With FOSSlife, a new web magazine was launched today. It’s a destination for all who care about the FOSS community and want to follow the trends, tools, projects, programs, and people who define the FOSS experience. The FOSSlife project is proudly supported by Linux Professional Institute (LPI) which is happy to provide a home to this new resource for all existing and future FOSS professionals and enthusiasts.
The FOSS life is about community, it is about advocacy, and it is about bringing people together and building sustainable, accessible solutions. Everyone is invited to become part of this community, which stands for openness and equality like no other. FOSSlife is intended to be a new place to go, both for experienced experts and for those who are interested in the subject and just starting to come to grips with it.
"At the Linux Professional Institute, we are committed to spreading FOSS knowledge as well as the spirit which helped free and open source technology become a worldwide phenomenon," said G. Matthew Rice, Executive Director of the Linux Professional Institute. "It is our mission to promote the use of free and open source by elevating the people who work with it. FOSSlife fits perfectly into this mission, as it helps us share, bundle, and disseminate knowledge about free and open source software and inspire people who are searching for their own approach in gaining this expertise.”
Linux Professional Institute launches FOSSlife, a website for the FOSS community.
Linux Professional Institute (LPI) has launched FOSSlife, a website for those “who care about the FOSS community and want to follow the trends, tools, projects, programs, and people who define the FOSS experience.”
According to the announcement, the new website will offer recent news and articles on FOSS technology and advocacy. FOSSlife is intended to be a destination and resource for experts as well as those just starting out on their open source journey.
In this section of FOSSlife, we will profile some of the valued partners of the website. In this article, we’ll hear about Rocket Girls, an organization in San Jose, Costa Rica, that’s working to generate opportunities for girls within the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).
“FOSS advocacy means advocating for all users to have freedom. Freedom to control their computing environment, freedom to not be spied on or having their data collected without their consent,” explained Deb Nicholson, director of Community Operations at Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
“It is important because [otherwise] we can't call it freedom when we force people to choose between access to information, services, entertainment, health care and their autonomy, privacy and security,” Nicholson added.
We’re proud to announce the launch of FOSSlife — a new webzine dedicated to the world of free and open source software. Paragraphs We’re proud to announce the launch of FOSSlife – a new webzine dedicated to the world of free and open source software.
The Free software community has been around for more than 30 years, and it has succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. Free and open source software drives the Internet, runs the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and lights up the laptops of Fortune 500 executives. In fact, FOSS has become so popular that many people don’t even recognize it as a thing anymore and think of it simply as the way we live.
But FOSS really is a thing, with challenges, threats, opportunities, and plenty of reasons to celebrate. The FOSS life is about community, it is about advocacy, and it is about bringing people together and building sustainable, accessible solutions. Most of all, FOSSlife is about the software: inventive, expressive, powerful software that is able, stable, and refreshingly free of hype.
We created FOSSlife to serve as a destination for everyone who cares about the FOSS community and wants to follow the trends, tools, projects, programs, and people who define the FOSS experience. We also serve as an entry point for those who are new to FOSS and are taking their first steps to explore the exciting world of free software.
This week we have been teaching our children to build a PC. We discuss where in the world people talk about Ubuntu, bring you some command line love and go over a bumper crop of your wonderful feedback!
Once upon a time, there were Linux distributions that focused on the needs of computer users with disabilities. Today's Ubuntu MATE does the best job of any modern desktop Linux at including the broadest out-of-the-box implementation of accessibility software. This is particularly valuable because Windows does not and the "officially supported" software applications for Windows that are focused on accessibility are also extremely expensive.
Josh and Kurt talk about a grab bag of topics. A DNS security flaw, port scanning your machine from a web browser, and CSV files running arbitrary code. All of these things end up being the result of corner cases. Letting a corner case be part of a default setup is always a mistake. Yes always, not even that one time.
The Linux kernel packs version 5.7 with exciting additions, version 2.2 of the Foliate eBook reader is out with support for many more formats, and members of the Association of American Publishers sue the Internet Archive over their library lending practices.
So we had a fairly calm last week, with nothing really screaming "let's delay one more rc". Knock wood - let's hope we don't have anything silly lurking this time, like the last-minute wifi regression we had in 5.6..
But embarrassing regressions last time notwithstanding, it all looks fine. And most of the discussion I've seen the last week or two has been about upcoming features, so the merge window is now open and I'll start processing pull requests tomorrow as usual. But in the meantime, please give this a whirl.
We've got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal - but "normal" for us obviously pretty big and means "almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers"), So the appended shortlog is only the small stuff that came in this last week since rc7.
Go test,
Linus
Linux 5.7 is now available. The updated version includes many changes such as ‘mmc: sdhci: Fix SDHCI_QUIRK_BROKEN_CQE,’ ‘copy_xstate_to_kernel(): don’t leave parts of destination uninitialized’ and the fixed Fix max PFN arithmetic overflow on 32 bit systems,’ among many others.
The shortlog available here includes the changes that came in this last week since rc7.
Seven weeks in development, the Linux 5.7 kernel is finally here. This series brings many goodies for Linux users, including a new and improved exFAT file system implementation, improved perf cgroup profiling, as well as a thermal-aware scheduler that should increase the performance.
Security-wise, Linux kernel 5.7 also introduces ARM Kernel Pointer Authentication for the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture to protect the kernel against return-oriented programming attacks and a new LSM (Linux Security Module) for BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) programs called bpf-lsm.
v5.7 introduces several new enhancements to 64-bit ARM architecture such as ARM Activity Monitors (AMU) extension support and in-kernel pointer authentication which was earlier restricted to userspace.
Furthermore, kernel 5.7 also adds support for new ARM architecture-based devices and SoCs. It includes Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 and PINE64’s Pinebook Pro laptop, PineTab tablet, and PinePhone mobile phone.
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Speaking of the other filesystems, Linux 5.7 brings Zstd compression support to the F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System) filesystem. Not only that, but F2FS now also has a new kernel ioctl and mount time display in debugfs. Here is a pull request that contains all enhancements, cleanups, and other bug fixes for F2FS in Kernel 5.7.
With Linux 5.7, XFS also sees a number of changes coming in two parts for code clean-ups, improved metadata validation, and other bug fixes. The major highlight in XFS is the initial preparation for online repair and filesystem checking.
Linux 5.7 has arrived, serving as the latest mainline release of the Linux Kernel — but what’s changed? Well, in this post we recap the new features and core changes bundled up inside this kernel update.
As per tradition Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.7 in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), where he says: “We’ve got a lot of changes in 5.7 as usual (all the stats look normal – but “normal” for us obviously pretty big and means “almost 14 thousand non-merge commits all over, from close to two thousand developers)”.
Fun fact: Linus recently switched from Intel to AMD, which he hasn’t used for quite a while!
While the Linux 5.7 kernel will likely be available for testing in Ubuntu 20.10 during development it’s not yet clear precisely which kernel version will be offered in the final stable release come October (and thus be back-ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as a HWE update in 20.04.2 LTS).
The MMC changes for new kernel cycles don't tend to be particularly noteworthy but it's a different story with the new Linux 5.8 kernel cycle.
With Linux 5.8, erase/discard/trim support is being enabled now for all (e)MMC/SD hosts. The Linux kernel has long supported this discard/trim support for MMC/SD but until now it's been opt-in by the host drivers. But thanks to all of the host driver work and MMC core improvements over the past number of kernel cycles, the developers are content enough with the overall state of the support that they are no longer making it opt-in but will make it supported on all hosts. Of course, the card in question still needs to support these commands for it to be supported, but at least the host capability checks are now removed from MMC core.
Linux's pstore "persistent storage" code is seeing a number of improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel.
Pstore is the Linux interface to persistent storage for archiving a limited amount of data across reboots, such as for archiving kernel oops or panic messages so they can be easily analyzed following a reboot from such a fatal problem.
Adding to the multiple new AMD drivers coming with Linux 5.8 is their new SPI controller driver.
The AMD SPI controller driver (spi-amd) was mailed out in April and for supporting the SPI controller within newer AMD SoCs. This 300+ lines of code driver was previously outlined in this earlier article.
The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were sent in today for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 merge window.
On the hardware monitoring front this cycle the updates include:
- The new AMD Energy driver for exposing the energy sensors on Zen/Zen2 CPUs. From my own testing so far this new driver is working out quite well albeit long overdue.
For those very concerned about CPU data sampling vulnerabilities, the Linux 5.8 kernel comes with the ability to flush the L1 data cache on each context switch. That's good for security, but will hurt the system performance with all the excess L1 cache flushing.
