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today's leftovers

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 13th of January 2018 12:10:48 AM Filed under

Misc

GTK's Vulkan Renderer Will Now Let You Pick The GPU For Rendering

One of the features exciting us the most about GTK4 is the Vulkan renderer that will make its premiere. This Vulkan renderer continues getting worked into shape for GTK+ 4.0.

The most recent addition to this Vulkan renderer is a means to allow specifying a device (GPU) to use for rendering, in the event of having multiple Vulkan graphics processors on the same system.
openSUSE Tumbleweed Now Patched Against Meltdown/Spectre, Adopts LibreOffice 6.0

openSUSE Project reports today through Douglas DeMaio that the openSUSE Tumbleweed software repositories have been flooded this week by four new snapshots that brought updated components and other improvements.

According to the developer, much of the efforts of the openSUSE Tumbleweed's maintainers were focused this week on patching the recently unearthed Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities that put billions of devices at risk of attacks by allowing unprivileged attackers to steal your sensitive data from memory.
Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2017
Debian/TeX Live 2017.20180110-1 – the big rework

In short succession a new release of TeX Live for Debian – what could that bring? While there are not a lot of new and updated packages, there is a lot of restructuring of the packages in Debian, mostly trying to placate the voices that the TeX Live packages are getting bigger and bigger and bigger (which is true). In this release we have introduce two measures to allow for smaller installations: optional font package dependencies and downgrade of the -doc packages to suggests.

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More in Tux Machines

Raspberry Pi lookalike offers HDMI 2.0 and optional M.2

Geniatech’s “XPI-S905X” is a new Raspberry Pi pseudo clone with a quad -A53 Amlogic S905X plus 2GB RAM, up to 16GB eMMC, 4K-ready HDMI 2.0, LAN, 4x USB, touch-enabled LVDS, and optional M.2. Geniatech, which is known for Qualcomm based SBCs such as the Snapdragon 410 based, 96Boards-like Development Board IV and Snapdragon 820E based Development Board 8, has posted specs for a Raspberry Pi form factor board with a quad -A53, Amlogic S905X with 1/6GHz to 2GHz performance. No pricing is available for the XPI-S905X, which appears to be aimed at the OEM market.

Linus Torvalds talks about coming back to work on Linux

"'I'm starting the usual merge window activity now," said Torvalds. But it's not going to be kernel development as usual. "We did talk about the fact that now Greg [Kroah-Hartman] has write rights to my kernel tree, and if will be easier to just share the load if we want to, and maybe we'll add another maintainer after further discussion." So, Kroah-Hartman, who runs the stable kernel, will have a say on Linus' cutting-edge kernel. Will someone else get write permission to Torvalds' kernel code tree to help lighten the load? Stay tuned. Also: Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election call for nominations

Mozilla: Firefox 65 Plans and Firefox 63 Analysis

Firefox 65 Will Block Tracking Cookies By Default

Mozilla today released Firefox 63, which includes an experimental option to block third-party tracking cookies, protecting against cross-site tracking. You can test this out today, but Mozilla wants to enable it for everyone by default in Firefox 65.
The Path to Enhanced Tracking Protection

As a leader of Firefox’s product management team, I am often asked how Mozilla decides on which privacy features we will build and launch in Firefox. In this post I’d like to tell you about some key aspects of our process, using our recent Enhanced Tracking Protection functionality as an example.
Firefox 63 Lets Users Block Tracking Cookies

As announced in August, Firefox is changing its approach to addressing tracking on the web. As part of that plan, we signaled our intent to prevent cross-site tracking for all Firefox users and made our initial prototype available for testing. Starting with Firefox 63, all desktop versions of Firefox include an experimental cookie policy that blocks cookies and other site data from third-party tracking resources. This new policy provides protection against cross-site tracking while minimizing site breakage associated with traditional cookie blocking.
Firefox 63 – Tricks and Treats!
Firefox 63 Released, Red Hat Collaborating with NVIDIA, Virtual Box 6.0 Beta Now Available, ODROID Launching a New Intel-Powered SBC and Richard Stallman Announces the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

Firefox 63.0 was released this morning. With this new version, "users can opt to block third-party tracking cookies or block all trackers and create exceptions for trusted sites that don't work correctly with content blocking enabled". In addition, WebExtensions now run in their own process on Linux, and Firefox also now warns if you have multiple windows and tabs open when you quit via the main menu. You can download it from here.
Changes to how Mozilla Readability extracts article metadata in Firefox 63

Mozilla Readability will now extract document metadata from Dublin Core and Open Graph Protocol meta tags instead of trying to guess article titles. Earlier this year, I documented how reader mode in web browsers extract metadata about articles. After learning about the messy state of metadata extraction for reader mode, I sought to improve the extraction logic used in Mozilla Readability. Mozilla Readability was one of the first reader mode parsers and it’s used in Firefox as well as other web browsers.

