Since the release of the Windows 10 KB4535996 cumulative update, Windows users have been reporting numerous problems including boot issues, crashes, performance problems, audio issues, and developer tools no longer working.
The optional Windows 10 KB4535996 cumulative update was released on February 27th, 2020 and while it resolved some Windows Search issues, it also introduced other issues for users who installed the update.
Unfortunately with Windows 10 installed on over 900 million PCs, there are always going to be problems for some users when installing a new update such as Windows not booting, the screen flickers, Cortana is broken, or they can no longer launch programs.
We answer questions and comment on internal drive problems, Microsoft making Linux more popular, the Distrowatch podcast, gPodder and Orca, the Mint forums, print/fax/scan compatibility, games, Manjaro, and Chromebooks running Linux.
Mozilla removes support for older versions of TLS in Firefox 74, Google launches a facility for managing machine images on Compute Engine, IBM’s Elyra brings new tools to Jupyter Notebooks, and Palo Alto Networks issues a dire report on the state of IoT security.
Ell and Wes sit down with Wirefall, founder of the Dallas Hackers Association, to talk about the struggles and rewards of community building, why moving with the times is key, and how to foster an inclusive community meetup that still feels like a family gathering.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some big news from GNOME, APT & systemd. We’ve also got some new releases from Jellyfin media server, Collabora Online (an online office suite), and a new release from ZorinOS. We’re going to round out this episode with some Linux Gaming news for playing Tetris and a new Space Shooter in your terminal! All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
We've known that Intel's P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver in general can be a bit quirky and especially so when dealing with Intel integrated graphics where the iGPU and CPU share the same power envelope. This has been shown with examples like using the "powersave" governor to boost iGPU performance while discrete graphics owners are generally best off switching over to the "performance" governor. As the latest though on helping the iGPU front with P-State, there is a new patch series talking up big gains in performance and power efficiency.
Francisco Jerez of Intel's open-source driver team sent out a set of ten patches today working on GPU-bound efficiency improvements for the Intel P-State driver.
Here we are going to describe what tracepoints are, how they are defined and finally demonstrate the various ways they can be used. By fleshing out all of the steps, I'm hoping others may find this process a bit easier.
dav1d 0.6.0 'Gyrfalcon', the fast and lean AV1 decoder
This is a major update of the dav1d, the fast and lean AV1 decoder, codename 'Gyrfalcon'.
0.6.0 brings major improvements in 10/12bit decoding on ARMv8 CPUs, up to 2.5 times faster than 0.5.2. It also brings new AVX-512, AVX2 and SSSE3 optimizations and improves the existing optimizations on all platforms. Finally, it also fixes some decoder mismatches and minor crashes.
Given this week's release of dav1d 0.6, here are some fresh benchmarks of this open-source AV1 video decoder on a few different Intel and AMD systems so far.
Dav1d 0.6 has various AVX2 and AVX-512 optimizations that excite us plus 10/12-bit video decoding improvements for ARMv8 hardware. With waiting for some more exciting ARM server platforms still to arrive, this round of testing is just looking at the Intel/AMD x86_64 CPU performance.
Dav1d 0.6 is now available as a big update to this open-source AV1 video decoder developed by the VideoLAN crew.
Dav1d already is quite fast on most CPUs but now is even faster on x86_64 hardware thanks to enabling AVX-512 optimizations and also extending their AVX2 and SSSE3 optimizations.
If you're a fan of Anime, Manga and that sort of thing the Humble Sakura Collection Bundle is officially live and plenty of the titles in this support Linux.
Arriving two weeks after Plasma 5.18.2, the Plasma 5.18.3 maintenance release is here to further improve the Flatpak experience for users in the Plasma Discover package manager. About 10 bugs related to Flatpak support were fixed in this update.
KDE Plasma 5.18.3 fixes about 70 issues, including a common crash the occurred when adding or removing widgets, as well as an issue that wouldn’t allow running GTK3 apps to immediately show any changes to titlebar button order.
Furthermore, it removes an unnecessary bottom scrollbar from the Audio page under System Settings, which now looks much better when using a fractional scale factor, and makes it possible to once again drag links into the Sticky Notes widget.
