Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

11.27.16

Links 27/11/2016: Linux 4.8.11, Linux 4.4.35, and Distrowatch Rankings

Posted in News Roundup at 4:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Riot releases end-to-end encryption: get ready to chat securely!

    End-to-end encryption gives users true privacy, preventing anyone else from eavesdropping on conversations — even the very communications services they’re using. This is incredibly important for a decentralised ecosystem like Matrix on which Riot is built, where data can span across many different servers, and users should not have to trust any of those servers.

    End-to-end encryption is also a real differentiating feature from most other popular collaboration apps whose business models fundamentally rely on being able to read, analyse and profile your conversations.

  • Progress update for AtCore.

    A few days ago we hit a milestone in our development of AtCore. We are now able to properly install the libary for general use. Not only is installing a necessary for a libary that you plan to use within other stuff it also means that we can now focus our attention mostly on Atelier. We have now entered that magical time in development when the real world usage begins to drive its development. Thanks to everyone efforts we are almost ready for the next stage. Patrick has been doing reviews on every pull request. While he has been unable to help with as many commits as he would have liked to. His advice and direction in his reviews has been really helpful and has kept our style and code quality at a high level. Tomaz has been busy fixing up AtCore to be a proper KF5 libary with all the cmake deployment parts to go along with it. Most all of the cmake stuff has been written by Tomaz. Lays has been working on Atelier setup and getting all the non AtCore parts working. Thanks to her effort we are now able to use Atcore from Atelier!

    As for me i have been adding stuff to AtCore. Since our last progress update a few new things have been added. Emergency Stop this simply allows you to stop the printer using the emergency stop code.It also cleans up any the command queue. Pause/Resume when paused we store the current location of the head that that way after resume you can move your print head out of the way to access the model.Pause supports a comma seperated string of commands to be sent after pause. For my printer i use “G91,G0 Z1,G90,G1 X0 Y195″ when pause this move my head up 1 mm and then pushes my model out toward the front fo the machine. This is useful if you want to maybe put a nut into printed part or change filament durring print and even to corrrect print defects while printing. We have also started to do lay ground work for more status info being picked out from the serial chatter. Setting of the firmware plugin can be done durring connect to force a specific plugin. A progress bar for printing progress. Some cleanup for autodetection of the plugin. There is still things to add to AtCore but it should provide enough for most use cases already!

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • NoScript is multi-process compatible now

        NoScript, the one must have add-on for Firefox if you ask me, has received an update recently that introduces full multi-process compatibility (e10s).

      • Firefox will only support WebExtensions by the end of 2017

        Mozilla announced a far reaching change coming to the organization’s Firefox web browser in late 2017.

        The organization plans to cut support of all extension technologies but the rather new WebExtensions when Firefox 57 Stable is released.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Funding

    • Money in Open Source, and How Needle & Thread Will Be Profitable

      Money is one of the most difficult subjects to talk about when it comes to open source projects. It’s a basic fundamental truth that all open source projects need money to operate, and while open source software provides a plethora of benefits, I don’t think any reasonable person would tell you that a steady stream of income is one of them. Lots of people and organizations have presented different ideas and undertaken different experiments to try and maximize the amount of money coming in, while at the same time remaining open, fair, and accessible.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Works On EFI Runtime ABI Support, But Still Experimental

      The next release of DragonFlyBSD will feature better EFI support.

      DragonFly lead developer Matthew Dillon has landed EFI runtime ABI support that was ported over from the FreeBSD code-base.

      This EFI runtime ABI support allows for querying and setting the time, scanning EFI BIOS variables, and more. This code was ported from FreeBSD but with various changes for DragonFlyBSD’s different kernel interfaces.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Tear the wrapping paper off the 2016 Ethical Tech Giving Guide

      Electronics are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. From surveillance to harsh rules about copying and sharing, some gifts take more than they give.

      The good news is that there are ethical companies making better devices that your loved ones can enjoy with freedom and privacy. Today, we’re launching the 2016 Giving Guide, your key to smarter and more ethical tech gifts.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • [Older] Samsung Joins the Eclipse Foundation

      We are proud to announce that Samsung has joined the Eclipse Foundation. The Eclipse Foundation is the leading open source organization whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. In tandem with Eclipse’s mission, Samsung provides an open and interoperable platform for IoT development through the Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT Platform.

    • How To Start Learning A Programming Language

      Have you ever wonder how everything works? From Smartphones Operating Systems to even each and every Linux Distro and every Operating System created by Microsoft and Apple. How does it play my favorite music? How does it save my files to the cloud? How does actually everything works? All this questions are answered with one big bolded and all capital “PROGRAMMING”.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Mars Ice Deposit Holds as Much Water as Lake Superior

      rozen beneath a region of cracked and pitted plains on Mars lies about as much water as what’s in Lake Superior, largest of the Great Lakes, researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have determined.

