If you’re itching to throw it back to a time when Linux offered you a bit of challenge to your daily grind, MiyoLinux might be just the operating system for you. It’s a lightweight operating system that makes good use of a minimal set of tools. Anyone who likes their distributions to be less modern and more streamlined will love this take on the Linux desktop. However, if you prefer your desktop with the standard bells and whistles, found on modern distributions, you’ll probably find MiyoLinux nothing more than a fun distraction from the standard fare.

• Sparky news 2019/02

  The 2nd monthly report of 2019 of the Sparky project

• MX Linux and SystemRescueCD

• Scaling PostgreSQL with Kubernetes Operators

  Crunchy Data's open source Crunchy PostgreSQL Operator is an Operator for PostgreSQL that is used in many production environments. It provides a simple yet powerful command-line interface that lets users deploy their own database-as-a-service system on any Kubernetes-enabled platform.

  For example, with the pgo create command, which is used to provision a database, you can set up a distributed, high-availability PostgreSQL cluster with full disaster recovery support along with a database monitoring sidecar powered by pgMonitor. In other words, in lieu of a complicated multi-step process or having to write your own scripts, you can create the type of PostgreSQL system required for production from a single command.

  While this may seem to be overkill if you are managing a handful of database clusters, the value of an Operator scales significantly if you need to support hundreds or thousands of different clusters. Having a standardized set of commands with the ability to flexibly deploy clusters for different workloads both eases the administration burden and provides more options for how a team can develop and deploy workloads into production.

• Today's Context Demands Use of OER

  This movement is the most exciting thing to happen to higher ed in my lifetime. It brings together the humanity, respect for students (and instructors!) and impetus to make a positive change in students’ lives from thinkers like bell hooks, Paulo Freire and John Dewey with the technological know-how and thirst for openness, access and justice of Seymour Papert, Richard M. Stallman and Aaron Swartz.

  There is no point in my parodying the eloquence of the expositors of open pedagogy cited above -- please go read them right now, if you haven’t yet. But one thing I can do is add a small point I haven’t see those authors emphasize, in the spirit (following Green) of exploring what motivates faculty. One thing that faculty members love (perhaps particularly at primarily research institutions, where they may be worried about something with enormous impact on pedagogy but which will require a large investment of their time) is their academic freedom.

• AMDGPU LLVM Backend Seeing A Number Of Fixes In Recent Days

  If you habitually use the latest open-source graphics drivers, you may want to pull down the latest LLVM code from SVN/Git as there has been a number of fixes to the AMDGPU back-end in recent days.

  For those that haven't upgraded in a while or perhaps still on the LLVM 8 code-base, the latest LLVM 9 development code has been seeing a number of AMDGPU commits during the second half of February. There's been enabling of function calls by default that fixes some crashes, other crash fixes, implementing various features, enabling the DPP combiner pass by default, and other bits.

• PyCharm 2019.1 EAP 6

  A variable viewer for our native Jupyter Notebook support, an interpreter indicator in the status bar, and more. Try the PyCharm 2019.1 EAP now, you can download the latest version on our website.

• Include the currency name into the forex application

  Hello and welcome back to this new python forex application project. In the previous chapter, we have successfully retrieved the name and the id pair for all the conbase supported currencies, and in this chapter, we will use that information to add the currency name beside each currency id when we are comparing that currency to the USD. Below is the modify version of this program.

• IRC vs IRL: How to run a good IRC meeting

  There's an art to running a meeting in any format. Many people have learned to run in-person or telephone meetings, but Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings have unique characteristics that differ from "in real life" (IRL) meetings. This article will share the advantages and disadvantages of the IRC format as well as tips that will help you lead IRC meetings more effectively.

  Why IRC? Despite the wealth of real-time chat options available today, IRC remains a cornerstone of open source projects. If your project uses another communication method, don't worry. Most of this advice works for any synchronous text chat mechanism, perhaps with a few tweaks here and there.

• GNOME Security Internship - The end?

  The first part regarding protecting the system from potentially unwanted new USB devices can be considered completed. Probably now it will requires just bug fixing and minor changes, if necessary. The required merge requests are up.

  The second part regarding limiting the number of usable keys for untrusted keyboards reached a working stage. However it’s still under evaluation which is the best way to achieve it, because even if with the current solution works it doesn’t mean that this is the desirable way to do it.

• Supply Chain Security Talk [iophk: "warning for Microsoft event; maybe don't want to [attend] despite Bunnie presenting"]

  In the talk, I relay some of my personal trials authenticating my supply chains, then I go into the why of the supply chain attacks to establish some scenarios for evaluating different approaches. The talk attempts to broadly categorize the space of possible attacks, ranging from attacks that cost a penny and a few seconds to pull off to hundreds of thousands of dollars and months. Finally, I try to outline the depth of the supply chain attack surface, highlighting the overall TOCTOU (time of check, time of use) problem that is the supply chain.

• Critical SHAREit Flaw Gives Attackers Full Access To Device Files

  Data sharing apps like SHAREit and Xender have transformed the way files are shared, since their release a few years ago. The apps transfer files over wifi which is much faster compared to sending files using Bluetooth.

• High-Severity SHAREit App Flaws Open Files for the Taking

  SHAREit has fixed two flaws in its app that allow bad actors to authenticate their devices and steal files from a victim’s device.

  Two high-severity flaws in the SHAREit Android app allow an attacker to bypass the file transfer application’s device authentication mechanism – and ultimately download content and arbitrary files from the victim’s device, along with a raft of data such as Facebook tokens and cookies.

• Mozilla GFX: WebRender newsletter #41

  Welcome to episode 41 of WebRender’s newsletter.

  WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for web written in Rust, currently powering Mozilla’s research web browser Servo and on its way to becoming Firefox‘s rendering engine.

  Today’s highlights are two big performance improvements by Kvark and Sotaro. I’ll let you follow the links below if you are interested in the technical details.
  I think that Sotaro’s fix illustrates well the importance of progressively rolling out this type of project a hardware/OS configuration at a time, giving us the time and opportunity to observe and address each configuration’s strengths and quirks.

• Sharing our Common Voices – Mozilla releases the largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset

  Mozilla crowdsources the largest dataset of human voices available for use, including 18 different languages, adding up to almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors.

  From the onset, our vision for Common Voice has been to build the world’s most diverse voice dataset, optimized for building voice technologies. We also made a promise of openness: we would make the high quality, transcribed voice data that was collected publicly available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies.

  Today, we’re excited to share our first multi-language dataset with 18 languages represented, including English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), but also for example Welsh and Kabyle. Altogether, the new dataset includes approximately 1,400 hours of voice clips from more than 42,000 people.

• Securing privacy with Mycroft, an Open AI voice assistant

  Voice-assisted technologies are extremely popular; already there are 2.5 billion such devices in use and that's expected to triple to 8 billion by 2023. This growth appears to be unstoppable—despite the privacy and security vulnerabilities in mainstream voice-assisted technology.

  One of these is the "open-window" vulnerability where, for example, a malicious person walks by an open window and shouts, "Hey, unlock the door!" and gains access to the house. Researchers have also identified thousands of false-positive wake words for Alexa and Google, potential attack vectors to inject malicious commands. Some people bring up the risk of subsonic commands injected over TV. Amazon may already be using frequency manipulations to keep Alexa from activating during its commercials. And, as with any web-connected computer device, there's the potential for backdoors and other common vulnerabilities.