There’s a clear trend of users moving from Windows and macOS to Linux distros lately. And this journey is fueled by the dissatisfaction and limited capabilities of those two giants. Linux distributions as ZorinOS are no less than Windows, and even giving more options to customize and better security. The developers of ZorinOS have released the new version 15.2, which has support for more hardware, improved security, etc as notables.
Though Linux itself is cool, it’s hard for a normie or a beginner to handle the extensive platform initially. That’s when several Linux distributions as Ubuntu, Mint, ElementaryOS, ZorinOS, etc stepped in, making the journey of users from Windows and macOS to Linux smooth and interesting. With respect to the latest development of such distribution, ZorinOS has rolled out its new version named v15.2. This contained new features as below:
LibreELEC 9.2.1 (Leia) the final version has arrived based upon Kodi v18.6, the 9.2.1 release contains many changes and refinements to user experience and a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability and extend hardware support compared to the LE 9.0 release.
Sculpt OS is the general purpose operating system built off the Genode operating system framework. Out now is their version 20.02 update that tries to make the OS more approachable.
Given they are trying to make Sculpt OS a general purpose OS, they determined their reliance on command-line utilities is a barrier for adoption. So with Sculpt OS 20.02 they have introduced a custom graphical file manager and text editor. They hope the file manager and editor will make it easier tweaking the system state while the CLI options remain available.
With the release of Sculpt version 20.02, we follow our roadmap's mission to make Sculpt OS easier to approach. In particular, we identified the reliance on a command-line interface as a potential barrier of entry. As Sculpt OS is not a Unix-like system, it should not require any Unix know-how from the user. To relieve users from this burden, Sculpt 20.02 introduces a custom graphical file browser and editor that can be used for interactively inspecting and tweaking the state of the system. The traditional command-line interface is still present as a fallback for advanced tasks though. The updated manual goes into detail about the use of the new system.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Zorin OS 15.2 core and some of the applications pre-installed.
In this video, we are looking at SparkyLinux 2020.03.
Red Hat Summit 2020, scheduled to take place at San Francisco’s Moscone Center from April 28-29, is moving to an online-only event as a safety measure against the current coronavirus outbreak.
A common request from OpenShift users has long been to raise the number of pods per node. OpenShift has set the limit to 250 starting with the first Kubernetes-based release (3.0) through 4.2, but with very powerful nodes, it can support many more than that.
This blog describes the work we did to achieve 500 pods per node, starting from initial testing, bug fixes and other changes we needed to make, the testing we performed to verify function, and what you need to do if you’d like to try this.
Today Red Hat announced Red Hat Ceph Storage 4, a major release that brings a number of improvements in scalability, monitoring, management, and security improvements. We also have designed Ceph Storage 4 to be easier to get started. Let's tour some of its most interesting features.
There have been some changes to the way we deliver OpenShift Container Platform 4 from OpenShift Container Platform 3. The installer and client binaries are delivered via mirror.openshift.com, as well as access.redhat.com. Also, container images are delivered from Quay.io primarily, and most of them are mirrored to the Red Hat container registries such as registry.access.redhat.com and registry.redhat.io. This was done to speed up the rate at which we can deliver updates, and facilitate over-the-air updates. You might be wondering how we ensure the integrity of bits delivered via this new delivery mechanism, so we’re going to dive into that in this post.
The current hype about robotic process automation comes with questions, concerns, and misconceptions about what RPA can and can't do. Let's examine 5 key facts business leaders should understand
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 to deliver simplified, petabyte-scale object storage for cloud-native development and data analytics. Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 is based on the Nautilus version of the Ceph open source project.
Wondering why there's another Red Hat Shares issue so soon after the last one? The February issue was all about edge computing. But, frankly, 1 newsletter isn’t enough to tackle a topic that’s poised to explode this year, as many predict.
We’ve published a couple of additional pieces on edge computing in the last month and thought you might be interested.
In this short issue, see how we approach edge computing, and read our own Paul Cormier’s blog post about edge’s dependence on hybrid cloud and open source.
