloud unofficial images reportedly being buggy, users are complaining to Canonical/Ubuntu, assuming it's an upstream issue. Having enough of that, they are now preparing for legal steps to remove the unofficial Ubuntu images from the particular cloud provider.
A new version of MirAL is now available, the Ubuntu project for making it easier to develop new Mir servers by offering a stable ABI and other shared/common components.
The MirAL 0.5 release has some utility scripts for common tasks, improved the tiling window manager mode for miral-shell, more configuration options for the MirAL kiosk mode, and other bug fixes and enhancements.
Trisquel GNU/Linux 8.0 alpha is now available for download and testing. Based on Ubuntu 16.04, Trisquel 8.0 also ships with the MATE 1.12 desktop.
Well,Just months back Linux Mint 18 got it's release,now it is the time to have the next point release of Linux Mint 18.Just few hours ago Linux Mint team has announced the availability of Linux Mint 18.1 Beta. As Linux Mint users , who have already moved to Linux Mint 18, might be loving it for the newly introduced themes,look & feel and features(of course,they didn't go like updating only pre-installed packages :p ).So,in this time, coming from rainy to winter season,they have made a good list of new improvements,features and support.
A few moments ago, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the Beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena."
Feeling fatigued by Windows 10 and its constant updates and privacy concerns? Can't afford one of those beautiful new MacBook Pro laptops? Don't forget, Linux-based desktop operating systems are just a free download away, folks!
If you do decide to jump on the open source bandwagon, a good place to start is Linux Mint. Both the Mate and Cinnamon desktop environments should prove familiar to Windows converts, and since it is based on Ubuntu, there is a ton of compatible packages. Today, the first beta of Linux Mint 18.1 'Serena' becomes available for download.
If you’re fed up with Windows 10 and its hiccups, or you can’t afford the new MacBook Pro with fancy TouchBar, somewhere there’s a solid Linux system waiting for you. Linux Mint is often regarded as one of the best Linux desktop operating systems. Over the years, Mint has established itself as a competent Windows 10 replacement and its impressive releases continue to affirm this notion.
Earlier this year in June, we witnessed the release of Linux Mint 18 Sarah. Now, the second point release of Linux Mint 18, i.e., Mint 18.1 Serena, is just around the corner. It’s slated to arrive later this December.
Portwell’s 3.5-inch “PEB-2773” SBC features dual- or quad-core Atom E3900 SoCs, wide-range power, industrial temperature support, and six USB 3.0 ports.
Portwell’s PEB-2773 extends the 14nm-fabricated Atom E3900 (“Apollo Lake”) system-on-chips in the 3.5-inch SBC form factor. Other 3.5-inch Apollo Lake SBCs include Advantech’s MIO-5350 and PCM-9366, as well as Aaeon’s GENE-APL5 and Avalue’s ECM-APL and Litemax’s AECX-APL0.
E-Con’s Linux-ready “eSOMiMX6-micro” COM offers an i.MX6 SoC, optional WiFi/BT and GbE, and a 54 x 20mm footprint. Its “Meissa-I” carrier is only 80 x 40mm.
In 2014, we called the E-Con Systems eSOMiMX6 computer-on-module “tiny” because it used the 70 x 45mm “üQseven” form-factor to expand upon the i.MX6 SoC. Now E-Con has bested that with a eSOMiMX6-micro model that similarly supports NXP’s 800MHz, dual or quad-core i.MX6, but with an even smaller 54 x 20mm (1,080 sq. mm) footprint. This doesn’t quite match Variscite’s 50 x 20mm (1,000 sq. mm) DART-MX6, but it beats out others including Mistral’s 44 x 26mm (1,144 sq. mm) Nano SOM.
Jolla engineers have spent the past few weeks porting Sailfish OS to an Android smartwatch as they feel their Linux-based OS is particularly suited for small screens.
Jolla isn't announcing a Sailfish Watch product, but rather looking at it as part of their licensing strategy to offer their OS to smartwatch manufacturers. Joona Petrell shared that they had technical and design inspiration help off the Asteroid Smartwatch OS and their libHybris layer allowed them to quickly bring-up Sailfish and their UI on the Android smartwatch.