This work stems from a proposal earlier this year to flush the L1d cache on context switches due to recent snoop assisted data sampling vulnerabilites or the cache data leaked via side channels. This work was carried out by an Amazon engineer so presumably there is some interest in offering this functionality in the AWS space.
Still digging through the 207 patches for the AMD Radeon Sienna Cichlid, but will update if seeing anything else of note. For the most part it's leveraging the existing Navi code paths but the usual churn surrounding firmware, clock-gating / power management differences, and other modifications in the usual spots for bringing up new hardware. The main code additions primarily pertain to the new DCN3 and VCN3 blocks.
Given the timing of these patches, the AMD Sienna Cichlid won't be mainlined until the Linux 5.9 merge window opening in August and then releasing in stable around October. That timeframe at least does point to Sienna Cichlid likely being the "RDNA 2" graphics card launch coming later in the calendar year.
Recently, at Build Conference 2020, Microsoft announced a new feature for its Windows subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). This time, it came up with ‘DirectX loves Linux‘ tagline that aims to further extend the computation capability of WSL2 instances.
After huge demand from developers, Microsoft brought the GPU hardware acceleration support to the Linux system running on WSL2. For the same, Microsoft submitted the first draft of its new DirectX driver to the Linux kernel. But it does not seem like an easy way for Microsoft to upstream code to Linux.
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Dave Airlie from Intel also put forward his thought that the patch would only add burden on upstream rather than adding any value to the Linux ecosystem. In his latest blog, he also expressed that it doesn’t enhance the Linux graphics ecosystem in any useful direction. Dave even declined to review the code.
Well, it is quite clear that ‘DirectX on Linux’ has nothing to do with native Linux desktop support. It is not available for bare metal Linux systems but rather only for Linux VM running on WSL2 Windows. As Microsoft’s developer states, currently the driver code strives to add GPU resource sharing capability to Linux guests on WSL2.
  A few weeks back I began delivering Ryzen 7 4700U Linux laptop benchmarks for this 8-core Zen 2 mobile CPU with Vega graphics. The results have been very good and the support is in good shape with the latest Linux kernel, but many have been wondering about the Ryzen 5 4500U. The Ryzen 5 4500U is beginning to appear in several $500~600 USD laptops and offers six cores. Here are benchmarks and initial impressions with the Lenovo Flex 5 that features a 14-inch 1080p display, 16GB dual channel memory, 256GB SSD, and the Ryzen 5 4500U all for just $599!
Given the overwhelming interest by readers in the Ryzen 5 4500U in it appearing in several budget-friendly laptops, curiosity got the best of me for testing this laptop as well as with there not being many (Windows) benchmarks in general for the 4500U at this point. As usual with most laptop vendors not being interested in laptop coverage, I ended up buying the laptop last week as a fun testing candidate given Phoronix turning 16 years old this week - a birthday of benchmarking! The most interesting value laptop I've found with the Ryzen 5 4500U has been the Lenovo Flex 5 15-inch 2-in-1 that has the Ryzen 5 4500U with a 1080p display, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, Vega graphics, and a 256GB NVMe SSD all for just $599. The particular SKU is 81X20005US for those looking for a sub-$600 laptop.
Foliate Linux eBook reader has been updated with support for more book formats, including comic book archive, a new library view (which includes eBook discovery), and various other improvements.
Foliate is a free and open source GTK eBook reader for Linux. Built with GJS and Epub.js, the eBook reader lets users view read eBook files using multiple layouts: single column, two-column, or continuous scrolling.
On top of that, it features reading progress slider with capter marks, bookmarks and annotations, customizable font, line-spacing, marings and brightness, custom themes, keyboard shortcuts and touchpad gestures, as well as the ability to open footnotes and look up words (using Wiktionary, Wikipedia and more) in popovers. The application also includes basic text-to-speech support using eSpeak NG and Festival.
Finding free ebooks to read in Foliate, a GTK ebook reader for Linux desktops, just got a whole lot easier.
The new Foliate 2.2.0 release comes with several enhancements, one of which is better eBook discovery via OPDS. OPDS is the “feed” protocol used by free ebook services like the Gutenberg Project, Standard Ebooks, and Feedbooks to share free works with the wider wold.
Having the works available from this repos accessible within the app is a nice touch.
The new “Catalog” feature (to give it its proper name) is accessible as a tab on the new Library view. You can manually add additional OPDS feeds (e.g., the Internet Archive) as well as edit or remove the ones which are there by default.
A common complaint about YouTube is that to watch the material you need to use a web browser. Fortunately, some creative developers have developed applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube.
If you prefer accessing YouTube material from the command-line, we recommend using youtube-dl and You-Get. They offer excellent functionality, and have a large following of both users and developers. But we are conscious that many people prefer an attractive and advanced graphical user interface. You might therefore be interested in Tartube.
Tartube is an open source program written in Python 3 and uses Gtk 3. It’s partially based on youtube-dl-gui.
A developer for Collabora, the open source consultancy firm that works with the likes of Valve has sent in a Linux Kernel patch aimed at helping Windows games run on Linux through Wine.
From what's noted in the patch, which was sent in for gathering comments (RFC = Request for comments), it seems more and more modern Windows applications / games are sidestepping the actual Windows API. The result? It breaks Wine compatibility as "it doesn't have a chance to intercept and emulate these syscalls before they are submitted to Linux".
What they're going for is an addition to the Linux Kernel, to enable them to filter and find out if the calls being done are from Wine itself or from the Windows application being run. They're proposing using the seccomp function, used usually for security purposes but this is in no way a security feature it's just how they're building the functionality for Wine while re-using what's available.
Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask, a prologue to a much bigger upcoming point & click horror adventure game is now confirmed to be releasing on June 18.
Today Red Martyr Entertainment sent word that the Linux version is ready to go so it will be a simultaneous release. It follows the mysterious events that precede a macabre series of murders, allegedly related to devil worship and witchcraft. According to the gameplay, your actions and choices will change how you experience the storyline and what characters you meet.
Today Paradox Interactive announced the formation of a new studio with Paradox Tinto, with an aim to focus on their grand strategy games.
Paradox Tinto is located in Barcelona, headed by Johan Andersson, 25+ year veteran of Paradox Development Studio and original creator of the Europa Universalis video game franchise. They're now putting together a dedicated team to oversee further development on Europa Universalis IV (which supports Linux). After that, they will be responsible for creating new grand strategy games.
Geneshift, an indie game that's had many faces over the years and now mostly settled into a Battle Royale as the main part has gained a single-player daily survival run.
The thing is, Geneshift had a single-player (and co-op) mode for a long time now. The issue is how the big Battle Royale update changed the focus of the game so the current single-player campaign is very different. This now daily survival run helps to bridge the gap a little and give you something extra to blast through and climb the leaderboard on. You go across waves of increasingly deadly enemies to see how long you can survive. If you own the Supporters Edition DLC, which contains the rest of the game (currently free with purchases), you can even do this mode in 4-player co-op.
Factorio, that magnificent indie game about building sprawling conveyor belts and production chains is going to release sooner than originally expected.
In their latest Friday Facts post, Wube Soft mentioned how Cyberpunk 2077 was now slated to be release around a week before their own launch. They thought that might have a negative effect as it would take attention away from other games. They have a point and so they've moved Factorio's release up to August 14, 5 weeks earlier than originally planned.
  When people think of the Open Source movement, they imagine plain-looking software with a no-frills user-interface that’s “of the geek, by the geek, for the geek”. But did you know that there are many developers who’ve contributed precious time and effort to create “free” computer games that could have otherwise earned them oodles of cash?
Here are a few fun offerings that are Open Source, which means that they are free to play, and you also get access to the code to tinker with and improve gameplay if you know just how...
 GamerOS, a Linux distribution based originally on Arch with a firm focus on an out of the box experience for gaming on your couch (much like Valve's original idea with SteamOS) has a new release.
Sounds like plenty of nice changes if you want a Linux-based system to stick under your big-screen TV. If you've used Steam Big Picture mode and know your way around it, GamerOS should make it quite easy since that's what it's based upon.
Plenty of the key components behind it have been upgraded with GamerOS 18 including a newer Linux Kernel at 5.6.15, update Mesa drivers 20.0.7, NVIDIA driver 440.82, plus an updated compositor and other bundled packages like RetroArch 1.8.8.
As they said they would late last month, it appears Electronic Arts have gone ahead and uploaded some of the source code for the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection.
Dropped onto GitHub recently is a new CnC_Remastered_Collection repository, containing plenty of code for both the original Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn plus Red Alert. Properly done too, with a GPL3 license to go along with it. They've attached some addition terms with it, which the GPL3 allows, to mention things we would expect like not giving rights away to trademarks and such.