Security: Cross-Hyperthread Spectre V2 Mitigation Ready For Linux, Targeted vs General-Purpose Security and More

Cross-Hyperthread Spectre V2 Mitigation Ready For Linux With STIBP

On the Spectre front for the recently-started Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel is STIBP support for cross-hyperthread Spectre Variant Two mitigation. Going back to the end of the summer was the patch work for this cross-hyperthread Spectre V2 mitigation with STIBP while now it's being merged to mainline.
Targeted vs General purpose security

There seems to be a lot of questions going around lately about how to best give out simple security advice that is actionable. Goodness knows I’ve talked about this more than I can even remember at this point. The security industry is really bad at giving out actionable advice. It’s common someone will ask what’s good advice. They’ll get a few morsels, them someone will point out whatever corner case makes that advice bad and the conversation will spiral into nonsense where we find ourselves trying to defend someone mostly concerned about cat pictures from being kidnapped by a foreign nation. Eventually whoever asked for help quit listening a long time ago and decided to just keep their passwords written on a sticky note under the keyboard. I’m pretty sure the fundamental flaw in all this thinking is we never differentiate between a targeted attack and general purpose security. They are not the same thing. They’re incredibly different in fact. General purpose advice can be reasonable, simple, and good. If you are a target you’ve already lost, most advice won’t help you. General purpose security is just basic hygiene. These are the really easy concepts. Ideas like using a password manager, multi-factor-auth, install updates on your system. These are the activities anyone and everyone should be doing. One could argue these should be the default settings for any given computer or service (that’s a post for another day though). You don’t need to be a security genius to take these steps. You just have to restrain yourself from acting like a crazy person so whoever asked for help can actually get the advice they need.
Oracle Moves to Gen 2 Cloud, Promising More Automation and Security [Ed: Ellison wants people to blindly trust proprietary blobs for security (a bad thing to do, never mind the CIA past of Oracle and severe flaws in its DBs)].

A primary message from Ellison is that the Gen 2 Oracle cloud is more secure, with autonomous capabilities to help protect against attacks. Ellison also emphasized the segmentation and isolation of workloads on the Gen 2 Oracle cloud, providing improved security.
Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #182

Here’s what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 14 and Saturday October 20 2018...

Latest News

today's leftovers

[Mesa-dev] 18.3 release plan
Mesa 18.3 Gets A Release Date Towards The End Of November

Intel open-source developer Dylan Baker has laid out a proposed release schedule for the upcoming Mesa 18.3 quarterly feature release. There are two key dates: 31 October is the proposed branching date and 21 November is the proposed Mesa 18.3.0 release date. Between those two dates would be the usual weekly release candidates and there is the potential for the Mesa 18.3.0 release to be drawn out to the end of November or early December depending upon any open blocker bugs, which is common for the Mesa quarterly feature releases.
Google Code-in 2018 is about to start!

After a break in 2017, the KDE community is participating in the Google Code-in contest as a mentoring organization. This means that pre-university students aged 13 to 17 from all over the world will be able to contribute to the Free Software movement by helping KDE develop software products that give users control, freedom, and privacy. Google Code-in is a global online contest with the goal of helping teenagers get involved in the world of open source development. Mentors from the participating organizations lend a helping hand as participants complete various bite-sized tasks in coding, graphics design, documentation, and more. This year we have tasks from KDE Connect, a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other; GCompris, an educational software suite; KDE Partition Manager, our disk partitioning utility; and the KDE Visual Design Group, our interface usability experts.
Celebrating KDE’s 22 years and embracing new contributors at LaKademy 2018

Almost two weeks ago we had the seventh edition of the LaKademy, an event that has been held in Brazil since 2012. As you may know LaKademy’s main goal is to get together the Latin American contributors of KDE community and to attract new ones. We don’t have talks like in Akademy because the event’s idea is to be a space for sprints. So people work in small groups doing specific tasks like fixing bugs, developing new features or translating software and documentation.
openSUSE Security Update For Leap

openSUSE has released an updated kernel for Leap 42.3 to address several vulnerabilities. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to cause a denial of service or escalate their privileges.
Death Road to Canada adds 4-player local co-op along with new game modes