There are more and more devices around the home (and in many small offices) running a GNU/Linux-based firmware. Consider routers, entry-level NAS appliances, smart phones and home entertainment boxes.
The rugged, Linux-supported WinSystems “EPX-C414” is an EPIC SBC with an Atom E3800, mini-PCIe and PC/104 expansion, and industrial temperature support.
WinSystems, which recently announced an EBX-style EBC-C413 single board computer based on the Atom E3800, once again taps a Bay Trail Atom, this time for an industrial strength, EPIC form-factor EPX-C414. This upgrade for legacy EPIC environments offers customers modern accoutrements such as dual simultaneous displays, HD video, AES-NI cryptography, dual GbE ports, and dual full-size mini-PCIe slots in addition to old-school PC/104-Plus (ISA + PCI) expansion.
As part of its security measures, Samsung are using the SVACE technology (Security Vulnerabilities and Critical Errors Detector) to detect potential vulnerabilities and errors that might exist in source code of applications created for the Tizen Operating System (OS). This technology was developed by ISP RAS (Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences), who are based in Moscow, Russia.
Android, the world’s most used mobile operating system, is going through a step change. For years, its creator, Google, only made a small number of own-brand devices running it for developers and enthusiasts. That changed with the release of the Pixel.
The Pixel is Google’s first real attempt to challenge Apple and Samsung’s smartphone dominance, but it wasn’t made by the same team that makes Android.
The Android software platform lets smartphone builders everywhere create devices for every niche. If Apple's iPhone is the gold standard against which all other phones must be measured, it's also a one-size-fits-all strategy with just a handful of models on the market at any given time.
As a direct result of Android's open architecture, the platform is sweeping world markets. According to the latest IDC report, 87.6 percent of the 344.7 million smartphones that shipped in the second quarter of 2016 were equipped with Android software. Another 11.7 percent came with Apple's iOS, leaving less than 1 percent of the pie to share among Windows Phone and other challengers.
So how did Android become such a success? Let's have a look in the rear-view mirror.
A company set up by former Nokia employees called HMD Global has licensed the Nokia brand name from Microsoft, struck partnerships with device manufacturer Foxconn and intends to launch an Android smartphone in the early part of 2017.
The first Nokia-branded handsets running Android are due to arrive early next year. After announcing its plans to return to tablets and phones back in May, Nokia is providing more details today as it formalizes a licensing agreement with HMD Global (HMD). Also based in Finland, HMD global is the new home of Nokia phones under a brand licensing deal that will last for at least 10 years.
We are happy to announce OSS-Fuzz, a new Beta program developed over the past years with the Core Infrastructure Initiative community. This program will provide continuous fuzzing for select core open source software.
Open source software is the backbone of the many apps, sites, services, and networked things that make up “the internet.” It is important that the open source foundation be stable, secure, and reliable, as cracks and weaknesses impact all who build on it.
Google announced "OSS-Fuzz," a beta project that open source software projects can join to do "fuzz testing." Fuzz testing, or "fuzzing," is an automated testing technique that can uncover memory corruption bugs in software by generating random inputs to a given program.
The program, developed in conjunction with the "Core Infrastructure Initiative" community over the past few years, specifically targets open source projects that have a "large user base" and/or are "critical to Global IT infrastructure."
Google today is rolling out a public beta of OSS-Fuzz, their new program to provide continuous fuzzing of core open-source software code-bases.
Amazon Web Services has named Zaheda Bhorat, a booster of open source software with stints at Salesforce, Google and the U.K. Government Digital Service under her belt, to lead its open source strategy effort.
Open source software advantages are numerous: the product is being constantly improved by thousands of developers all across the world, a business owner can clearly see “what’s in the trunk” and adapt the product to his or her eCommerce store needs anytime.
Nevertheless, for those who consider eCommerce systems to be just a tool for selling their goods or services, open source products can be still suspicious. Read on to see how we dispel doubts about open source by examining concerns related to it.
The Node.js Foundation is set to oversee the Node.js Security Project in an effort to consolidate and improve security for the popular open-source application programming framework.
In a move that aims to help improve security vulnerability disclosure, the Node.js Security Project announced on November 30 that it is now officially becoming part of the Node.js Foundation. The move will help to improve the security of the open-source Node.js development framework and its modules, which are widely used in modern applications.