Jupyter Notebooks are now the open standard for data science and artificial intelligence (AI) model development. In keeping with our commitment to open source and the Jupyter community, in particular, IBM is proud to announce Elyra, a set of open source AI-centric extensions to Jupyter Notebooks, and, more specifically, the new JupyterLab user interface.
Fedora 31 Release Party was a social event for people to meet & connect who are curious about Fedora from Karachi in general, and check out the cool & awesome features of the new Fedora 31 release. It also served as an opportunity for people to find out what Fedora and free software in general is all about and ask questions of people already involved in the community.
Are free software organizations descending into the abyss, or is there light at the end of the tunnel?
A number of organizations have recently indulged in shaming volunteers, including FSF, FSFE and Debian. Is it a smart move? Hollywood may provide some interesting clues.
I have a Raspberry Pi at my parents home. They have internet access via some ISP using Carrier Grade NAT (CGN). Hence their home router is not reachable via IPv4 from the outside, they do have IPv6 and the devices can also be made accessible via IPv6 via the local router. Did that, was able to access my Raspberry Pi over IPv6 and SSH from the outside. So doing backup of that Raspberry Pi with BackupPC from the outside was a walk in the park.
Unfortunately the IPv6 prefix seems to change occasionally and the router only allows to configure explicit IPv6 addresses in firewall rules — so after a prefix change the configured rules no more match the devices IPv6 addresses. Meh.
I have worked a bit on the fonts I use recently. From the main font I use every day in my text editor and terminals to this very website, I did a major and (hopefully) thoughtful overhaul of my typography, in the hope of making things easier to use and, to be honest, just prettier.
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in March) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
Here’s my (fifth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in Debian this February.
At Canonical we have recently performed a series of cyber tabletop exercises (TTX). A TTX is an information security preparedness drill where a cyber incident scenario is played out to improve your tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). When performing a TTX it is important to use the same amount of staff and effort as though a real incident were occuring. This helps to uncover deficiencies in your TTPs and address those issues before a real event occurs. Being as efficient as possible is critical during incident response because as time passes data that can help determine root cause is lost and the attacker may still be causing harm to the environment.
This past month we performed two TTXs with different groups within Canonical. This type of exercise requires support from the top down, you will be interrupting work for up to a day and it is imperative that the management of each team is behind this effort. At Canonical security is in our DNA and this exercise was performed with full support of everyone within the company.
Interana, an analytics software provider, enables users to run advanced big data queries on raw customer data and delivers answers in seconds. Their customers include Microsoft, Comcast and Salesforce.
Interana’s leading-edge platform is based on Ubuntu and deployed directly inside customers’ public cloud environments. This empowers users with some of the fastest analytics capabilities on the market. However, this also means that they have to schedule large-scale data migrations with each client.
The first screenshot was taken at 10:36 with a 70% charge, and an estimated 1h30 left for a full charge. I turned off the display and came back 41 minutes later with only 79% charge, and an estimated 1h18 to go for a full charge. Something is clearly wrong, and I’m not alone with no workaround. It’s been nearly two months since Android 10, so a fix would really be nice…
I decided to write the issue this morning, as Xiaomi Mi A2 Lite model just got its Android 10 update (partial release), and an article on Notebookcheck recommends avoiding the update. Why? Because of the history of botched releases by Xiaomi including Xiaomi Mi A3 phone which they had to revert. But more worrying are some of the comments in the post:
This update entirely bricked my phone, and there’s widespread reports of the same issue!
One of the primary contributions of the open source community to the world is a system that allows random people from around the world to work together to solve complex problems, so it is no surprise that Collabora has been from the get-go a geographically distributed company. Our consultancy team of Open Source professionals is distributed across 2 offices - Cambridge, UK and Montreal, Canada - and remote based in more than 30 different countries around the globe.
Here at Collabora, we trust our people to work remotely, we give them full responsibility for their output, and we believe it helps create an even stronger internal culture and comes with some other positives.
his issue Jonni has been getting very angry at me for conflating the terms emulate and virtualise, don’t even get him started on containerise. Largely I hadn’t clocked that virtualise only includes systems running on the same hardware platform. Surely, that’s an easy enough mistake to make with the x86 platform being so dominant, it’s the main thing you are going to virtualise!
