• Android Easter Eggs from Gingerbread to Oreo: A History Lesson

• Android Auto adds ability to view full contacts list

• Installing apps from other sources under Android 8

• Huawei P20 Pro vs. Galaxy S9+: What's the Better Android?

• US-China Trade War Is Bad News for Google's Expansion

• What do you think Android P will be called?

With this week's Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X benchmarks some thought the CPUFreq scaling driver or rather its governors may have been limiting the performance of these Zen+ CPUs, so I ran some additional benchmarks this weekend.

Those launch-day Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X Ubuntu Linux benchmarks were using the "performance" governor, but some have alleged that the performance governor may now actually hurt AMD systems... Ondemand, of course, is the default CPUFreq governor on Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions. Some also have said the "schedutil" governor that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data may do better on AMD. So I ran some extra benchmarks while changing between CPUFreq's ondemand (default), performance (normally the best for performance, and what was used in our CPU tests), schedutil (the newest option), and powersave (if you really just care about conserving power).

• Libjpeg-Turbo 2.0 Beta Brings More AVX2 SIMD, Improved CMake Build System

  A Phoronix reader recently pointed out that LibJPEG 2.0 Beta quietly shipped last month as working towards the next big update for this speed-focused JPEG library.

  Libjpeg-Turbo 2.0 beta is available for testing and it brings AVX2 SIMD support for colorspace conversion, chroma downsampling/upsampling, integer quantization and sample conversion, and integer DCT/IDCT algorithms. These AVX2 SIMD accelerated paths are generally bringing gains anywhere from 9% to 36% faster depending upon the operation. This version is also bringing SIMD acceleration for Huffman encoding on SSE2 CPUs and Loongson MMI SIMD implementations for more functions.

• A look at Rancher 2.0

  Last December, we announced a Kubernetes Cloud Native Platform in partnership with Rancher Labs. Built on Canonical’s Distribution of Kubernetes and Rancher 2.0, the Cloud Native Platform will simplify enterprise usage of Kubernetes with seamless user management, access control, and cluster administration. Join our webinar to get a tour of the platform!

• Mozilla's Common Voice Project, Red Hat Announces Vault Operator, VirtualBox 5.2.10 Released and More

  Participate in Mozilla's open-source Common Voice Project, an initiative to help teach machines how real people speak: "Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web."

• Collabora Online 3.2 Supports Chart Creation, Other Features

  A new version of Collabora Online is now available, the web-based open-source office suite derived from the cloud version of LibreOffice.

• DragonFlyBSD Kernel Gets Some SMP Improvements

  It looks like the DragonFlyBSD 5.4 release will be delivering at least a few kernel-level performance improvements.

  It turns out just hours after wrapping up the latest BSD vs. Linux benchmarks, Matthew Dillon pushed a few performance tweaks to the Git tree for DragonFly.

• Best Open Source 3D Printers

  In simplest terms, an open source 3D printer refers to a 3D printer whose hardware and software information are available to the public, typically under a license. The information can be used by anyone to build, modify, or improve the 3D printer.

  If you’re looking for real open source 3D printers, then you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we introduce you to completely open source 3D printers. The hardware and software information of all the products listed here can be easily found on the internet.

• Microsoft Calls On Linux for Its New IoT Security Platform [Ed: When Microsoft exploits Linux it's for lockin which requires that you buy a licence for Windows, Visual Studio etc. while paying Microsoft rents.]

• Microsoft Improves Linux Subsystem Security; Adds Windows Defender Firewall Support [Ed: No, FOSSBytes, Microsoft just puts GNU/Linux with limited functionality inside a keylogger (Vista 10) with back doors, then markets that as "security" for dumb writers to repeat]

• Researchers Deliver Open-Source Simulator For Cyber Physical Systems

  Cyber physical systems (CPS) are attracting more attention than ever thanks to the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its combination with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the cloud. These interacting networks of physical and computational components will provide the foundation of critical infrastructure, form the basis of 'smart' services, and improve the quality of life in areas ranging from energy and environment to transportation and healthcare.

• Specification and Verification of Software with CafeOBJ – Part 2 – Basics of CafeOBJ

• Step by Step Instance Creation Flow in OpenStack

• host detection in bash

• Weekend Reading: Networking

Vim is an improved version of Vi, a known text editor available by default in UNIX distributions. Another alternative for modal editors is Emacs but they’re so different that I kind of feel they serve different purposes. Both are great, regardless.