“DevOps isn’t any single person’s job — it’s everyone’s job.” What does DevOps mean for Atlassian and what shapes the company culture? How do departments support DevOps and what are the usual DevOps aspects that aren’t part of the company values? We invited Ian Buchanan, Developer Advocate, Integration Specialist for Atlassian’s DevOps Ecosystem to weigh in on Atlassian’s road to DevOps and to debunk some of the myths surrounding this movement.
Who is the market leader in IT monitoring? You won’t find the answer to that question in this article.
With a wide range of functionality being offered for multiple audiences, our priority is to provide clarity about who wants what. The New Stack is seeing two contradictory patterns. Many companies are trying to create a full stack of monitoring services, but there is also a desire to have a composable infrastructure.
We believe these trends will continue. The lines between infrastructure and application monitoring will continue to blur, but task-specific tools will gain prominence. Perhaps the biggest factor in how these changes unfold is the job roles of the people using the monitoring software.
In order to circumvent the regulations imposed by NHTSA on his aftermarket driver assist device, the ‘comma one’, George ‘geohot’ Hotz announced that his startup is releasing a new version of the product, ‘comma neo’ (an anagram for one), for free as an open-source platform.
On the first day of December, Gooogle decided that it's time for the popular Chrome web browser to get a new release, so it promoted Chrome 55 to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Today, I’m joining Mozilla’s Board. What attracts me to Mozilla is its people, mission and values. I’ve long admired Mozilla’s noble mission to ensure the internet is free, open and accessible to all. That Mozilla has organized itself in a radically transparent, massively distributed and crucially equitable way is a living example of its values in action and a testament to the integrity with which Mozillians have pursued that mission. They walk the talk. Similarly, having had the privilege of knowing a number of the leaders at Mozilla, their sincerity, character and competence are self-evident.
Today, we are very pleased to announce the latest addition to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors – Julie Hanna. Julie is the Executive Chairman for Kiva and a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship and we couldn’t be more excited to have her joining our Board.
We just released our State of Mozilla annual report for 2015. This report highlights key activities for Mozilla in 2015 and includes detailed financial documents.
The origin story of Martin Dougiamas, creator and CEO of Moodle, involves vast deserts, the Kalgoorlie School of the Air before the internet, the groundbreaking coming of the internet, and fireplaces.
Crop breeders in developing countries can now access free tools to accelerate the breeding of improved crops varieties, thanks to a collaboration between the GOBII project at Cornell University and the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), and the James Hutton Institute in Scotland.
A group of high school students in Sydney, Australia is having a moment of fame after announcing they were able to synthesize Daraprim—the anti-parasitic drug that went from $13.50 to $750 a pill last year, thanks to the infamous Martin Shkreli, ex-CEO of Turing pharmaceuticals.
According to headlines, the kids “show up” and “school” Martin Shkreli with their basic chemistry prowess. Forbes even went a violent route, saying the high schoolers “punch Martin Shkreli In the face, figuratively” with their science savvy. On Twitter, there even seemed to be a sincere question of whether the kids could actually compete with Daraprim on the market.
Sydney Grammar students, under the supervision of the University of Sydney and global members of the Open Source Malaria consortium, have reproduced an essential medicine in their high school laboratories.
Open source has become the programmers’ daily bread: Hardly a project that does not build upon publicly available code from open source projects, licensed such that use of the code (as is or modified) is permissible even for commercial endeavors. An increasingly popular web comic about a young witch called Pepper and her tomcat Carrot is developed as “open-source comic.” Open source in the arts?!?
A RISC-V chip is now available in the form of SiFive’s Freedom E310 (Fig. 1). The Freedom E310 is a microcontroller with a 32-bit RV32IMAC architecture. The RV32IMAC designation is an abbreviation for the standard RISC-V features including 32-bit support (RV32), integer support (I), hardware integer multiplication and division (M), atomic real-time instructions (A), and support for the 32-bit and compact (C) 16-bit instruction set. The chip has 16 32-bit registers and no hardware stack. As with many RISC systems, it uses a jump and link (JAL) instruction to save a return address in a register.