This x86 world is changing though; sure for Linux Format readers x86 is going to remain the primary desktop platform. But there’s a good chance Arm plays as much a roll in your life, be that in the Raspberry Pi, your smartphone, tablet or smart TV.
In big business Amazon is already running its own design of Arm-based server processor, Apple is posturing to launch an Arm-based consumer-level processor for laptops, while Microsoft is already peddling Arm-builds of Windows. You can see the world is changing. If slowly.
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.
Google today launched TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ), an open-source library for prototyping quantum machine learning models.
Quantum computers aren’t quite mainstream yet, but when they arrive they’ll need algorithms. TFQ fills that Gap by making it possible for developers to create hybrid AI algorithms that use both classical computing techniques and quantum computer circuit simulations.
We use Gravit Designer on the daily as our go-to vector editing and design tool but for a long time, Inkscape was always in the old tool bag. Problem was, using Inkscape on Chrome OS in the past required Crouton and the unofficial path to dual-booting Linux on your Chromebook. With the advent of the Crostini Project and Linux apps support, that has changed and for many, installing Inkscape free software on a Chromebook has been a game-changer for productivity. While we no longer use Inkscape, it is still an incredible vector editor and we recommend it for users who aren’t ready to make the jump to the pro version of Gravit that runs you $49.99/year.
As we’ve seen in the past few months, Linux apps on Chrome OS have come a long way. There’s still work to be done and there are new features that are on the way or that have just launched, but the overall feel of Linux apps on Chromebooks is way more cohesive than it was just 6 months ago.
As of late, I spend a good majority of my time digging into Linux on Chrome OS and testing what works and what doesn’t. As the Command Line series takes shape, we’ve become a little keener to Linux-related commits in the Chromium repository. There’s so much that you can do with Linux apps on Chrome OS but the Crostini project still has its limitations due to the nature of the technology. Running applications in containers requires some workarounds for certain things that are normally native on full Linux distributions.
Brave, the popular crypto-integrated browser, has surpassed its previous adoption records.
As of Mar. 5, Brave had 4 million daily active users (DAU) and 12 million monthly active users (MAU). Based on Brave’s previous usership statistics, this means that Brave attracted approximately 2 million monthly active users and 700,000 daily active users over the past three months.
The latest release of Firefox features some login management improvements, the ability to add custom sites to the Facebook Container, better privacy for web voice and video calls, and better add-on management. See the release notes for more information.
The freshly accelerated Firefox release schedule see a new version of Firefox released every four weeks. The increased release rate allows the famous FOSS browser to bring new features to users faster.
The headline change in Firefox 74 is the use of DNS over HTTPS by default for users in the USA.
A privacy-minded feature, DNS over HTTPS encrypts all DNS requests made in Firefox 74 (requests which are normally done ‘in the open’). This helps prevent people snooping on internet traffic from discerning detail about the requests being made.
Firefox 74 defaults to Cloudflare as the DNS resolver but users are able switch to NextDNS through the Preferences > Network Settings dialog.
Firefox 74.0 is the release offering DNS-over-HTTPS support with Cloudflare as the default DNS resolver, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 support is now disabled, sandbox security improvements, CSS text-underline-position support, implementing the JavaScript optional chaining operator, and many other developer improvements. The DNS over HTTPS is enabled by default for users in the United States with Firefox 74 while others can turn it on manually. While Cloudflare is the default DNS resolver, NextDNS can also be selected as another option. The roll-out began in late February and more details on Mozilla's DoH work via this blog post.
I’m glad to see that Mozilla has made a significant process with offering Firefox as a flatpak. Having Firefox as a flatpak was one of our long-term goals.
Three years ago we started a testing flatpak repo with Firefox Developer Edition and soon after that we added Firefox Nightly. For a long time it was the only source of Firefox for Flatpak out there. The user base grew into thousands, a level our hosting could barely deal with. Lately we haven’t had much time for its maintenance and at least the nightly builds were often broken.
That’s why from the very beginning we worked with Mozilla to make official Firefox builds available as flatpaks. The effort was later on picked up by Endless.
Now it brings first fruits, Mozilla is already shipping Firefox Beta in the beta channel on Flathub. You just need to enable it by installing this file: https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.mozilla.firefox.flatpakref
I think it may already be useful for Silverblue users who have relied on our testing repo if they didn’t want to use package overlay.