Google's game streaming service, Stadia, today adds another 5 titles available for anyone who has an active Stadia Pro subscription to redeem. As promised by Google recently, they continue to expand Stadia and reward those who stick with the Pro tier.
Dicey Dungeons was one of my favourite releases from last year and it keeps getting better! A fresh update recently released making it even easier to play.
What is Dicey Dungeons? It's a deck-building roguelike. You collect cards which form your abilities and travel through various floors of a dungeon taking down enemies as you go. What makes it different is how you play. There's no mana like other games. Instead, you roll dice and cards activate based on what number die you place inside them. It's brilliant.
The thing is though, sometimes you just want to kick back and relax with a gamepad—and now you can. As of the 1.8 update, Dicey Dungeons has full gamepad support and it really does work great. It's actually a little surprising how good it feels in such a game, almost like it was made for it.
Hey all! This is my first report of the project’s Coding Period.
Today, the Community bonding period finally ended and GSoC’s three months coding period officially begins.
In the last month, I made myself more familiar with git, qml and javascript. As KDE including Gcompris has been moved to Gitlab so I also changed the configuration of my local repository accordingly and tested it. I read codes of almost all the activities (hope I didn’t miss any) and I am quite comfortable with all now.
A month ago I was selected to participate as a student in Google Summer of Code with Kdenlive. The Community Bonding period is coming to an end and the coding period will soon commence.
In this post, I am going to talk about what the project is about, how I plan to implement it, and what all I have done in the community bonding period to ensure a smooth and bump-free coding period.
I promised gocryptfs support in Vault a long time ago, but I kept failing to deliver on that promise because of other obligations, life and work happenings.
Now, the beauty of Free Software is that the users do not need to rely only on my free time for new Vault features.
Martino Pilia sat down and wrote a gocryptfs backend for Plasma Vault which has been merged and will be available in Plasma 5.19. Many thanks for that!
This is the second beta release for Krita 4.3.0. It’s later than expected because our system for making release builds was temporarily unavailable.
It was around 23:25(IST) on the 4th of May, my brother and I were glued to our phone screens, the GSoC webpage open, eagerly waiting for the results (he was visibly the more excited one). And BAM! 23:31, I saw my name on the GSoC website. Then followed a tsunami of “congratulations”. I’ve been accepted into GSoC to work with GNOME.
I applied for the Music project under GNOME. I’ve always fancied music, making music and now I wanted to make a music player to play that music. So, when I saw the Music listed for GSoC, I knew, I just knew that it was the “one”. I started contributing to the project and made some minor fixes, here and there. Those fixes taught me a lot about open source.
I have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2020 with GNOME Foundation! I am grateful to my mentor albfan and the whole GNOME developer community to have helped me become capable enough to tackle this project. Can’t wait to get my hands dirty and become a strong member of the GNOME community!
On 5th May 2020, I got an email from google, stating that I got accepted as a participant for Google Summer of Code 2020. The organisation I applied to was GNOME.
Reason being, I have been contributing to GNOME since early 2019 to various projects such as gitg, libgit2-glib, GNOME Games etc. These contributions were usually minor fixes, but ended up being very educational for someone who was new to open-source.
I'm so excited to announce that I'm being part of Summer of Code 2020 with GNOME!
In this post, I'll talk about my experience during the student application period.
Hello everyone, This is the first post in my blog of many up coming posts that will be documenting my journey through the open source world as I’ve been accepted to GSoC internship for 2020, contributing to Gnome organization. I’ll try to document every little detail as possible to try to give the same experience I had.
So, who am I ? you may be wondering !!
As said on the home page, I am Nour E-Din, an undergrad student, my first contribution to and open source application was to Evolution. Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME.It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. It has been maintained for years, had developed a lot and has many users who use it daily.
Well, why the ants ? Think teamwork, think team effort, interdependent efforts, voluntary involvement, the easy stuff, the hard stuff, the small and the large stuff, they all do it together, collectively and end up making what all of us call an ant-hill. A self sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting various ants, queen ant,the female workers, and male ants and the baby ants of-course. Who will in-turn help build a bigger ant-hill bootstrapped upon its previous design and so on into the future . . . .
Well enough said about ants ! You get where I am going !
This post is about how I came to contribute to an open-source project, got started on a journey I had been looking forward to since ever.
It’s already been 3 weeks since I’ve received my acceptance email to GSoC internship. I am going to explain what progress have been made during this time and what I am willing on achieving on the upcoming days .
Fuchsia is an open-source operating system designed from the ground up for security and updatability.
Fuchsia is…
  Once AutoTux is up and running it is very close to running Debian 10 with Xfce installed and a macOS-style theme in place. The key feature of the distribution is less about what we end up with and more about how we get there. In other words, the focus of the project is the install process and I feel that is what we should look at when evaluating its merit.
To its credit, AutoTux does what it claims to do. It almost entirely automates the install process. We transfer the ISO file to removable media, boot from it and the installer is entirely automated. All we need to do is remove the disc at the end and press Enter to restart the computer. It really does not get much more streamlined than that. In the end, we end up with a solid, Debian-based install with a wide array of default applications that should allow most people to get straight to work. This is a fast way to get up and running with a general purpose operating system.
I have just two concerns when it comes to AutoTux. The first is the message we are shown when the install is over which asks the user to leave the install media in the machine when pressing Enter to reboot. Following this direction results in an endless loop of the system being installed over and over. It may seem like a small detail, but when a project's install process is just two manual steps, having one of them include a misleading prompt is an unfortunate oversight.
Released not even 24 hours ago, the Linux 5.7 kernel series ships with lot of goodies, including a new and improved exFAT file system, a thermal-aware scheduler for better performance, ARM64 Kernel Pointer Authentication, a new BFS-based Linux Security Module, and some new features for x86 CPUs.
If you want to install Linux kernel 5.7 on your Linux Lite computer, now you can. The kernel is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit installations on Linux Lite series 3.x, 4.x, and the just launched Linux Lite 5.0, which is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Here’s how to install it!
Linux Lite is one of the best Linux distributions suitable for Windows users. Not just limited to that, it’s also one of the most preferred lightweight Linux distributions available.
Linux Lite 4.x series based on Ubuntu 18.04 was good but it didn’t have UEFI support. But, now that Linux Lite 5.0 has finally arrived based on Ubuntu 20.04 and I’m excited to see the changes!
Even though OpenBSD’s origin story goes back almost 25 years, there is nothing pre-historic about this project. OpenBSD is a well-renowned powerhouse for innovation. Every day extremely talented developers share their latest software creations — through the OpenBSD project — with all of the world to enjoy, for everyone to use as they see fit.
This tireless sharing of creativity helped create a world where now virtually every computer and smartphone on the planet contains pieces of OpenBSD software.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04 LTS and some of the applications pre-installed.
In Step 2 Toward Enhanced Update Infrastructure Access the time-line for enabling access to the SUSE update infrastructure in the Public Cloud via routing through the data center was announced. As of June 1, 2020 we have started the work necessary to make this possible for all regions in AWS, Azure, and GCE. This marks the beginning of the final phase of a process that started almost 1 year ago with A New Update Infrastructure For The Public Cloud. We expect to have everything completed by no later than the end of June 2020, but will most likely be much faster. The changes from a global IP based access control mechanism to an instance based access mechanism apply to both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server For SAP Applications (SLES For SAP) on-demand instances and any images released in the future that might access the update infrastructure.
“The first is cost,” he says. “Linux has been around since the 1970s and has come a long way in that time. In one month (April 2020), Linux installations grew from 1,3% of the total installed base to a 3%. This might not sound like a lot, but it represents massive growth. For some Linux distributions, the grow rate was better than 600%.”
[...]
Brink points out that switching to a Linux front-end and an effective back-end management tool could save organisations a massive chunk of their end user license costs. SUSE Manager monitors an organisation’s infrastructure and manages how they deploy services on to front-end devices from a central point.
  Many organizations utilizing Red Hat Satellite have network policies that block direct access to the internet by the Satellite Server, and instead require that the Satellite Server go through an HTTP proxy to access the internet to synchronize content. Satellite 6.7 introduced some changes and new functionality around its support for connecting to the Red Hat CDN through a proxy that will be covered in this post.
On versions of Satellite prior to 6.7, it was possible to enable utilization of a global proxy. However, in environments with multiple proxy servers, it was not possible to configure a different proxy server for individual repositories. With Satellite 6.7, in addition to the ability to set a global proxy, it is now also possible to configure proxies at the individual repository level or at the product level.