I don’t feel vim is necessarily a geeky kind of taste or not. Vim introduced modal editing to me and that has changed my life, really. If you have ever tried vim, you may have noticed you have to press “I” or “A” (lower case) to start writing (note: I’m aware there are more ways to start editing but the purpose is not to cover Vim’s functionalities.). The fun part starts once you realize you can associate Insert and Append commands to something. And then editing text is like thinking of what you want the computer to show on the computer instead of struggling where you at before writing. The same goes for other commands which are easily converted to mnemonics and this is what helped getting comfortable with Vim. Note that Emacs does not have this kind of keybindings but they do have a Vim-like mode - Evil (Extensive Vi Layer). More often than not, I just need to think of what I want to accomplish and type the first letters. Like Replace, Visual, Delete, and so on. It is a modal editor after all, meaning it has modes for everything. This is also what increases my productivity when writing files. I just think of my intentions and Vim does the things for me.

• Intel 2018Q1 Graphics Stack Recipe

  Last week Intel's Open-Source Technology Center released their latest quarterly "graphics stack recipe" for the Linux desktop.

  The Intel Graphics Stack Recipe is the company's recommended configuration for an optimal and supported open-source graphics driver experience for their Intel HD/UHD/Iris Graphics found on Intel processors.

• Mesa 18.1-RC1 Released With The Latest Open-Source 3D Driver Features

  Seemingly flying under our radar is that Mesa 18.1 has already been branched and the first release candidate issued.

  While the Mesa website hasn't yet been updated for the 18.1 details, Dylan Baker appears to be the release manager for the 18.1 series -- the second quarter of 2018 release stream.

At the end of my previous post we concluded with yet another question. Indeed, on the 2017 KDEPIM contributor network we found out that Christian Mollekopf while being a very consistent committer didn't appear as centrality as we would expect. Yet from the topology he seemed to act as a bridge between the core contributors and contributors with a very low centrality. This time we'll try to look into this and figure out what might be going on.

My first attempt at this was to try to look into the contributor network on a different time period and see how it goes. If we take two snapshots of the network for the two semesters of 2017, how would it look? Well, easy to do with my current scripts so let's see!

• 0.1.1 Release of Elisa

  The Elisa team is happy to announce the first bug fix release for the 0.1 version.

• KDE Plasma 5.13 Is Making Great Improvements On Its Wayland Support

  KDE Plasma 5.13 that is due for release in June will have a great number of improvements to its Wayland support for allowing the KDE Plasma desktop to work much better on this alternative to the X.Org Server.

  KDE developer Roman Gilg has provided a nice summary of some of the Wayland improvements in the queue for the Plasma 5.13.0 release due out towards the middle of June.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 15

  I’ve initiated a big project: overhauling KDE Open & Save dialogs for greater usability and productivity.

• Latte bug fix release v0.7.5

  Latte Dock v0.7.5   has been released containing important fixes and improvements! Hopefullly this is going to be the last stable version for v0.7.x family. During the next months the next stable branch (v0.8.x) is going to appear.

• IBM Launches Open-source Toolkit to Safeguard AI Systems

  On 17th, April 2018, IBM Security announced the launch of an open-source toolkit at the RSA conference in San-Francisco. The Open-Source library entails framework-agnostics software that contains defenses, attacks as well as bench markings to safeguard artificial intelligence systems. This open-source library is also known as Adversarial Robustness Toolbox is designed to assist in protecting Artificial Intelligence system (AI) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) into the “Open-Source Community”.

• Cincinnati Police review: 911 operator said she couldn't hear dying teen's final call from Seven Hills [iophk: "Microsoft Windows kills"]

  The review also found Smith said she tried to document the call when it came in, but she told supervisors her computer screen froze, preventing her from entering any information immediately. That information could have been helpful to police searching for Kyle.

• What happened? A timeline of events preceding the discovery of dead teen Kyle Plush

• Just How Random Are Two Factor Authentication Codes?

  So technically speaking, Google could omit certain hard-to-remember sequences. But it's probably not a great idea. "You can’t take out too many things because you want the full space of possible values for entropy," Smetters says. In essence, your algorithm would produce fewer codes; generally speaking, the fewer codes your algorithm produces, the easier it is to crack. Plus, she says, many patterns are probably memorable to people for different reasons.

• GCHQ warns public ‘absolute protection not possible’ as it briefs power and transport firms on cyber attacks [iophk: "Windows TCO"]

• The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

  In 2005 security-software provider PC Pitstop LLC promised a $1,000 prize to the first user to spot the offer deep in its terms and conditions; it took four months before the reward was claimed.