Today, we are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.0.3, the third bugfix and stabilization release for KDevelop 5.0. An upgrade to 5.0.3 is strongly recommended to all users of 5.0.0, 5.0.1 or 5.0.2.
Together with the source code, we again provide a prebuilt one-file-executable for 64-bit Linux, as well as binary installers for 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. You can find them on our download page.
The development behind the open-source and cross-platform KDevelop IDE (Integrated Development Environment) was proud to announce on the first day of December the availability of the third point release for KDevelop 5.0 stable series.
KDevelop 5.0.3 arrives one and a half months after the second maintenance update, but it's a small bugfix release that attempts to patch a total of nine issues reported by users since then. However, it's a recommended update for all users.
"We are happy to announce the release of KDevelop 5.0.3, the third bugfix and stabilization release for KDevelop 5.0. An upgrade to 5.0.3 is strongly recommended to all users of 5.0.0, 5.0.1 or 5.0.2," reads the release announcement.
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.1.0.
This first major update to last year's huge PHP 7.0 release builds several new features on top. Introduced by PHP 7.1 is nullable types, a void return type, a iterable pseudo-type, class constant visibility modifiers, support for catching multiple exception types, and many other language enhancements plus more performance optimizations and other work.
The Node.js Foundation is continuing its mission to make Node.js VM-neutral. The foundation announced major milestones toward allowing the solution to work in a wide variety of VMs at the Linux Foundation’s Node.js Interactive conference this week.
According to the foundation, VM-neutrality will allow Node.js to expand its ecosystem to more devices and workloads, such as the Internet of Things and mobile devices. Other benefits include developer productivity and standardized efforts.
ORACLE IS PROVIDING $1.4bn (around €£1.1bn) in direct, and what it calls ‘in-kind' support for European computer sciences and skills.
The cash is part of an $3.3bn kitty that applies worldwide and is designed to support digital literacy, something that we are often told is lacking.
Throwing a perfect strike in virtual bowling doesn't require your gaming system to precisely track the position and orientation of your swinging arm. But if you're operating a robotic forklift around a factory, manipulating a mechanical arm on an assembly line or guiding a remote-controlled laser scalpel inside a patient, the ability to pinpoint exactly where it is in three-dimensional (3-D) space is critical.
Mozilla moves quickly to fix vulnerability that was being actively exploited in attacks against Tor Browser, which is based on Firefox.
Late afternoon on November 30, Mozilla rushed out an emergency update for its open-source Firefox web browser, fixing a zero-day vulnerability that was being actively exploited by attackers. The vulnerability was used in attacks against the Tor web browser which is based on Firefox.
Security flaws found in 10 different types of medical implants could have "fatal" consequences, warn researchers.
The flaws were found in the radio-based communications used to update implants, including pacemakers, and read data from them.
By exploiting the flaws, the researchers were able to adjust settings and even switch off gadgets.
The attacks were also able to steal confidential data about patients and their health history.
A software patch has been created to help thwart any real-world attacks.
The flaws were found by an international team of security researchers based at the University of Leuven in Belgium and the University of Birmingham.
Lenovo server admins should disable Windows Update and apply a UEFI fix to avoid Microsoft’s November security patches freezing their systems.
The world’s third-largest server-maker advised the step after revealing that 19 configurations of its x M5 and M6 rack, as well as its x6 systems are susceptible.
More than 100,000 people in the UK have had their internet access cut after a string of service providers were hit by what is believed to be a coordinated cyber-attack, taking the number affected in Europe up to about a million.
TalkTalk, one of Britain’s biggest service providers, the Post Office and the Hull-based KCom were all affected by the malware known as the Mirai worm, which is spread via compromised computers.
The Post Office said 100,000 customers had experienced problems since the attack began on Sunday and KCom put its figure at about 10,000 customers since Saturday. TalkTalk confirmed that it had also been affected but declined to give a precise number of customers involved.
More than 900,000 customers of German ISP Deutsche Telekom (DT) were knocked offline this week after their Internet routers got infected by a new variant of a computer worm known as Mirai. The malware wriggled inside the routers via a newly discovered vulnerability in a feature that allows ISPs to remotely upgrade the firmware on the devices. But the new Mirai malware turns that feature off once it infests a device, complicating DT’s cleanup and restoration efforts.