With the Firefox 74 release out of the way Mozilla developers now turning their attention towards Firefox 75, scheduled for release in the early part of April.
While Firefox 75 will (obviously) ship with new features, key changes and a dollop of developer-related improvements it will be notable for another reason:
It’s looking like Firefox 75 will be the first version of the famed web browser to be released as a Flatpak app on the Flathub app store.
Today sees the release of Firefox number 74. The most significant new features we’ve got for you this time are security enhancements: Feature Policy, the Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy header, and removal of TLS 1.0/1.1 support. We’ve also got some new CSS text property features, the JS optional chaining operator, and additional 2D canvas text metric features, along with the usual wealth of DevTools enhancements and bug fixes.
Today marks the release of Firefox 74 and as we announced last fall, developers will no longer be able to install extensions without the user taking an action. This installation method was typically done through application installers, and is commonly referred to as “sideloading.”
If you are the developer of an extension that installs itself via sideloading, please make sure that your users can install the extension from your own website or from addons.mozilla.org (AMO).
LibreOffice is made by volunteers and certified developers across the globe, and today we’re announcing a new system to credit their work and show appreciation: Open Badges. So what are they?
In a nutshell, Open Badges are PNG images that are awarded to contributors for reaching a certain threshold – such as a number of commits to the codebase, or answering questions on Ask LibreOffice. But these images are something special: they contain metadata describing the contributor’s work, which can be verified using an external service. Open Badges are used by other free software projects, such as Fedora.
We at The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – will start issuing customised badges to contributors, who can then proudly display them on websites or social media. And because of the embedded metadata, contributors can use the badges as proof of their work. If you’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice and are in the job market, use your badge to highlight your involvement in a large open source project!
Padded numbering is a style where you insert 0 characters in front of an otherwise normal (Arabic) numbering, making sure that the result always has at least N characters. Up to now, you had to number your content manually to have this effect, while Word supports this feature.
OOXML supports padding up to 2, 3, 4 and 5 characters. Padding up to 2 characters is the older feature, supported in DOC and RTF as well, so I focused on that piece.
The second release candidate for WordPress 5.4 is now available!
WordPress 5.4 is currently scheduled to be released on March 31 2020, and we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.4 yet, now is the time!
What is Free Software? How does it contribute to digital sovereignty, security and transparency of state digital infrastructure? Which steps can public administrations take? These and more questions are answered in our publication "Public Money Public Code – Modernising Public Infrastructure with Free Software". After the successful release of the English version of our brochure we translated it into three more languages: German, Czech and Brazilian Portuguese.
The recent debates about digital sovereignty show that the desire for self-determined government action in the field of digitisation is immense. Digital services offered and used by our public administrations are the critical infrastructure of 21st century. In order to establish trustworthy systems, public bodies must ensure they have full control over the software and the computer systems at the core of our state digital infrastructure. We need software that helps public administrations regain sovereignty over their critical digital infrastructure, allowing them to become and remain independent from a handful of companies.
The brochure summarises the FSFE's long-term expertise with additional knowledge from leading experts in various ICT areas. It helps readers understand Free Software and its benefits for a modern digital public infrastructure. Hot topics covered include the avoidance of vendor lock-in, improvement of IT security through openness, exploring different business models, handling of procurement issues, and learning from innovative approaches to smart cities.
RenderDoc 1.7 is out today for this cross-platform graphics debugging/profiling tool that supports Vulkan, Direct3D, and OpenGL graphics APIs across all major platforms.
RenderDoc 1.7 comes with Python API changes, improved capture performance for Direct3D 12 programs, better handling of queue ownership transfer barriers in Vulkan, support for Vulkan's KHR_shader_non_semantic_info extension, and dozens of bug fixes across the board. RenderDoc 1.7 also brings a global font scale for better scaling of text within its own user-interface.
A release candidate Git v2.26.0-rc1 is now available for testing at the usual places. It is comprised of 453 non-merge commits since v2.25.0, contributed by 47 people, 10 of which are new faces.
The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/testing/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.26.0-rc1' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.25.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!
