today's leftovers

• Google is Now a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation

  oogle is now a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation. A long-time member of the non-profit organisation, Google has chosen to increase the amount of money it donates to the foundation from $100k a year to a massive $500k.

• Coming Up: GUADEC 2018, Annual Report 2017 & Release Video 3.30

  GUADEC is coming up and I’m super excited for it! My hand luggage will be packed with socks and I plan on becoming a red shirt again this year, as is tradition. I can recommend volunteering to anyone who has tried attending GUADEC before, it is an excellent way to get to know some fellow conference attendees.

• Your Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure questions answered

  In mid-2017, Red Hat Inc. entered the HCI market with the Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure platform. Using the existing open source software in the Red Hat playbook, the company crafted a suite of products that enables customers to deploy HCI on existing hardware or hardware purchased specifically for a Red Hat HCI implementation. [...] One thing Red Hat has going for it is that its customer base is used to using open source software, including the company's own Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. So, the benefit of easier management that comes with HCI appliances is less important than it might be to organizations not using Red Hat's products already.

• Biz: How Red Hat's CEO's pay compares to his employees

• Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S8 & Note 8 Approved by the U.S. Department of Defense

  South Korean Samsung electronics company announced that several of its flagship devices have been recently approved by the Department of Defense (DoD) of the United States of America. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) added the Samsung Galaxy S9, Samsung Galaxy S8, and Samsung Galaxy Note 8 smartphones running the Android 8.0 Oreo mobile operating system to the Approved Products List (APL), ensuring customers in the United States that these devices are safe to use for communication and everything else they need.

• Firefox 61 for Android Fixes Recurring Crash on Samsung Galaxy S8 with Android 8

  Mozilla released the Firefox 61 web browser this week for desktops, including Windows, Linux, and Mac computers, but also for Android devices to bring better browsing for those who are always on the go. Firefox 61 for Android isn’t a major release, but a small maintenance update that brings a couple of performance improvements like faster scrolling by implementing a new functionality that treats touch event listeners as passive by default, and better page rendering times by improving the Quantum CSS component.

• Deploy a VM in Amsterdam

• Three Things Exciting Clear Linux Developers With GCC 8

  While Intel's Clear Linux platform has already been making use of GCC 8.1 since shortly after its release in early May, one of their developers has now published a blog post highlighting three performance and security features enjoyed and that helps benefit their performance-oriented Linux distribution. Victor Rodriguez Bahena of Intel wrote a blog post this week outlining three GCC 8 compiler improvements he finds important. Those features include improvements to interprocedural optimizations, Intel Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET), and changes to loop nest optimization flags. The first and last items benefit the GCC performance of generated binaries while CET helps with security.

• Rediscovering blindness products

  While in the early 2000s, cell phones were still mainly made accessible by specialized software, for example Talks or MobileSpeak for the Nokia S60 platform, or special devices such as the PAC Mate were created to bring mainstream operating systems onto special hardware with a screen reader added, the advance of iPhone and Android devices in the late 2000s brought a revolution for blind and visually impaired people. For the first time, accessibility was being built into the platform, and no special software or hardware was needed to operate these devices. [...] All good, or what? Well, I thought so, for a long time, too. I even sold some blindness-related products such as my first generation Victor Reader Stream by Humanware because I thought my iPhone and iPad could now fulfill all my needs. And for the most part, they do, but at a cost. And that cost is not, in most cases, technical in nature, but rather has to do with the sheer fact that the device I am running the app on is a mainstream device. Many of these problems are, in one form or another, also applicable to people who aren’t blind, but might impact them less than they do me. [...] One other problem that keeps me always on the edge when using mainstream devices are screen reader inconsistencies and inaccessible apps or websites. Any update to an app can break accessibility, any update to the OS can break certain screen reader behavior, or web content I might need or have to consume at a particular moment can prove to be inaccessible, requiring me to either fiddle around with screen reader tricks to kick it into obedience, or simply not being able to get something done at all. Yes, despite all web accessibility efforts, this is still more often the case in 2018 than any of us could want.

• New macOS Cyberattack Focuses on Cryptocurrency Investors

  Digital criminals who are using a piece of macOS-based malware called OSX.Dummy seem to be targeting a group of cryptocurrency investors who use Discord as well as those who use Slack. OSX.Dummy isn’t a particularly sophisticated piece of software, but it does seem to allow arbitrary code execution on machines that it can get embedded into.

• #BetaNews20 Giveaway: System76 Linux computer seller swag kit

  Today is July 1, meaning BetaNews' month-long birthday celebration is officially over. We still have some active giveaways, however -- be sure to use the below links to enter them.

Linux Weather Forecast

This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments below.

US Senator Recommends Open-Source WireGuard To NIST For Government VPN

One of the additions we have been looking forward to seeing in the mainline Linux kernel in 2018 is WireGuard. WireGuard is the open-source, performance-minded, and secure VPN tunnel. WireGuard is designed to be run within the Linux kernel but has also been ported to other platforms. WireGuard hasn't yet made it into the mainline Linux kernel, but it's looking like it still stands good chances of doing so in 2018. Curious about the state, I asked WireGuard's lead developer Jason Donenfeld this week. He informed me that he is in the process of preparing the patch(es) for review and that it won't hopefully be much longer before that happens. Of course, following the review process is when it could be integrated into the mainline Linux kernel at the next available merge window (he gave no explicit indication, but if it's to happen this year, that would mean Linux 4.19 or Linux 5.0).

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