This is the first in what I hope to make a monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog.
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In May, we published 31 posts. The site had 4,964 visits from 2,392 unique viewers. Readers wrote 13 comments. 202 visits came from Fedora Planet, while 716 came from search engines.
You hear the expression "betting" on platforms all the time. But Bilyoner Interactive Services in Turkey is really betting on Red Hat OpenShift by deploying a live betting platform on OpenShift with Red Hat Ansible Automation.
When live sports betting was legalized in Turkey, Bilyoner Interactive Services needed a supported, scalable, and highly available technology foundation to support this new service. By migrating from community open source to Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Bilyoner used container and microservices technology to quickly create and launch its new live betting platform. As a result, the company reports a five-fold increase in traffic and close to 100% service uptime.
In this 28th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in May 2020.
Security concerns remain one of the key factors in enterprises unlocking the true value of the cloud. From modernizing applications with containerized microservices, to securing data while training AI models, or building continuous, secure DevOps pipelines in a growing complex hybrid cloud, developers face myriad challenges when it comes to security in a cloud native hybrid cloud environment. IBM Developer wants security to be one less thing you have to worry about when you’re building high-performance solutions. That’s why we put together the Digital Developer Conference: Cloud Native Security on June 24, 25, and July 1.
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Learn the skills to react with speed and confidence by using solutions on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift alongside leading open source contributions by IBM and Red Hat to Kubernetes, Istio, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Apache Foundation.
What started as an idea in early 2019 has now blossomed into a publishing platform with a growing community with more than 100 writers. As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Enable Sysadmin publication, we’re excited to announce a new program for our community of writers.
On May 5, 2020, we officially launched the Sudoers program for the Enable Sysadmin community. The Sudoers program recognizes our most trusted and committed contributors and provides a framework for becoming an established writer on the site.
The editorial team has been working closely with 10 of our writers to help establish the first group of members in the Sudoer program. To date, this group of amazing sysadmins has collectively published more than 100 articles on the Enable Sysadmin publication.
Last week, we reported a “new” Raspberry Pi 4 SBC with 8GB RAM launched last week, together with a beta version of “Raspbian” 64-bit needed to make full use of the extra RAM, although the 32-bit version can also address the full 8GB thanks to LPAE, but with a limitation of 3GB per process.
It turns out the launch of the new board, effectively killed Raspbian. But by name only, as the recommended Raspberry Pi operating system is now called Raspberry Pi OS with three 32-bit images namely Desktop with recommended apps such as Wolfgram and Mathematica, Desktop, and Lite for headless applications, as well as the Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit beta that’s yet to be officially released, but can be downloaded from the forums and works on Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 boards.
Kotlin is being packaged under the Google Summer of Code within the Debian organization itself. The major reason behind bringing Kotlin in Debian is to update all the Android packages which are now heavily dependent upon the Kotlin libraries.
The major work to bring Kotlin into Debian is done for the version 1.3.30, by Saif Abdul Cassim (goes by m36 on IRC) as a part of his GSoC'2019. All his contributions to the team can be found in his blog posts.
So, for now, we have a bootstrap package and a Kotlin package for the version with 1.3.30. There were still changes needed as we lacked some of the dependencies for Kotlin, and the source package lacked copyright information and didn’t comply with Debian standards.
Here’s my (eighth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
In May 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 14.5 hours (of 14.5 hours planned).
I would say that this was a crazy month, but with everything ever escalating, does that even mean anything anymore?
I lost track of tracking my activities in the second half of the month, and I’m still not very good at logging the “soft stuff”, that is, things like non-technical work but that also takes up a lot of time, but will continue to work on it.
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I’m also moving DPL activities to the DPL blog, so even though it’s been a busy month in the free software world… my activity log here will look somewhat deceptively short this month…
  This week’s open source software highlight is Synaptic. Learn what this good old package manager can do that the modern software managers cannot.
Synaptic is a lightweight GUI front end to apt package management system used in Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and many other Debian/Ubuntu based distributions.
Basically, everything that you can do using the apt-get commands in the terminal can be achieved with Synaptic.
  The Linux Mint developers have revealed today in their regular monthly newsletter some more new features of the soon-to-be-released Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” operating system, which will be coming later this month based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).
One of these upcoming features is improved support for NVIDIA Optimus. In Linux Mint 20, the NVIDIA Prime system tray applet will now let users select the GPU they want to use and also display the GPU renderer, as you can see from the image below, courtesy of the Linux Mint project.
Moreover, a new “Run with NVIDIA GPU” right-click context menu option was implemented in the applications menu in Cinnamon and MATE desktops to allow users to easily run apps with their dedicated NVIDIA graphics card.
Along with the release of the $75 Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory, the Raspberry Foundation has updated its official operating system, Raspberry Pi OS, formerly known as Raspbian.
The 32-bit version of Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS is gaining a new 'bookshelf' app that organizes editions of Raspberry Pi-related magazines and books from Raspberry Pi Press, such as the MagPi, HackSpace and Wireframe.
The foundation has provided Raspbian as the official OS ever since the first batch of Arm-based single-board computers arrived in 2012, which featured just 512MB of RAM and a Broadcom chip that ran at 700MHz.
  Timesys announced a BSP Lifecycle Maintenance Service for embedded Linux products using NXP processors. The BSP service offers regular board support package release updates okys the Vigiles Prime security and management service.
Last June, Timesys launched a Vigiles security monitoring and management service with CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) tracking for embedded Linux. Now, Timesys has teamed with NXP to provide a turnkey BSP Lifecycle Maintenance Service for updating NXP-based board support packages that includes a subscription to the highest Vigiles Prime tier.
The 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 is now available, according to an announcement by Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi blog. The new, more powerful, Pi 4 is priced at $75.
The 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 features slightly rearranged components. According to Upton, this change was made in order to supply the higher peak currents required by the new board and involved “removing a switch-mode power supply from the right-hand side of the board next to the USB 2.0 sockets and adding a new switcher next to the USB-C power connector.”
  It seems to me there are two camps when it comes to the Raspberry Pi. Some people use them as little PCs or even laptops with a keyboard and screen connected. But many of us use them as cheap Linux servers. I’m in the latter camp. I have probably had an HDMI plug in a Pi only two or three times if you don’t count my media streaming boxes. You can even set them up headless as long as you have an Ethernet cable or are willing to edit the SD card before you boot the machine for the first time.
However, with the Raspberry Pi 4, I wanted to get to a desktop without fishing up a spare monitor. I’ll show you two ways to get a full graphical KDE desktop running with nothing more than a network connection.
  The Nuvo-7531 offers ruggedization features including -25 to 60€°C operation, vibration resistance compliant with MIL-STD-810G, Method 514.6, Category 4, and shock resistance per Method 516.6, Procedure I, Table 516.6-II. There are EN 55032 and EN 55024 certifications for EMC, as well as humidity tolerance rated at 10%~ 90%, non-condensing. The GbE and USB ports are equipped with screw-lock mechanisms.
Standard SKUs include the top-of-the-line 9th gen Coffee Lake Refresh, octa-core Core i7-9700E clocked at 2.6GHz/4.4GHz. The processors integrate Intel UHD graphics 630 and are accompanied by Intel H310 chipsets. As usual with Neousys, no OS was listed, but Linux should be a good fit.
With over 41 billion IoT devices expected to be active by 2027 — that’s at least 5 devices for every person on the planet — edge computing has emerged as a tenable solution to prevent the impending snowballing of network traffic.
Allow me to lift the veil on this buzzword and explain why it’s been gaining attention in tech circles lately.
The concept
IoT devices generate a lot of data. Smart home hubs constantly accrue information on voice commands, ambient noise, and auxiliary device output. Connected security cameras transfer several gigabytes of image data each day. And self-driving cars will, in all likelihood, be gathering hundreds of terabytes of data each year.
The idea of edge computing is to process all this data at the location it is collected. Data that is only of ephemeral importance can (and should) be crunched on the device itself. This is in contrast to cloud computing, where data is sent to massive, far-away compute warehouses for processing.
Sintrones’ fanless, Linux-ready “ABOX-5210G” transport PC features an up to 10-core Comet Lake-S CPU, Nvidia graphics, 3x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, 3x DP, 2x HDMI, 2x SATA, and 10x GbE ports with optional PoE.
Sintrones has announced the second embedded PC we’ve seen with an Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-S processor after Vecow’s recent ECX-2000 Series. The fanless ABOX-5210G uses slightly lower powered, but more power-efficient Core TE Comet Lake-S models than the Vecow system, including a 2.0GHz/4.5GHz Core i9-10900TE. There is also a 2GHz/4.6GHz Xeon W-1290TE, which similarly offers 10x dual-threaded cores, 20MB Intel Smart Cache, and a 35W TDP.