Abhishek Kumar, Benno Evers, Eyal Soha, Harald van Dijk, Jacques Bodin-Hullin, Kir Kolyshkin, Lucius Hu, Peter Kaestle, Rasmus Jonsson, and Shourya Shukla.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.
Alban Gruin, Alexandr Miloslavskiy, Bert Wesarg, brian m. carlson, David Turner, Denton Liu, Derrick Stolee, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Eric Sunshine, Hans Jerry Illikainen, Hariom Verma, Heba Waly, Jeff King, Johan Herland, Johannes Berg, Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Jonathan Nieder, Jonathan Tan, Junio C Hamano, Kevin Willford, Kyle Meyer, Luke Diamand, Martin Ãâ¦gren, Masaya Suzuki, Matheus Tavares, Matthew Rogers, Miriam Rubio, Paolo Bonzini, Philippe Blain, Pranit Bauva, Ralf Thielow, René Scharfe, SZEDER Gábor, Tanushree Tumane, and Taylor Blau.
Git 2.26-rc1 is out this morning as the newest test version of this distributed version control system.
Highlights of the Git 2.26 series so far as of RC1 consists of:
- Continued work on improving the Bash/CLI auto-completion for different sub-commands.
I am really enjoying the weekly challenges, specially doing in Raku. The point of blogging is also about sharing my fight with Raku. I hardly write anything about my Perl solution as I don’t see anything new to talk about. Having said that, I still go for Perl first as it is my first love and will remain so rest of my life. Even today, my brain is so tuned to Perl, every ideas come in form and shape of Perl only. I started contributing in the Week #46. I could only find time to do Perl solutions in the Week #46. The following Week #47 was the same as I didn’t get to do Raku. It was the Week #48 when I managed to find time to do both Perl and Raku for the first time. Ever since I have been able to contribute every week in both languages. I would give the credit to the fellow Team PWC member, Ryan Thompson, for helping me with the Perl and Raku reviews.
Acting as containers for enterprise APIs, Zato services are able to invoke each other to form higher-level processes and message flows. What if a service needs to invoke a hot-deployable Python function or method, though? Read on to learn details of how to accomplish it.
In this tutorial, we will learn about polymorphism, different types of polymorphism, and how we can implement them in Python with the help of examples.
Many programming languages have a special function that is automatically executed when an operating system starts to run a program. This function is usually called main() and must have a specific return type and arguments according to the language standard. On the other hand, the Python interpreter executes scripts starting at the top of the file, and there is no specific function that Python automatically executes.
Nevertheless, having a defined starting point for the execution of a program is useful for understanding how a program works. Python programmers have come up with several conventions to define this starting point.
Note that Python 3.8 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. You should consider upgrading to it. Get the latest release of 3.8.x here. We plan to continue regular bugfix releases of Python 3.7.x through mid-year 2020 and provide security fixes for it until mid-year 2023. More details are available in PEP 537, the Python 3.7 Release Schedule.
Lists are a fundamental data type in the Python programming language. A list is a mutable sequence that is typically a collection of homogeneous items. Mutable means that you can change a list after its creation. You will frequently see lists that contain other lists. These are known as nested lists. You will also see lists that contain all manner of other data types, such as dictionaries, tuples or objects.
As you are aware, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a topic of frequent and ongoing discussions. We would like to provide an update on our status and policies as well as provide resources for additional information.
As of today, our event schedule remains as posted on event sites. Any changes or updates will be immediately shared. The NumFOCUS staff and board of directors are closely monitoring the situation and will be following the lead of the WHO, CDC, and state and local governments. Our plan is to weekly reassess information and provide updates as needed.
The following text is in German, since we're announcing a Python sprint in Düsseldorf, Germany.
With issue9108, the trytond server does not enforce access right on wizard relying on the access right of the model on which it runs.
With issue9089, the web client does not set noreferrer nor noopener to open external links.
I know I'll die, sooner or later, but how many years do I have left?
There's no answer to that question for me or for anyone else interested in their future, because the future is unknowable. That hasn't stopped demographers and actuaries from calculating life expectancies in years and sometimes making news with their calculations.