Open Source Programming simply means writing codes that other people can freely use as well as modify. It is essential for authors to license their code, it enables them to have a copyright for those codes. Therefore, for a code to be declared safe and free for all to use, whether it’s available in the Github or in a public-repo; the author is required to license their own code. This is to avoid cases of individuals being sued by the author for using, modifying or even embedding the code without being granted a license to do that.

Mugshot, the simple user configuration utility, has hit a new stable milestone! Release 0.4.0 wraps up the 0.3 development cycle with full camera support for the past several years of GTK+ releases (and a number of other fixes).

Also: MenuLibre 2.2.0 Released

• AV Linux 2018.4.12 has been Released!

• Spring cleanup - Current ISO for 19 04 2018

  Pat has rebuilt the complete set of Slackware packages, so I thought that providing a new current Zenwalk ISO would make it easier to upgrade everything in one step

• Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS Desktop Tour: See What's New!

In February after Plasma 5.12 was released we held a meeting on how we want to improve Wayland support in Plasma 5.13. Since its beta is now less than one month away it is time for a status report on what has been achieved and what we still plan to work on.

Also today started a week-long Plasma Sprint in Berlin, what will hopefully accelerate the Wayland work for 5.13. So in order to kick-start the sprint this is a good opportunity to sum up where we stand now.

Adam Conrad of the Ubuntu Release Team is pleased to announce the first
set of Bionic RC images for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Over the next couple of hours, builds for Bionic Final should be added
to the tracker[1] for all flavours. The builds have some intentional
omissions, but please do test them anyway.

Known issues that will be addressed Sunday/Monday:
– Volume label still set to Beta
– base-files still not the final version
– kernel will have (at least) one more revision

Despite the above, please, please, please test your images. Do not
wait for a “final” build to test, as that guarantees your final build
will be broken. We need you testing now, iterating uploads to get
your bugs fixed, filing bugs and escalating where you need help.

Again: DO NOT DELAY, TEST NOW, FIX BUGS, FILE BUGS, ESCALATE FOR HELP.

Happy testing everyone, and here’s hoping we push out another smooth
and stress-free release on Thursday.

… Adam Conrad

• Pakistan Open Source Summit 2018 concludes [Ed: Not about software]

  A large number of attendees from industry, academia, government, and students participated in the summit. Portuguese Ambassador to Pakistan Dr Joao Sabido Costa was the chief guest at the opening ceremony while former Naval Chief Admiral (r) Asif Sandila graced the occasion as the chief guest at the closing ceremony.

• ‘Open Summit key to create industry-academy linkages’

  Ambassador of Portugal to Pakistan Dr Joao Sabido Costa has said that events such as the Open Source Summit are excellent for spreading awareness and for creating industry-academia linkages and enhancement of the information technology.

  He stated this while addressing a concluding ceremony of the two-day informative ‘Pakistan Open Source Summit 2018’ attended by large number of people from industry, academia, government and students. Former naval chief Admiral (R) Asif Sandila co-chaired the concluding session.

  Dr Joao Sabido Costa said that the organisations should utilise open source platforms to build their IT infrastructures in future. To build open source culture in Pakistan, he recommended roadmap with future activities and timelines for spreading open source.

• Madrid GNOME+Rust Hackfest, part 2

  Yesterday we went to the Madrid Rust Meetup, a regular meeting of rustaceans here. Martin talked about WebRender; I talked about refactoring C to port it to Rust, and then Alex talked about Rust's plans for 2018. Fun times.

• DataworksSummit Berlin - Wednesday morning

  Data strategy - cloud strategy - business strategy: Aligning the three was one of the main themes (initially put forward in his opening keynote by CTO of Hortonworks Scott Gnau) thoughout this weeks Dataworks Summit Berlin kindly organised and hosted by Hortonworks. The event was attended by over 1000 attendees joining from 51 countries.

  The inspiration hat was put forward in the first keynote by Scott was to take a closer look at the data lifecycle - including the fact that a lot of data is being created (and made available) outside the control of those using it: Smart farming users are using a combination of weather data, information on soil conditions gathered through sensors out in the field in order to inform daily decisions. Manufacturing is moving towards closer monitoring of production lines to spot inefficiencies. Cities are starting to deploy systems that allow for better integration of public services. UX is being optimized through extensive automation.