After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would write down my first impressions.
If you have never heard of the Pinebook Pro: It is a cheap, open, hackable laptop with an ARM processor, the successor of the original Pinebook (which I thought was too low-end to be a useful daily driver) with generally more premium components.
The risk with company-owned devices and improper behavior is not legal — which tends to grant full rights to a device owner — but is retention. And that speaks to punitive actions. If your company fires someone because they downloaded a non-whitelisted game app, will that lead to rebellion? And if you don't punish, why would anyone abide by your inconvenient rules?
Many mobile companies are now developing their technology to compress the heavy use of smartphones and converting into the wrist smartwatch with all the features of an android phone. Let’s just imagine; you just brought a brand-new android smartwatch for yourself from an electronics store.
  Implementing infrastructure using open-source software significantly reduces the total cost of ownership (TOC) of your infrastructure. Over the last few years, we’ve seen more and more companies moving to open source. These include Netflix, Uber, Visa, eBay, Wikipedia and AT&T. And this trend will only continue to grow. The migration is driven by better economics, improved flexibility, better integration capabilities and thus, the higher business value provided by the open source software.
Together with Dell, we hosted a webinar describing all of those benefits in detail. We also demonstrated our joint reference architecture for open infrastructure implementation. In this blog, I expand on the building blocks behind the open infrastructure and explain the role they play in the stack.
 We looked at the open source bootable USB tool Ventoy back in April 2020 when it first came out. The developer has been very active in the meantime; reason enough to take another look at the application to find out what has changed and improved.
Ventoy creates bootable USB devices using ISO images. That sounds an awful lot like what established programs such as Rufus do at first, but when you realize that it puts the ISO images on the drive and does not extract them, it becomes interesting.
Even better, it is possible to place multiple ISO images on the USB device after it has been prepared by Ventoy; this allows you to boot into different Linux systems or install different versions of Windows straight from a single USB device.
The key to understanding how we move forward is to first remember how we got here. OSI as we know it didn't exist until 2013.
Founded in 1998, the organization was held together in its first decade through strong board leadership in Michael Tiemann (2001-2012) and Danese Cooper (2002-2011). Deb Bryant (2012-present), Karl Fogel (2011-2014), Mike Milinkovich (2012-2018), and Simon Phipps (2010-2020) helped OSI begin professionalizing, by hiring General Manager Patrick Masson (2013-present), and becoming more democratic, with the introduction of a community-elected board. Molly de Blanc (2016-2020), Allison Randal (2014-2019), and Stefano “Zack” Zacchiroli (2014-2017) fostered better ties with the free software community. Richard Fontana (2013-2019) elevated legal discussions, taking OSI’s licensing work from knowledgeable hackers to expert practitioners and defining a review process. And Pam Chestek (2019-present) has brought a new level of professionalism to the license review process.
This is a reductionist and inevitably incomplete view of OSI’s history, but the point is this: OSI has come a long way, and I am forever grateful to the talented and generous individuals who collectively invested decades to get us here.
Over the last seven years, OSI has: sustained its core mission, shaped policy around the globe, worked tirelessly to mitigate open washing, built an alliance of more than 125 organizations representing hundreds of thousands of people, provided a home for projects like ClearlyDefined, and rolled out programs like FLOSS Desktops for Kids and Open Source Technology Management courses with Brandeis University.
How many times have you been researching stuff online that lead you to open more tabs than you needed? Many times I have even opened tabs and left in the far left corner of my browser because, while they had the information I was interested in returning to use later, I didn’t want to bookmark them. In a way, closing a tab makes me feel like I am done with it. But that was a while ago anyway because I have the power of tab managers under my fingers.
Tab (or session) managers are productivity tools that enable one to save tabs for later as well as to easily traverse the open ones. Continuing my streak of productivity-related topics, here is my collection of the best extensions that will enable you to take back control of your Chrome tabs and browsing sessions like it’s magic.
With the release of Firefox 77, we are pleased to welcome the 38 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 36 of whom were brand new volunteers!
Back when I first moved to Silicon Valley in 1998, I tried to understand how capital markets here made the valley such a unique place for inventors and entrepreneurs. Corporate stocks, real estate, international currency and commodities markets were concepts I was well familiar with from my time working at a financial news service in the nation's capital in the mid 1990's. However, crowdfunding and angel investing were new concepts to me 20 years ago. The emergence of crowdfunding platforms (Kiva, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Appbackr for instance) were more to the advantage of the funding recipient than the balanced two-sided exchanges of the commercial financial system.
When trying to grasp the way angel investors think about entrepreneurship, my friend Willy, a serial entrepreneur and investor, said: “If you want to see something succeed, throw money at it!” The idea behind the "angel" is that they are the riskiest of risk-capital. Angel investors seldom get payoffs from the companies they sponsor. But they do it to grow a cause they support in spite of the the uncertain outcome of the specific industry initiative they're funding, much like charitable gifting.
During the Augmented World Expo in May, I attended a conference session called "Web Monetization and Social Signaling," hosted by Anselm Hook, a researcher at the web development non-profit Mozilla, where I also work. He made an interesting assertion during his presentation, "Money appears to be a form of communication." His study was contrasting social signals (such as up-voting, re-tweeting, applauding with emojis) to draw attention to content users discovered on the web, in this case the Firefox Reality VR web browser. There are many reasons for this kind of user "social signaling." It serves as a bookmarking method, it signals to friends of the user who might also like the content and it gives feedback to the content/comment provider. However, he found in his research that participants actually reacted more strongly when they believed their action contributed financial benefit directly to the other participant. The interactions we need to enable as web developers is a new kind of gesture akin to the act of tipping with cash in offline society.
The promise of America is “liberty and justice for all.” We must do more to live up to this promise. The events of last week once again shine a spotlight on how much systematic change is still required. These events — the deaths at the hands of police and civilians, the accusations that are outright lies — are not new, and are not isolated. African Americans continue to pay an obscene and unacceptable price for our nation’s failure to rectify our history of racial discrimination and violence. As a result, our communities and our nation are harmed and diminished.
Change is required. That change involves all of us. It’s not immediately clear all the actions an organization like Mozilla should take, but it’s clear action is required. As a starting point, we will use our products to highlight black and other under-represented voices in this unfolding dialog. And we’re looking hard at other actions, across the range of our activities and assets.
  The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 7.0 Beta1 is available for testing!
LibreOffice 7.0 will be released as final at the beginning of August, 2020 ( Check the Release Plan for more information ) being LibreOffice 7.0 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 7.0 started in the beginning of June, 2019. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha1, 831 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 179 bugs have been fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in LibreOffice 7.0.
During the past weekend, we got the 500,000th donation since we started counting them, on May 1st, 2013. We are grateful to all the people who have donated, because they help all of us to keep the LibreOffice community growing and developing. The community has worked on translating LibreOffice in over 120 languages, closing the digital gap for many people who can only use LibreOffice in their native language and would otherwise be forced to use an office suite in English or in another foreign language.
Many donors have added a note to their donation, at the end of the process which starts on the following page: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Here is a list of the most significant from people who have had to access documents stored in a proprietary document format, a unique LibreOffice feature based on libraries developed and maintained by the Document Liberation project, in English or translated into English.
From 21 June a new set of rules will guide the implementation of Router Freedom in Europe. The internalisation of the rules by the 27 EU member states will face challenges with negative consequences for Router Freedom. The FSFE contributed to several improvements of the guidelines and will monitor compliance with them.
The COVID-19 pandemic shows how dependent people are on the Internet for their work and personal life. In times of lockdown, when people need to stay home and work remotely, the whole internet traffic, encryption, business and work interaction are transferred through personal routers. Since 2013, the FSFE has been advocating for Router Freedom in Europe with outstanding results in Germany and effects beyond its borders. Now, a new set of rules, for which the FSFE contributed to improve, will guide the implementation of Router Freedom in Europe. We summarise the positive outcomes as well as the challenges ahead.
The concept of inventory applied to software, sometimes called catalogue, is not new. In IT/help-desk it usually refers to the software deployed in your organization. Along the history, there has been many IT Software Inventory Management tools. I first started to think about it beyond that meaning when working in deployments of Linux based desktops at scale.
The popularity that Open Source and Continuous Delivering is providing this traditionally static concept a wider scope as well as more relevance. It is still immature though, so read the article with that in mind.
1.- What is Inventory in software product development?
I like to think about the software inventory as the single source of truth of your software product so the main element for product development and delivery auditing purposes.
Isn’t that the source code?