Here in Australia the Government Actuary produces Life Tables every 5 years. The tables are based on enumeration. How many 60-year-old women were there at the last Census? How many 60-y-o women died around the Census time? From those numbers (and others) the Actuary can calculate a current likelihood of dying and an expected number of years before death for 60-y-o women.
Tallying population and death totals isn't straightforward and adjustments are made to both the current male and female populations at each age, and to the death numbers. The population figures in the latest Life Tables were adjusted from the 2016 Census, and the death figures cover the 3 years 2015-2017.
The 2020 RustConf Call for Proposals is now open!
Got something to share about Rust? Want to talk about the experience of learning and using Rust? Want to dive deep into an aspect of the language? Got something different in mind? We want to hear from you! The RustConf 2020 CFP site is now up and accepting proposals.
Intel has added bare-metal oneAPI support to its open-source Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL and oneAPI, according to a Phoronix report on Monday. This brings oneAPI Level Zero to Linux.
Intel’s bare-metal specification for oneAPI is known as Level Zero and provides the lowest-level access to hardware, such as accelerators. Intel has now brought initial support for Level Zero to its Graphics Compute Runtime for OpenCL and oneAPI, as evidenced by a commit on GitHub.
The past weekend some members of the XMPP community gathered in Düsseldorf to work on the next iteration of the OMEMO Encryption Specification. All of us agree that the result – version 0.4 of XEP-0384 – is a huge step forward and better than ever!
On Saturday morning we met up at the Chaosdorf, a local Hacker Space who’s members kindly hosted the sprint. Huge thanks to them for having us!
Prior to the sprint we had collected a list of bullet points of topics we wanted to discuss. Among the more urging topics was proper specification of OMEMO for group chats, support for encrypting extension elements other than the body, as well as clarification on how to implement OMEMO without having to use libsignal. While the latter was technically already possible having a clear written documentation on how to do it is very important.
I was to fly to Boston tomorrow evening, but I'm staying home instead. Just a few days ago, I was thinking all the fear around Covid-19 was silly, but then I caught a very mild cold and, wondering whether that could get me quarantined, sent back home, or barred from travelling, I started looking into the matter, and what I learned changed my mind.
I used to think I was reasonably healthy, and though I invariably catch a bug at conferences abroad, for sleepless nights in tight plane seats and long exposure to unknown pathogens, I'm likely able to survive Covid-19 even if I came across it, which was extremely unlikely to begin with. It's not much more than a flu, after all, right?
Well... It's not so simple. What happens if everyone reasons this way and carries life on as usual? The virus spreads very fast, healthcare units get overloaded, and even people with very treatable diseases fail to get treatment and die.
Avoiding unnecessary physical contact slows down the propagation. In extreme cases, this might even get a virus to die off. Even if we don't go that far, the more we slow it down, the more time we buy to develop treatments and vaccines, and the less we overload healthcare units so that people who need treatment are more likely to get it.
Why bring that up? The big reason is to mention the need for backup plans and continuity plans. With COVID-19 concerns in play within the continental United States, the Windows Subsystem for Linux conference had to switch from being an in-person event to a virtual event. After my broadband decided to die on me I decided to follow up on guidance from the state's election authorities to get early voting out of the way as reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. My account on Instapaper has been full of closure listings in the local area such as Kent State University stopping classes on all campuses including the local commuter campus in Ashtabula. Many people and institutions are having to improvise, adapt, and overcome.
For the individual developer, though, there should be some consideration about COVID-19. Is your code maintained in a way that nobody else could access it if you were incapacitated? Do you have a "trusted person" who has delegated access if you become incapacitated so automated systems can continue to function? Is your code clean and commented sufficiently so that somebody could take over maintaining it if, heaven forfend, you are out of commission for an extended period of time?
These are all good business practices. The COVID-19 situation merely brings them into sharp focus as being essential business practices. If you haven't implemented them already there is no time like the present.
The TARS Foundation can help make the microservices ecosystem more effective, building a more aligned community of contributors and supporters. As more technology-first companies deploy microservices in production, we expect the trend to extend to traditional industries that are transforming. We hope that more people and companies will participate in the TARS Foundation and welcome everyone to contribute to a better and more open microservice ecosystem.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced Project OWL’s IoT device firmware effort will be hosted at the Foundation and is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks. Project OWL, the winner of Call for Code 2018, is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response. The Linux Foundation’s open governance model will enable a global network of developers to accelerate the development of the mesh networks, which could help save lives following a natural disaster.