“Welcome to the world of strategic analysis,” Ivan Selin used to tell his team during the Sixties, “where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist.” Selin, who would spend the following decades as a powerful behind-the-scenes player in the Washington mandarinate, was then the director of the Strategic Forces Division in the Pentagon’s Office of Systems Analysis. “I was a twenty-eight-year-old wiseass when I started saying that,” he told me, reminiscing about those days. “I thought the issues we were dealing with were so serious, they could use a little levity.”
That vague title leaves a lot open to interpretation. And if the internet has taught us anything, it's that interpretation is not the average person's strong suit ... or even their medium suit, for that matter. "Clash" suggests an equal meeting of force, and that's really not the case when one side has military hardware and the backing of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, and the other side ... well ... doesn't. Reading that headline makes the story sound identical to every other protest of the last 20 years. But thanks to sites like Twitter, "water protectors" with drones can put video of how that "clash" really looked in front of thousands of eyes...
The world’s most popular food and household companies are selling food, cosmetics and other everyday staples containing palm oil tainted by shocking human rights abuses in Indonesia, with children as young as eight working in hazardous conditions, said Amnesty International in a new report published today.
Choking haze caused by Indonesia's annual slash-and-burn forest fires affects millions of people. Wetter weather provided some relief in 2016, but tackling the fires properly will require monumental change
Global warming is beyond the “point of no return”, according to the lead scientist behind a ground-breaking climate change study.
The full impact of climate change has been underestimated because scientists haven't taken into account a major source of carbon in the environment.
Dr Thomas Crowther’s report has concluded that carbon emitted from soil was speeding up global warming.
The findings, which say temperatures will increase by 1C by 2050, are already being adopted by the United Nations.
Almost 3,500 individuals and companies in the Panama Papers are probable matches for suspected criminals including terrorists, cybercriminals and cigarette smugglers, according to a document seen by the Guardian.
The analysis, which was carried out by Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, sheds more light on the breadth of criminal behaviour facilitated by tax havens around the world.
“The main point here is that we can link companies from the Panama Papers leaks not only with economic crimes, like money laundering or VAT carousels, but also with terrorism and Russian organised crime groups,” Simon Riondet, head of financial intelligence at Europol, told a committee of MEPs.
Indonesia will seek a win-win outcome for the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with the European Union, having exchanged views on a number of crucial sticking points ahead of the next round of negotiations in January.
The EU and Indonesia began earnest talks on the free trade pact in September following the signing of scoping papers earlier in April.
Issues discussed in the negotiations include market access for trade in goods and services, customs and trade facilitation, sustainable development and dispute settlement.
The carefully calibrated “grand coalition” of Europe’s dominant political parties, which EU leaders have relied on to sustain their agenda and to manage a series of crises since 2014, this week imploded amid the collapse of a power-sharing deal in the European Parliament and the start of a bruising fight over the Parliament presidency.
The rupture cast a shadow of uncertainty over Brussels, raising the prospect of weeks of distraction and legislative paralysis, and leaving European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and European Council President Donald Tusk with little choice but to watch in dismay from the sidelines and brace for further turbulence.
Venice and Bilbao will remain the only Guggenheim museums in Europe for the foreseeable future after Helsinki finally buried a controversial plan for a striking new shrine to modern and contemporary art on the city’s waterfront.
After a stormy five-hour meeting lasting into the early hours of Thursday morning, city councillors voted by 53 to 32 to kill off the project, which had been fiercely contested in Finland since it was floated in 2011.
Helsinki’s deputy mayor, Ritva Viljanen, who had supported the plans for a €150m (€£126m) museum on a prime dockside site currently in use as a car park, said the project’s proponents would have to accept the decision.
“Democracy has spoken, and in no uncertain manner; there can be no ifs or buts,” Viljanen told YLE, the state broadcaster. She said she was sorry feelings about the project had run so high, with some backers receiving threats of violence.
Today, the Spanish newspaper “El Confidencial” reports on leaked documents revealing tax avoidance practices by football stars like Cristiano Ronaldo. Although residing in Madrid, Ronaldo has been invoicing most of his advertising revenues through an Irish company. With this manoeuvre, he has benefitted from a significantly lower tax rate on his earnings. While Spain taxes at 43.5%, Ireland only charges 12.5%. MEP Sven Giegold, financial and economic policy spokesperson of the Greens/EFA group, comments on the so-called “football leaks”...