I am one of the agents of chaos who passionately argued the importance of removing barriers and recognizing that people are the core of a healthy DevOps mindset. Fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which collocated teams were forced to disperse overnight into self-isolating distributed entities, relying on technology to bring us all back together in a virtual world.
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A healthy DevOps mindset navigates through different paths of continuous improvement wherein disruption, discipline, and guardrails are the norm. What no one anticipated is the radical disruption we are all experiencing due to the pandemic, and the impact it has on our DevOps and personal mindset, our workflows, and the ceremonies of kanban and agile teams.
You may recall Tuckman's theory of group development, which outlines how teams grow into productive high-performers in stages. As expected, most, if not all, agile teams that switched from collocated to remote setup will slide back from the norming and performing stages to the storming stage, as shown in Figure 1.
Git 2.27 is out as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system.
Among the highlights with Git 2.27 are:
- The Transport Protocol Version 2 support, which was made the default in the previous release, has been demoted. There are some "remaining rough edges" leading to the v2 protocol being demoted from the default in Git 2.27.
GitLab has updated its CI/CD platform with a raft of capabilities spanning everything from value stream management to cybersecurity. In addition, GitLab announced it is making generally available Gitaly Clusters, which enable DevOps teams to create a warm replica of a Git repository.
In terms of core DevOps capabilities, the latest release adds the ability to customize the Value Stream Analytics module to specific workflows. GitLab is also planning to make it possible to visualize stages of a workflow.
Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population. We also hired more remote employees across all other teams, and tripled the number of remote Stripes across the company.
First, a Unix perspective on command-line interface design.
Unix is a computer operating system and the ancestor of Linux and macOS (and many other operating systems as well). Before graphical user interfaces, the user interacted with the computer via a command-line prompt (think of today's Bash environment). The primary language for developing these programs under Unix is C, which is amazingly powerful.
So it behooves us to at least understand the basics of a C program.
The write-up is at a very in-depth level, and while there’s an admission that some of the steps could have been performed more easily with ready-made tools, its point is to go through all steps at a low level. So the action largely takes place in GNU Radio, in which we see the process of identifying the signal and shifting it downwards in frequency before deducing its baud rate to retrieve its contents. The story’s not over though, because we then delve into some ASCII tricks to identify the packet frames, before finally retrieving the data itself. It still doesn’t tell you what the data contains, but it’s a fascinating process getting there nonetheless.
It’s easy to forget that GNU Radio has signal processing capabilities far beyond radio, but it was the subject of a fascinating Superconference talk. We even jumped on the bandwagon in the non-foolish part of our April Fool this year.
The next video (following the announcement, and shells sessions one, two, and three) is up in the T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. This time we introduce the wonderful byobu tool which is called both a ‘text-based window manager’ and a ‘terminal multiplexer’:
Hey all!! I'm Aghin Shah, a 3rd Year CS undergrad from IIT-Madras. I'll be working with DFFML, a sub-org under Python Software Foundation during GSoC on Implementing Distributed Orchestrator and Adding DataFlow tutorials.
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I'll be finishing patches for a couple of issues which I've been working on. I'll also start working on adding basic tutorials for DataFlow.
Hi, I am Arnav Kapoor a 3rd year Undergraduate student from IIIT-Hyderabad and I will be working with the Scrapinghub sub-org this summer. The project goal is to create a nuarmber-parser library to parse numbers in natural language and incorporate the same with existing libraries.
Hello, I am Aditya Kumar. I will be contributing to Scrapy during GSoC'20. This is my first blog of the series.
Welcome to my blog. I am participating in this year's GSoC program for Panda3D - a suborgansiation under PSF. Today is the start of the coding period. Its 7:00 am in India here and I am starting this memorable day by writing my first blog here on this forum. I have been assigned the task to integrate Recast & Detour tools in Panda3D game engine. Already excited by the project idea, I started playing with the tools of Panda3D during the community bonding period. I did go through a lot of blogs and articles about "recastnavigation", which is the github repository that provides the Recast and Detour tools. Well, this was pretty much what I did in the previous month, but now starts the actual coding period. I plan to start by planning the classes and functions required to bring recast into the Panda3D world.
Hello World! My name is Saksham Arora. I'm a 2nd year undergraduate student from India pursuing B. Tech in Information Technology. This is my blog for GSoC 2020 @ PSF! Over the summer, I'll be working with DFFML under the umbrella of Python Software Foundation. My project for the summer is to Integrate Image Processing into DFFML!
If you are trying to set up your Python box and wondering how to begin etc, then you are at the right place. Here, I tried to give you some steps for you to get you started.
The Raspberry Pi is one of the leading physical computing boards on the market. From hobbyists building DIY projects to students learning to program for the first time, people use the Raspberry Pi every day to interact with the world around them. Python comes built in on the Raspberry Pi, so you can take your skills and start building your own Raspberry Pi projects today.
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The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK-based charity organization. Originally designed to provide young people with an affordable computing option to learn how to program, it has developed a massive following in the maker and DIY communities because of its compact size, full Linux environment, and general-purpose input–output (GPIO) pins.
For the second year in a row, I was invited to report on the Python Language Summit. It’s a private gathering of Python language implementers (both the core developers of CPython and alternative Pythons), plus third-party library authors and other Python community members. This year, the Summit was held over two days by videoconference. I’m no longer mainly a Python programmer, but it’s still exciting to hear new ideas for the language. The core developers’ decisions affect millions of programmers; it’s a privilege to be in the room where it happens.
This week we welcome Seth Michael Larson (@sethmlarson) as our PyDev of the Week! Seth is the lead maintainer of urllib3. He also writes a Python blog.
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My first introduction to Python was in my “intro to CS” class at university. I fell in love with the simplicity of the language and the Open Source community. I’d known some programming before going to university so it wasn’t my first programming language but I really enjoyed what Python had to offer.
I remember getting excited by how straightforward sockets and network programming were in Python compared to C or C++, that was definitely a feature that grabbed my attention.
Since release 5.6 development has restarted, with the first changes already landing in the development branch.
Our demo servers now no longer require authentication. This helps keep the shared servers accessible to everyone (we often found that people would change the passwords and lock everyone else out).
FastAPI is a modern Python web framework that leverage the latest Python improvement in asyncio. In this article you will see how to set up a container based development environment and implement a small web service with FastAPI.
Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2020 Developer Survey, which was conducted back in February and taken by more than 65,000 people. Of those respondents, just over 52,000 identified themselves as professional developers. Topics covered in the survey included most loved (and dreaded) languages, technologies, and frameworks, as well as career values and employment status.
According to the survey, Rust remains the most loved language – for the fifth year in a row. Python fell from the second to third this year, with TypeScript moving into the number two slot. Kotlin, Go, Julia, and Dart are next on the list of beloved languages, separated by just a few tenths of a percentage point.
Violence against Asian Americans and Asian immigrants has surged in response to COVID-19. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and racist misinformation spews from the top leaders of the U.S. as Asian communities are vilified as scapegoats for Trump’s “Chinese virus.” Racial health inequities, leading to disproportionate deaths in communities of color, intensify with each passing day. All of this is occurring amid a backdrop of pre-existing structurally racist policies fueling and deepening public health crises, including the state-sanctioned police violence which continues to terrorize and Black lives every day, with the recent examples being the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.
There could be some selection bias here: States that waited longer may have been in a stronger economic position than those desperate to reopen sooner (although everything above is measured relative to each state’s own jobs trend for its last week in lockdown). And states that never issued stay-at-home orders are, on average, down less in job postings from 2019 (-34.5 percent, as of May 22) than states that still had orders in place as of May 22 (-38.3 percent). But those numbers are also indicative of how little power government orders may have to restart the job market anyway when compared with the power of the virus itself.
For example, running an effective booter service requires a substantial amount of administrative work and maintenance, much of which involves constantly scanning for, commandeering and managing large collections of remote systems that can be used to amplify online attacks.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, dosfstools, gst-plugins-good0.10, gst-plugins-ugly0.10, json-c, php-horde, php-horde-gollem, salt, and sane-backends), Fedora (drupal7, marked, NetworkManager, and wireshark), Mageia (gdb, jasper, and json-c), openSUSE (freetds, jasper, libmspack, mariadb-connector-c, sysstat, and trousers), Red Hat (bind), Scientific Linux (bind and freerdp), and SUSE (file-roller and java-11-openjdk).
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) connects external devices to a host. This interface exposes the OS kernels and device drivers to attacks by malicious devices.
To help detect such vulnerabilities, EPFL researchers have come up with a new security tool called USBFuzz to identify vulnerabilities in the USB driver stacks of widely used operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.