Project Owl is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics (Owl, for short) for disaster response. Our team developed a mesh network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices called “DuckLinks” that can be deployed or activated in disaster areas to quickly re-establish connectivity and improve communication between first responders and civilians in need.
In 2018, we won the inaugural Call for Code Global Challenge. Our idea rose to the top from over 100,000 participants from 156 nations and we won the opportunity to work with IBM’s Code and Response initiative with The Linux Foundation, to help us build, fortify, test and launch our solution to help communities in need.
Computer security researchers involved in the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting many modern processors have developed a related attack technique called Load Value Injection (LVI).
The attack relies on microarchitectural data leakage to inject and execute malicious code in a way that breaks the confidentiality of modern Intel systems.
Chipzilla's processors, already weighed down by defenses deployed against side-channel attacks over the past two years, could get slower still if they try to thwart this latest vulnerability: prototype compiler changes, for full mitigation, have produced performance reductions ranging from 2x to 19x.
Load Value Injection (LVI) is being disclosed today as a new class of transient-execution attacks and the researchers claim can defeat all existing mitigations around Meltdown, Foreshadow, Zombieload, RIDL and Fallout. The researchers say LVI can affect virtually any access to memory and compiler-based mitigations can be expensive.
LVI combines Spectre-style code gadgets with Meltdown-type illegal data flows to bypass existing defenses and allow injecting data into a victim's transient execution. LVI was discovered in April of 2019 while today the researchers and Intel are making a coordinated disclosure. The initial discovery was made again by university researchers but Bitdefender ended up also discovering the same vulnerability.
Oh hell. This comes shortly after Intel had another one announced that was 'unfixable', plus one for AMD too and now this all in the space of a month. Rough time right now, for Intel specifically on this one.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libvpx and network-manager-ssh), Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, and podman), openSUSE (chromium and python-bleach), Oracle (curl), Red Hat (ansible and qemu-kvm), SUSE (gd, ipmitool, and php7), and Ubuntu (runc and sqlite3).
Microsoft’s Windows is always considered the most vulnerable OS owing to its popularity or kernel design. But a recent analysis report published by theBestVPN.com may surprise and clear some myths for you.
The idea that Microsoft’s Windows is the world’s most buggy and vulnerable operating system is pants, and it is so-called cast iron operating systems like Linux and macOS which are the worst.
An analysis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database, compiled by Thebestvpn.com, tracked ‘technical vulnerabilities’ in popular pieces of software between 1999 and 2019.
A vulnerability (CVE-2020-8597) in the Point-to-Point Protocol Daemon (pppd) software, which comes installed on many Linux-based and Unix-like operating systems and networking devices, can be exploited by unauthenticated attackers to achieve code execution on – and takeover of – a targeted system.
Few people look forward to their commute, but Albane Bochatay, 30, has it easier than most. With Switzerland’s snow-capped mountains and Lake Geneva as a backdrop and an almost guaranteed seat, her one-hour train journey one-way is decidedly more relaxing than a packed London Underground train. And most importantly, she gets paid for it.
After moving from Bern, the centre of government, to the southwestern city of Lausanne, Bochatay, a research associate for Swiss union Transfair, now works at a regional office near her home two days a week and commutes to the headquarters in Bern the other three. And thanks to Switzerland’s well-equipped and uncrowded trains, her boss was happy for her to start her workday on the journey in.
“I can answer my mails, I can read some papers, I can also write some minutes, so I can actually do a lot of things on the train,” she says. “And now I can be home at six in the evening and I can do some sport or see some friends. So it's a good balance.”
In this week’s Patent News – WIPO Academy, RGNIIPM and NLU Nagpur to host WIPO-India Summer School; Coordination Committee of WIPO nominates Mr. Daren Tang for post of Director General; IP applications filed by foreign applicants continue to grow: CNIPA; EPO launches public consultation for EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines and other news updates.