      Scientists examined part of Mars’ Utopia Planitia region, in the mid-northern latitudes, with the orbiter’s ground-penetrating Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument. Analyses of data from more than 600 overhead passes with the onboard radar instrument reveal a deposit more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico. The deposit ranges in thickness from about 260 feet (80 meters) to about 560 feet (170 meters), with a composition that’s 50 to 85 percent water ice, mixed with dust or larger rocky particles.

      At the latitude of this deposit — about halfway from the equator to the pole — water ice cannot persist on the surface of Mars today. It sublimes into water vapor in the planet’s thin, dry atmosphere. The Utopia deposit is shielded from the atmosphere by a soil covering estimated to be about 3 to 33 feet (1 to 10 meters) thick.

      “This deposit probably formed as snowfall accumulating into an ice sheet mixed with dust during a period in Mars history when the planet’s axis was more tilted than it is today,” said Cassie Stuurman of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the lead author of a report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

  • Hardware

    • AMD may launch next-generation Zen processors on January 17

      The latest rumor surrounding AMD’s upcoming and much-hyped Zen architecture has it slated for a launch on January 17. Purportedly the first chips to be released will be high-end desktop components, with their initial unveiling coming a week earlier at the CES event in Las Vegas.

  • Security

    • Azure bug bounty Pwning Red Hat Enterprise Linux

      Acquired administrator level access to all of the Microsoft Azure managed Red Hat Update Infrastructure that supplies all the packages for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances booted from the Azure marketplace.

    • pledge(2) … or, how I learned to love web application sandboxing

      I use application-level sandboxing a lot because I make mistakes a lot; and when writing web applications, the price of making mistakes is very dear. In the early 2000s, that meant using systrace(4) on OpenBSD and NetBSD. Then it was seccomp(2) (followed by libseccomp(3)) on Linux. Then there was capsicum(4) on FreeBSD and sandbox_init(3) on Mac OS X.

    • [Older] Why is Apache Vulnerable by Default?

      Apache is the most popular web server on Earth, with a market share of 46.4% — well above Nginx (21.8%) and Microsoft IIS (9.8%). Thanks to Linux package managers like Yum and APT you can install and get it up and running in minutes. The core installation even features powerful modules for URL rewriting, user authentication, and more.

    • [Re]discovering/correcting a ThinkPad supervisor password crack

      Don’t believe it? I didn’t either; it never worked for me. It turns out that’s only because the contemporary instructions for how to do it are wrong, or rather, they’ve mutated into a form that only works on some machines. As originally discovered, the hack reliably unlocks any* ThinkPad up to and including the Ivy Bridge models.

  • Finance

Share this post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Reddit
  • co.mments
  • DZone
  • email
  • Google Bookmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • NewsVine
  • Print
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • Facebook

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

Pages that cross-reference this one

What Else is New

  1. Links 9/1/2017: Dell’s Latest XPS 13, GPD Pocket With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day

  2. Update on Patent Trolls and Their Enablers: IAM, Fortress, Inventergy, Nokia, MOSAID/Conversant, Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, Faraday Future, A*STAR, GPNE, AlphaCap Ventures, and TC Heartland

    A potpourri of reports about some of the world’s worst patent trolls and their highly damaging enablers/facilitators, including Microsoft which claims that it “loves Linux” whilst attacking it with patents by proxy

  3. Mark Summerfield: “US Supreme Court Decision in Alice Looks to Have Eliminated About 75% of New Business Method Patents.”

    Some of the patent microcosm, or those who profit from the bureaucracy associated with patents, responds to claims made by Techrights (that software patents are a dying breed in the US)

  4. Eight Wireless Patents Have Just Been Invalidated Under Section 101 (Alice), But Don't Expect the Patent Microcosm to Cover This News

    Firms that are profiting from patents (without actually producing or inventing anything) want us to obsess over and think about the rare and few cases (some very old) where judges deny Alice and honour patents on software

  5. 2017: Latest Year That the Unitary Patent (UPC) is Still Stuck in a Limbo

    The issues associated with the UPC, especially in light of ongoing negotiations of Britain's exit from the EU, remain too big a barrier to any implementation this year (and probably future years too)

  6. Links 7/1/2017: Linux 4.9.1, Wine 2.0 RC4

    Links for the day

  7. India Keeps Rejecting Software Patents in Spite of Pressure From Large Foreign Multinationals

    India's resilience in the face of incredible pressure to allow software patents is essential for the success of India's growing software industry and more effort is needed to thwart corporate colonisation through patents in India itself

  8. Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released

    Links for the day

  9. Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)

    A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone

  10. The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO

    In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"

  11. Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern

    The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)

  12. Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3

    Links for the day

  13. Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released

    Links for the day

  14. Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents

    Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress

  15. New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)

    To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies

  16. Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials

    One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"

  17. Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones

    Links for the day

  18. Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released

    Links for the day

  19. Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)

    New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO

  20. 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil

    The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them

  21. Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC

    The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out

  22. Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It

    Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)

  23. Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event

    Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')

  24. When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO

    Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management

  25. No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council

    In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash

  26. FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union

    A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)

  27. EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)

    The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?

  28. Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1

    Links for the day

  29. 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”

    A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli

  30. Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”

    Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli

CoPilotCo

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

CoPilotCo

Recent Posts