The malware is called the Octopus Scanner, and it targets Apache NetBeans, which is an integrated development environment used to write Java software. In its write-up of the attack, the GitHub Security Labs team explains how the malware lurks in source code repositories uploaded to its site, activating when a developer downloads an infected repository and uses it to create a software program.
Joomla! is one of the biggest CMS in the World, to be specific, it is the 3rd most popular after WordPress and Drupal. Being that big in the industry, even a tiny error can cause millions of users worldwide. Just a few days back, the Joomla! team announced a data breach that occurred accidentally last week.
Thankfully, the breach does not affect millions but 2,700 users who registered on JRD, Joomla Resources Directory. The incident happened last week when a member of JRD left a full unencrypted backup of JRD on AWS S3 server.
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Most of the users’ information involved in the breach is already public except the IP address and hashed passwords. If anyone found the backup and successfully unhashed the passwords, he can use those passwords on other websites like Gmail, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. to access them. If you are affected by the breach, used the same passwords on Gmail, Facebook, etc. as on JRD platform, change your passwords immediately.
KeePassXC appeals to Linux users who want to handle their own password management offline, but the added effort involved and lack of built-in password sync will frustrate casual users.
According to the actor, the leak is from 2019. Our preliminary analysis noted the last DOB record was from 2008. However, it should be noted that there are certain records with ‘NULL/empty’ DoB records, hence it’s hard to confirm how recent it is.
The biggest-ever spy network of Pakistan which was attempting to gather information about the Indian defence in Ladakh, using illegal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) exchange has been busted in Mumbai by the Military Intelligence of Jammu & Kashmir and the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police.
One person has been arrested in Mumbai so far. The probe, sources said, is underway to ascertain the identity of other individuals involved in the network and locations of other similar exchanges. Sources said more arrests are expected in the next few days.
Official sources said that in a joint operation, the crime branch of the Mumbai Police and the military intelligence of the Indian Army unearthed three functional Chinese SIM boxes and one standby sim box along with 191 SIM cards, laptop modem; antennas; batteries and connectors used for an illegal VoIP exchange in Mumbai.
The AG said that Google’s location tracking is unfair, deceptive, and also against the law: in this case, the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act.
The AG’s Office kicked off its consumer fraud investigation in August 2018, after the Associated Press ran an article titled “Google tracks your movements, like it or not”. The article was based on research from Princeton University that found that Google’s ability to track users’ location histories went far deeper than many of us realized.
Two of the largest U.S. college campus political organizations are calling for the closure of all Confucius Institutes in the United States, saying the Beijing-funded outposts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to control discourse on China at American universities.
The open letter states that China’s actions at U.S. colleges and universities “pose an existential threat to academic freedom as we know it.”
The Athenai Institute, a recently formed non-profit organization “dedicated to limiting the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on U.S. college campuses, published the letter.
Because something has been revealed here, which even the major voices in mainstream media cannot avoid. It isn't something about the possibly excessive, possibly regrettable protests or about their ambiguous racial dynamic, issues that until Saturday seemed to dominate the chattering-class social media discourse. It's about America's police, which increasingly resemble a lawless, authoritarian third force, largely unconstrained by political leaders, heedless of their own supposed rules and internally compromised by far-right or white supremacist ideology.
What we have seen in the United States over the last 48 to 72 hours is a nationwide "police riot," a term made famous more than 50 years ago during the protests outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. As David Fahrenthold and Arelis Hernández reported for the Washington Post on Sunday morning, police in Minneapolis and elsewhere sought "a forceful restoration of control," but "the effect was often the opposite, signaling disorder among those whose job it was to restore order": [...]
The violence appears so widespread and consistent that you could be mistaken for thinking it’s coordinated at a national level. To some extent, it is: President Trump has cheered on police violence like a fan at a sports event, and police departments across the country have styled themselves as military forces after receiving two decades of hand-me-downs from the War on Terror.
The publisher, Natural News, was one of the most prolific pushers of the viral “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which falsely claimed that the coronavirus is part of an elaborate government plot to control the populace through vaccines, and erroneously claimed that wearing a mask increases the risk of catching the coronavirus.
Facebook said that it had found foreign [astroturfers] repeatedly posted content from Natural News, an anti-vaccination news site that frequently posts false coronavirus conspiracy theories about 5G towers and Bill Gates. They also posted content from Natural News' sister websites, NewsTarget and Brighteon, in an effort to artificially inflate their reach.
The milestone, announced Thursday by the US Energy Information Administration, demonstrates the dramatic shift away from coal despite President Donald Trump's promises to prop up the industry.
America's coal consumption collapsed by another 15% last year to its weakest level since 1964, the EIA said. The sixth-straight year of declines for coal occurred even as Trump has slashed environmental regulations and installed a former coal lobbyist to lead the EPA.
Renewable energy, by contrast, continues to boom as costs fall and climate change concerns rise. Consumption of renewable energy in the United States hit a record high last year, the fourth-straight years of growth, the EIA said.
"Our most vulnerable communities are hungry, desperate and under enormous emotional stress. The American people want action from Congress and they want it NOW."
In a video message posted to Instagram on Saturday amidst days of nationwide protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a plea to anyone calling for the end of the “unrest” stirred by brutality and oppression to focus on the root causes of poverty, distrust, and violence in American society.
The Republican president is finding a way to turn the coronavirus into something that will rally his base. Can the Democrat say the same?
Too often journalists contribute to a troubling hierarchy by adhering to industry norms that work against protest movements that aggressively challenge the status quo.
Political groups that don’t fully disclose their sources of funding have already spent more than $100 million to influence 2020 races, a figure that is sure to rise as “dark money” backed super PACs unload their unprecedented cash reserves.
For decades, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals abroad to work in countries where natural disasters or poverty have left people without healthcare.€ In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the catastrophic US response to it, the absurdity of a propaganda war against Cuban medical missions has become more obvious than ever. But you can’t rely on corporate media to explain why.
Permutations of disaster are bearing down with such velocity on working-class people in the United States, it’s not easy to keep abreast — of the harms, but also of the welcome initiatives.
It’s a label that is usually reserved for foreign terrorist organizations and requires, under federal law, that the organization has a foreign nexus, according to CNN’s Josh Campbell. But antifa is a domestic entity with no real organization or leader, so we have to understand this move by Trump for what it is: a blatant attempt at shifting the blame for the unrest and violence onto the left. While many have been quick to blame protesters for the violence, a closer examination of footage shows that police are often escalating conflict unnecessarily by ramming protesters with SUVs and shooting rubber bullets, pepper spray and tear gas at peaceful protesters, press and even at residents standing on their own front porches.
Attorney General William Barr announced that federal law enforcement will activate the 56 regional FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces to apprehend and charge what he described as “violent radical agitators.” “The violence instigated and carried out by Antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly,” Barr said in a statement.
Market competition failed in delivering the urgently needed medical supplies and ensuring food distribution in China’s initial stage of the COVID-19 crisis. Again, we have observed the same in the United States. The timeline and the initial handling of the COVID-19 outbreak by Chinese authorities before January 23 are severely contested. But once the central government recognized the severity of the situation, it shifted to an all-out mobilization. China at least temporarily placed people over profits — and switched into disaster relief mode.
Social media platforms have become a central element of modern political life — too important to allow them to be run according to the whims of either an unbalanced president like Donald Trump or a few tech billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
The [Internet] was abuzz late Saturday night with speculation that Anonymous — the decentralized [attacker] collective — had successfully disabled the Minneapolis Police Department website, in retaliation for the murder of George Floyd.
The Minneapolis PD site, as well as the parent City of Minneapolis site, became inaccessible late Saturday, according to multiple user reports.
By early Sunday, the sites were still experiencing access problems, sporadically requiring visitors to enter “captchas” verifying they weren’t bots in a front-end hosted by [Internet] security firm Cloudflare — a signal the sites were experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, designed to render an [Internet] service unusable by flooding it with bogus traffic. (A separate site for the Minneapolis Police Department, insidempd.com, appears to be unaffected.
Many of these reforms have been implemented in Minneapolis. In 2018, the City issued a report outlining all the procedural justice reforms it has embraced, like mindfulness training, Crisis Intervention Training, implicit bias training, body cameras, early warning systems to identify problematic officers, and so on. They have made no difference. In fact, local activist groups like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD 150 have rejected more training and oversight as a solution and are now calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to cut the police budget by $45 million and shift those resources into “community-led health and safety strategies.”
Unfortunately, at the national level, Democratic members of Congress appear to have learned few lessons from the failures of six years of “police reform.” [...]