There is nothing more important to our American way of life than our democracy. The lifeblood of this nation is the principle that each citizen’s vote is equal when it comes to choosing our president.
But in the age of computerized voting machines and unprecedented corporate influence in our elections, our electoral system is under increasing threat. How can every citizen’s voice be heard if we do not know if every citizen’s vote is counted correctly?
To help ensure it is, I have asked for a recount of the 2016 presidential election in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Our goal is not to change the result of the election. It is to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the vote. All Americans, regardless of party, deserve to know that this and every election is fair and that the vote is verified.
Did the outcome of voting for president in Wisconsin accurately reflect the intentions of the electors? Concerns have been raised about errors in vote counts produced using electronic technology — were machines hacked? — and a recount may occur.
Some reports involving statistical analysis of the results has been discussed in the media recently. These analyses, though, rely on data at the county level. Technology, demographics and other important characteristics of the electorate vary within counties, making it difficult to resolve conclusively whether voting technology (did voters cast paper or electronic ballots?) affected the final tabulation of the vote for president.
Leading US venture investor Chris Sacca is calling on Silicon Valley to stand up and defend the technology industry from President-elect Donald Trump, or risk an unpleasant future where technology no longer provides solutions, but instead hurts people and spies on them, as well as potentially destroying the planet.
"The hypocrisy is really risking what America stands for. I think the tech sector has to acknowledge that we're making this problem worse. We can't just be open source and say use [software, products and services] for whatever you want," Sacca, an early seed investor in Twitter, Uber, Instragram, Twilio and Kickstarter told the audience at the Slush 2016 tech conference in Helsinki, Finland.
A teenager from Washington state has become the seventh person to indicate that she will break ranks with party affiliation and become a “faithless elector” in an attempt to prevent Donald Trump being formally enshrined as president-elect when the electoral college meets on 19 December.
Levi Guerra, 19, from Vancouver, Washington, is set to announce that she is joining the ranks of the so-called “Hamilton electors” at a press conference at the state capitol in Olympia on Wednesday.
The renegade group believes it is the responsibility of the 538 electors who make up the electoral college to show moral courage in preventing demagogues and other threats to the nation from gaining the keys to the White House, as the founding fathers intended.
President-elect Donald Trump's lawyers have filed an objection to the recount in Michigan, delaying and potentially blocking a review that was slated to begin Friday.
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson (R) said that the state's Bureau of Elections received the objection from Trump representatives on Thursday, a day after Green Party nominee Jill Stein filed for a recount.
We have officially entered the post-fact American era. Donald J. Trump presidential surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes, known for being one of the most wack in Trump's pack, explicitly said on public radio's “The Diane Rehm Show” yesterday that lying is official Trump strategy.
On the heels of the most contentious presidential election in recent history, comes an equally contentious recount effort. Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who won only 1 percent of the popular vote, is now attracting far more media attention than her campaign ever did, after she launched a controversial effort to initiate recount proceedings in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—three states where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by roughly 1 percent.
How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines?
Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate.
This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.
Users and mods of /r/the_donald have tread a fine line between enthusiastic support for a political candidate and online abuse, which has caused all sorts of problems within Reddit. Following some serious internal drama that you probably don’t care about, Reddit is now “taking a more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit:” removing stickied /r/the_donald posts from Reddit’s main page.
THE METROPOLITAN POLICE SERVICE (MPS) has announced plans to store data gathered from its body-worn camera in Microsoft's newly-opened UK data centres.
The MPS is currently rolling out 22,000 body-worn cameras as part of a €£3.4m deployment that it claims will help reduce the time it takes to secure convictions by providing more clear-cut evidence of situations they attend.
The US surveillance state is poised to grow more powerful under a Trump administration.
Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain's new wide-ranging spying laws.
The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs.
In order to help advertisers target their consumers, Facebook maintains a platform that estimates its users’ interest in a wide range of topics.