• Is Andy Ramer’s Departure the End of Cantor Fitzgerald’s Patent Trolls-Feeding Operations and Ambitions?
• EPO Hoards Billions of Euros (Taken From the Public), Decreases Quality to Get More Money, Reduces Payments to Staff
• Short: Calling Battistelli’s Town (Where He Works) “Force for Innovation” to Justify the Funneling of EPO Funds to It
• Short: EPO Bribes the Media and Then Brags About the Paid-for Outcome to Staff
• Short: EPO’s “Working Party for Quality” is to Quality What the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is to Democracy
• Short: This Spring’s Message From the EPO’s President (Corrected)
• Short: Highly Misleading and Unscientific Graphics From the EPO for an Illusion of Growth
• Short: EPO Explains to Examiners Why They Should and Apparently Can Grant Software Patents (in Spite of EPC)
• As USPTO Director, Andrei Iancu Gives Three Months for Public Comments on 35 U.S.C. § 101 (Software Patenting Impacted)
• In Keith Raniere v Microsoft Both Sides Are Evil But for Different Reasons
• Links 21/4/2018: Linux 4.9.95, FFmpeg 4.0, OpenBSD Foundation 2018 Fundraising Campaign
• Links 20/4/2018: Atom 1.26, MySQL 8.0
• Links 19/4/2018: Mesa 17.3.9 and 18.0.1, Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas, Elections for openSUSE Board

• BSidesSF CTF 2018: Coder Series (Author's PoV)

  As the author of the “coder” series of challenges (Intel Coder, ARM Coder, Poly Coder, and OCD Coder) in the recent BSidesSF CTF, I wanted to share my perspective on the challenges. I can’t tell if the challenges were uninteresting, too hard, or both, but they were solved by far fewer teams than I had expected. (And than we had rated the challenges for when scoring them.)

  The entire series of challenges were based on the premise “give me your shellcode and I’ll run it”, but with some limitations. Rather than forcing players to find and exploit a vulnerability, we wanted to teach players about dealing with restricted environments like sandboxes, unusual architectures, and situations where your shellcode might be manipulated by the process before it runs.

• Sniffing Unix Domain Sockets

• Building a ToDo API with Golang and Kubernetes! – Part 3 – Building and Deploying our Application

• OPL2 Audio Board: an AdLib sound card for Arduino

• my haskell controlled offgrid fridge

• 3 methods to Install Plugins on Jenkins server

• Getting the lock screen to work properly when resuming from Suspend-to-RAM with multiple sessions in Lubuntu 17.10

• glibc 2.27-2 and pam 1.3.0-2 may require manual intervention

• Install Rust Programming Language In Linux

• Linux Fun – How to Create ASCII Text Banners in Terminal

• Using Your Android Phone For Voice Dictation On Linux

• How To Install OpenSnitch Application-Level Firewall In Ubuntu

• How To Enable and Connect the Django Admin Interface

• How to Install and Configure Nginx on Debian 9

• How To Upgrade Ubuntu To 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

• How To Make Gedit More Programmer Friendly

Customization is a big part of the Linux experience, and your desktop theme is no exception. The world of Linux desktop themes is an ever-evolving one, with new ones replacing old favorites all the time. Of course, the desktop environments and GTK itself are always changing, so that adds another dynamic element to consider. That said, some of the best desktop customization happens on the simplest desktop environments, like XFCE.

As of now, in early 2018, there are some really excellent GTK themes available. These themes aren’t ranked in any particular order. That comes down to a matter or preference. Any one of them can add a whole new look to your GTK-based desktop.

• Ubuntu To Discontinue Opt-In Development Milestones In Favor Of Test Weeks

  The proposal for replacing early Ubuntu derivatives' early alpha/beta releases with "testing weeks" in its place is moving forward with no objections having been raised but flavors like Kubuntu and Xubuntu being in favor of the change.

• Ubuntu Linux Replaces Alpha/Beta Release Model With “Testing Weeks”

• Re-evaluating Ubuntu's Milestones

  Happy Release Week!

  I do not believe there have been any -1s to this proposal from any
  flavor, nor from the Release Team, so I think it's time to move forward
  with it.

  In summary, what will now happen from here on out is that opt-in
  milestones will be discontinued in favor of testing "weeks" (Tuesday
  through Thursday). I can organize the testing weeks for the 18.10 cycle
  (so we can get a process going), but from the 19.04 cycle and on,
  representatives (probably Release Managers) from any active flavor can
  (and should!) organize these testing weeks.

  Additionally, I will look into the automated testing Steve brought up
  shortly after the 18.04 release, with the goal being to adopt that
  sooner rather than later. I'll write a follow-up email to ubuntu-release
  once I have something to show for that.

  Thanks everyone!