In today’s post, we’re talking about failure. In episode 4, “Fail Better,” we learn how Google has systematically learned to embrace (each and every) failure as an opportunity to learn, grow, and prevent classes of similar problems from happening again. We also learn how one of the most popular video game franchises of all time may not have been so successful had the developers been successful in their first attempt at an algorithm for some rather prominent non-player characters (NPCs). Whether we like it or not, some amount of failure is inevitable. To this end, I started this week’s discussion with Jared and Michael by asking about how an early failure may have led to a different—or even a beneficial—outcome.
Failure as a catalyst: Designing a feedback loop for success

Emotional Resonance (context): I was turned down by Red Hat for a scrum master position because I wasn’t “qualified enough” even though this is what I had been doing prior to my job search. Red Hat was a fantastic opportunity for me and an opportunity to work on tech at a software company. I really wanted to work there. I longed to work there. (Note: Red Hat saw the error of their ways 4 months later and offered me a position that was hand crafted for my experience. The rest is history. And I’m forever grateful to my hiring manager.)
Arm expands DesignStart program for Linux embedded designs

Arm has expanded its DesignStart program to include the Cortex-A5 CPU, Arm's low-power and Linux-capable application processor, according to the processor IP vendor. Developers can now accelerate embedded and IoT SoC design for applications including medical, smart home, gateways and wearables. [...] When ready to tape out a custom chip, time to market can be accelerated with Arm's Artisan physical IP. Developers can also benefit from design enablement platforms being supported by 18 foundry partners with process technology ranging from 250nm to 5nm, Arm said. Earlier in October 2018, Arm announced its DesignStart program would be offering Cortex-M processors without any license fee or royalty on Xilinx FPGAs. Through expanding the program to offer Cortex-A5, Arm is looking to support innovation across the entire design spectrum of embedded and IoT devices. DesignStart also helps speed up SoC implementation with free access to the industry-leading library of physical IP, tailored for a range of fabs and process nodes, through Arm Artisan physical IP.
Inexpensive Webcam

Using a $5 Rpi Zero W from Microcenter, physically soldered the tiny webcam wires to the Zero: 3 V black to pin 1 on GPIO, ground to pin 6, D+ to PP22 pad next to the microusb and D- to PP23 usb pad. This wasn’t easy and I made a mess of the usb pads, but it works!
The Best Android Phones Under $300

Android Leftovers

OSS Leftovers

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® HTTP Server v2.4.37

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® HTTP Server 2.4.37, the latest version of the world’s most popular Web server. Apache HTTP Server is an Open Source HTTP server for modern operating systems that include UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS/X, and Netware. For more than 23 years, the award-winning server software has been lauded as a secure, efficient, and extensible server that provides HTTP services observing the current HTTP standards.
Benjamin Mako Hill: Why organizational culture matters for online groups

Leaders and scholars of online communities tend of think of community growth as the aggregate effect of inexperienced individuals arriving one-by-one. However, there is increasing evidence that growth in many online communities today involves newcomers arriving in groups with previous experience together in other communities. This difference has deep implications for how we think about the process of integrating newcomers. Instead of focusing only on individual socialization into the group culture, we must also understand how to manage mergers of existing groups with distinct cultures. Unfortunately, online community mergers have, to our knowledge, never been studied systematically.
Why does the C Programming language refuse to die?

As a technology research analyst, I try to keep up pace with the changing world of technology. It seems like every single day, there is a new programming language, framework, or tool emerging out of nowhere. In order to keep up, I regularly have a peek at the listicles on TIOBE, PyPL, and Stackoverflow along with some twitter handles and popular blogs, which keeps my FOMO (fear of missing out) in check. So here I was, strolling through the TIOBE index, to see if a new programming language is making the rounds or if any old timer language is facing its doomsday in the lower half of the table. The first thing that caught my attention was Python, which interestingly broke into the top 3 for the first time since it was ranked by TIOBE. I never cared to look at Java, since it has been claiming the throne ever since it became popular. But with my pupils dilated, I saw something which I would have never expected, especially with the likes of Python, C#, Swift, and JavaScript around.
RcppTOML 0.1.4: Now with TOML v0.5.0
GitHub suffers major outage caused by faulty storage appliance

Actual repository data wasn't affected, but at just before midnight last night, UK time, the MySQL databases containing push and pull requests were borked.
NAB, Microsoft join to build ATM with facial recognition

The proof-of-concept uses a cloud-based application developed using Azure Cognitive Services and artificial intelligence to identify customers who opt in to the service.