Today December 1, the United States FBI is granted new powers to intrude into any computer anywhere on the globe, instantly changing the FBI from a random law enforcement agency to a global adversary. Law enforcement agencies are expected to be met with open arms and treated as good guys. There’s not going to be any good guy treatment of the FBI here, and for good reason.
The U.S. FBI has been sort of a random law enforcement agency somewhere on the planet doing physical law enforcement work, kind of like the Bundespolizei in Germany would appear to an American, or the way the Policía Federal Argentina would appear to a European. Today, the FBI becomes a global adversary and enemy to every security-conscious computer user and to every IT security professional, similar to how the mass surveillance agencies are treated. The FBI has requested, and been granted, the lawful power (in the US) to intrude into any computer in the entire world. In 95% of the world, this makes the FBI no different from a Russian or Chinese criminal intruder, and it will be treated in the same way by people defending their systems; defending their homes.
Wikileaks has released 2,420 documents from German government agencies relating to the inquiry into surveillance by Germany's intelligence agency and its cooperation with the US' National Security Agency (NSA). Wikileaks said that the collection contains early agreements and more recent details on close collaboration between German and American intelligence agencies and show how intelligence agencies found ways to work around their own government.
Today, 1 December 2016, WikiLeaks releases 90 gigabytes of information relating to the German parliamentary inquiry into the surveillance activities of Germany's foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and its cooperation with the United States' National Security Agency (NSA).
The 2,420 documents originate from various agencies of the German government including the BND and Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) and were submitted to the inquiry last year in response to questions posed by the committee. They include administrative documents, correspondence, agreements and press reactions. They also include 125 documents from the BND, 33 from the BfVand 72 from the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
The rule of law has gone into the heap of history, and Julian Assange is one of the victims of that. I do hope the UK will come to its senses and start obeying international law, former CIA officer Ray McGovern told RT.
A UN panel rejected an appeal from the British government in the case of Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than four years.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention upheld its earlier ruling that the WikiLeaks founder is being arbitrarily detained.
More than 2,000 U.S. military veterans plan to form a human shield to protect protesters of a pipeline project near a Native American reservation in North Dakota, organizers said, just ahead of a federal deadline for activists to leave the camp they have been occupying.
It comes as North Dakota law enforcement backed away from a previous plan to cut off supplies to the camp – an idea quickly abandoned after an outcry and with law enforcement’s treatment of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters increasingly under the microscope.
Voices from Toronto’s Jewish community are accusing a group of Muslim and pro-Palestinian university students of scuttling a vote by their union to commemorate Holocaust Education Week.
The controversy unfolded during Tuesday’s general meeting of the Ryerson Student Union (RSU), which was set to vote on a Jewish student group’s motion to hold Holocaust Education Week events.
According to a member of Hillel Ryerson, students from the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP Ryerson) and the Muslim Students Association (RMSA) first called for an amendment to the motion to include all forms of genocide.
But then they walked out, causing the meeting to lose quorum and the vote to die, Hillel Ryerson’s Aedan O’Connor says. “Instead of going through with trying to amend it, they ... decided to walk out,” he said Wednesday.
Call 6 Investigates Chief Investigator Rafael Sanchez was denied press credential access to the announcement event at the Carrier plant that will detail the deal the west-side Indianapolis plant made with President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence to keep more than half of the jobs of the original 1,400 slated to be moved to Mexico.
What do popcorn, chewing-gum, football, syringes, and chocolate have in common? According to a United States paper tabled at the World Intellectual Property Organization, they are all rooted in traditional knowledge. While most efforts are geared this week towards trying to find consensual language on a treaty protecting traditional knowledge, the US said a discussion on what is protectable and what is not would be instructive. Some other delegations resubmitted proposals introducing alternative means of protection than a binding instrument.
Michael Geist writes, "The global music industry has spent two decades lobbying for restrictive DMCA-style restrictions on digital locks. These so-called "anti-circumvention rules" have been actively opposed by many groups, but the copyright lobby claims that they are needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Internet treaties. Now the head of the RIAA in Canada admits that the treaty drafters were just guessing and that they guessed wrong."
Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport has announced a new initiative for tackling piracy, especially online. Minister ÃÂñigo Méndez de Vigo said a special prosecutor's office will be developed alongside enhanced technological and human resources. An educational campaign targeting children is also on the agenda.