First, antifa is not an organization. It does not have a leader, membership roles or any defined, centralized structure. Rather, it is a vaguely defined movement of people who share common protest tactics and targets.
More important, even if antifa were a real organization, the laws that permit the federal government to deem entities terrorists and impose sanctions on them are limited to foreign groups. There is no domestic terrorism law, despite periodic proposals to create one.
Seward is seen in later footage being treated by a medic near the scene for a deep gash under his left eye. Both men sustained injuries to their arms, and Chavez was hit in the back of the neck.
The Reuters journalists were clearly identified as members of the news media. Chavez was holding a camera and wearing his press pass around his neck. Seward was wearing a bullet proof vest with a press label attached.
While Microsoft says the layoffs aren’t directly related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, media businesses across the world have been hit hard by advertising revenues plummeting across TV, newspapers, online, and more.
I have been invited to convey the attached four pieces of correspondence for your urgent review and response. The undersigned represent a cross party alliance of serving and former MPs, a cross-section of the Australian legal profession, diverse human rights advocates and a large number of writers, publishers and journalists.
In a matter of only a few days, Julian Assange will face court again in the UK. As detailed in the letters, we seek your urgent intercession in this matter while there is still time.
Physical copies will be delivered to your office shortly; in the meantime I would appreciate acknowledgement of receipt of these electronic copies.
If we want to reach a better place on the other side of this, we must refuse to be comforted too quickly.
As protests against police violence and the killing of George Floyd continued in cities across the U.S. on Saturday, a massive crowd gathered outside President Donald Trump’s White House as demonstrators again turned their ire and demands for justice and healing towards the nation’s most powerful elected official. After tensions built, clashes erupted between law enforcement and demonstrators.
Driving SUVs into demonstrators. Firing paint-ball rounds at people on their own front porch. Pushing an elderly man to the ground. These were just a few of the incidents witnessed as a militarized nation faced off against its own people on Saturday.
The rights of women to terminate their pregnancies and to receive free contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are on the chopping block. Those challenges to reproductive freedom are consistent with Trump’s agenda of pandering to the religious right while erasing Barack Obama’s achievements. The Supreme Court will rule on these cases during the month of June.
"Do I think this has solved the issue between police and unarmed black, human beings? No. But I do believe that this type of leadership is a positive step in the right direction and gives me hope for black men and women around the world and for all of humanity."
"Let's be clear," warned the ACLU. "There is no legal authority for designating a domestic group. Any such designation would raise significant due process and First Amendment concerns."
Here’s the social media accountability we actually need.
Black lives matter on the streets. Black lives matter on the Internet.€
EFF stands with the communities mourning the victims of police homicide. We stand with the protesters who are plowed down by patrol cars. We stand with the journalists placed in handcuffs or fired upon while reporting these atrocities. And we stand with all those using their cameras, phones and digital tools to make sure we cannot turn away from the truth.
In video footage, Mr Chauvin, 44, can be seen kneeling on Mr Floyd's neck for several minutes on Monday. Mr Floyd, 46, repeatedly says that he is unable to breathe.
"The fact that officer Chauvin kept his knee on his neck for almost three minutes after he was unconscious. We don't understand how that was not first degree murder. We don't understand how all these officers haven't been arrested," lawyer Crump said.
In addition to Minnesota, where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, the military is tracking uprisings in New York, Ohio, Colorado, Arizona, Tennessee, and Kentucky, according to a Defense Department situation report. Notably, only Minnesota has requested National Guard support. The documents were originally stored on an unclassified server but were subsequently “elevated” to a classified system. While the documents reveal significant National Guard force capabilities in each of the seven states, one Minnesota Guard member expressed concerns about the troops’ lack of training in responding to civil unrest.
Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.
"We’ve seen how militarized gear can sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force," Obama said at the time. "Some equipment made for the battlefield is not appropriate for local police departments."
Now, after Trump has loosened the program's requirements, the volume of surplus equipment flowing to police agencies is roughly the same as it was under Obama. But what's changed is the need for justification, mandated federal supervision and training — and that's got critics warning about trouble ahead.
"There is no accountability in place," said Ed Chung, a former Justice Department official who led the group that advised Obama on the issue.
State officials said that around 80 percent of those arrested in the Twin Cities on Friday had come from outside Minnesota
While "there's a group of folks that are sad and mourning" about Floyd, Mayor Melvin Carter said, "there seems to be another group that are using Mr. Floyd's death as a cover to create havoc."
John Harrington, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said there were approximately 40 arrests across St. Paul and Minneapolis on Friday night. He said some of those protesting had been linked to white supremacist groups and organized crime.
Flint has drawn national attention for its water crisis, which began in 2014, when city and state officials switched the city's water supply to save money. It exposed residents to dangerously high levels of lead and resulted in more than a dozen lawsuits.
During a protest for George Floyd in Flint on Saturday, the Genesee County sheriff decided to walk along side protesters.
In a video that has over four million views on Twitter, the sheriff, Christopher Swanson, was encouraged by protesters to walk with them.
Swanson asked the crowd of people surrounding him to tell officers what they needed to do and protesters began chanting "walk with us." Swanson responded by saying "let's walk."
There are already widespread news reports of how Trump is trying to “punish” Twitter or Facebook. In reality, the former has given him an unfettered megaphone with no friction for years—only recently adding an extra click to one of his tweets—and the latter surely welcomes the millions his campaign will spend on the forthcoming election. Facebook is also likely to continue algorithmically amplifying divisive, polarizing, or dubious content. Again and again, people tend to underestimate this president, whose grammar and punctuation may leave something to be desired but whose political instincts are keen. What else can you call his ability—in the middle of this summer of pandemic and as a major American city erupts in anger against yet another police killing—to have so many newspapers, analysts, and nongovernmental organizations spend so much time doing close readings of an executive order to assess its legality, coherence, or potential for becoming a law, as if any of that matters an iota. In the meantime, Trump remains focused on the only thing that matters: keeping Facebook in line until November 3, 2020.
In the Supreme Court's recent clarifying campaign through the Federal Circuit's U.S. patent law jurisprudence, one section of the statute, 35 U.S.C. ۤ112(a) has been noticeably left unscathed. Indeed, avoidance of this statutory section continues a pattern that has existed since the 1952 Patent Act was enacted. It is not for lack of petitions for certiorari, which have included during the Court's denials in Amgen v. Sanofi; Janssen Biotech, Inc. v. Abbott Laboratories; CoreValve Inc. v. Edwards Lifesciences AG; and Ariad v. Eli Lilly & Co. Last week, the Court's refusal to consider this section recurred with its denial of certiorari in Actavis Laboratories FL, Inc. v. Nalproprion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
To recap, the case arose in ANDA litigation over Nalproprion Pharma's Contraveۨ extended-release tablets of the combination of naltrexone hydrochloride and buproprion hydrochloride, for treatment of obesity, as claimed in Orange Book-listed U.S. Patent Nos. 7,375,111; 7,462,626; and 8,916,195. The District Court found that Defendant Actavis had not established that one claim (claim 11) of the '195 patent was invalid for failure to satisfy the written description requirement of 35 U.S.C. ۤ 112(a) with regard to the claim limitation reciting USP dissolution methods ("USP1" versus "USP2")
Quick recap: Merck KGgA (Merck Global) is a German company that traces its roots back to 1668. After the First World War, Merck Global's US subsidiary (Merck US) became an independent business, trading under the name MERCK in the US and Canada, while Merck Global traded under that name in other countries. A coexistence agreement was signed in 1955 and updated in 1970. The terms of the 1970 agreement were, in extremely brief summary, that each party could only trade in the other's territory if it used its full name.
So far, so good, until the Internet came along and ruined everything. Merck Global ended up suing Merck US for trade mark infringement in the UK on the basis of use of "MERCK" by Merck US on various websites, social media platforms and email addresses, which Merck Global said were targeted at the UK (Merck US also made some presentations physically in the UK, but Merck Global did not allege any actual sales or offers for sale by Merck US in the UK). Broadly speaking, Merck Global won at first instance and on appeal (reported by the Kat here and here, respectively), but various issues were remitted to the High Court for further consideration (because the first instance judgment did not contain sufficiently detailed findings in relation to some of the points in dispute).
Cloud torrenting services are an ideal tool to download content swiftly. They also help to hide your IP-address from the public at large. However, are they really anonymous? We asked the leading cloud torrenting services what their policies are.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment and the Motion Picture Association of America have 'seized' four more domains for being involved in piracy activities. While the domains don't appear to be particularly big players, they add to a growing list of online portals being quietly placed under the control of the massive global anti-piracy coalition.
