Android Leftovers

• New Android vulnerability called StrandHogg 2.0 identified (Includes interview)

• Android phone users in India, CERT-In has a ‘spy warning’ for you

• Android users dealt fresh blow as Google cancels major launch event

• Android Auto gains updated Material Theme icons when navigating in Google Maps

• Google fixes Android flaws that allow code execution with high system rights

• As Covid-19 disrupts people’s sleep, Google introduces ‘Bedtime’ feature for Android

• Google postpones Android 11 launch amid US protests

• 9to5Google Daily 454: The Android 11 beta drops early for some, June Pixel Feature Drop arrives, plus more

• Android 11 Beta 1 adds new ways to control Pixel Launcher app suggestions, including adding them to your home screen

• Remote and interface for Google's upcoming Android TV dongle leaked

• Nokia Android TV 43-inch model to launch on June 4: 4K, Dolby Vision, and more

• Wallpaper image crashes some Android phones

• Android: Why this photo is bricking some phones

• Two Critical Android Bugs Open Door to RCE

• Best free games for kids for Android and iPhone

• How to reverse image search on Android

today's leftovers

• Green Hills Software Adds Industry-Leading Advanced Software Development Tools Support for RISC-V

• Sonoff SNZB Zigbee Sensors and Switches Launched for under $10

  All four devices are powered by a CR2450 coin cell battery and you’ll get a notification once the battery level drops below 10% in the mobile app. Which mobile? The usual eWelink app for Android or iOS which also supports integration with IFTTT. If you prefer open-source firmware, it may take more time, or never happen, as while we’ve reported on Zigbee open-source firmware, most of the work is based on TI CC25xx chips, and Sonoff Zigbee sensors are all likely based on Silicon Labs EFM32 Zigbee MCU like it is for their ZBBrigde gateway.

• Monitoring bees with a Raspberry Pi and BeeMonitor

• openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference Will Take Place Online

  Organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference along with the project’s boards have made the decision to change the conference to an online conference. The uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the event were reasons for shifting the event from a physical event to an online event. Shifting the conference online is good news and the organizers intend to provide a great conference that is filled with insightful talks, technical presentations and sessions dedicated for those who want to socialize during the event. Using video a conferencing tool, attendees learn about new technologies in openSUSE and LibreOffice and have the chance to chat to developers and ask questions. Communities involved in marketing, design, QA and other topics will be able to meet online, catch up and exchange ideas.

• Introducing Jetpack Scan, a New Solution that Helps Small Businesses Easily Protect Their Sites from Malware Threatss

  Jetpack, the popular WordPress security and performance solution developed by Automattic, is announcing the global launch of Jetpack Scan, an automated malware and vulnerability scanning solution specifically for WordPress websites. [...] We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.

• The Month in WordPress: May 2020

  May was an action-packed month for WordPress! WordPress organizers are increasingly moving WordCamps online, and contributors are taking big steps towards Full Site Editing with Gutenberg. To learn more and get all the latest updates, read on.

• Sony uploads the kernel source code for the Xperia 10 II and Xperia 1 II

  Back in February, Sony unveiled their “Mark 2” lineup, i.e. the flagship Xperia 1 II and the mid-range Xperia 10 II smartphones via an online event. Months after the initial announcement, the phones are now available for pre-order across Europe as well as in the US. On the software side, both of these devices run Android 10 out of the box. To satisfy the requirements of the GNU General Public License v2 and kickstart the custom development of third-party ROMs and kernels, Sony has now released the kernel sources for the Xperia 10 II and the Xperia 1 II.

• MicroK8s now native on Windows and macOS

  Windows and macOS developers can now use MicroK8s natively! Use kubectl at the Windows or Mac command line to interact with MicroK8s locally just as you would on Linux. Clean integration into the desktop means better workflows to dev, build and test your containerised apps. MicroK8s is a conformant upstream Kubernetes, packaged for simplicity and resilience. It provides sensible defaults and bundles the most commonly used components for at-your-fingertips access. A single-node install is one command and done in seconds, which makes it easy to add or remove from any system. MicroK8s is widely used by developers for local testing. After installing it, you can start and stop Kubernetes with a single command to conserve battery. With built-in GPGPU acceleration, Istio, Prometheus, Jaeger and many other popular services on tap, it serves as a complete workstation edition of K8s. All of this capability is now neatly accessible from the Windows and macOS command-line.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 633

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 633 for the week of May 24 – 30, 2020.

• Retrotech: The Novell NetWare Experience

  In the simplest terms possible, NetWare was a dedicated network operating system. It was designed around fast and reliable network operations at the expense of almost everything else. Novell had invested massive amounts of research in figuring out how to do fast I/O and minimizing any delays from hardware related sources. The end result was a very lean system that remained stable and performant with a large number of clients attached. As networking was Novell's bread and butter, NetWare had excellent support for everything: clients were available for DOS, Windows, UNIX, Macintosh, OS/2 and probably other platforms I've never even heard of.

  The early history of NetWare is very muddled, and pre-2.0 versions have been lost to time. This compounded with poor documentation has made it very difficult to trace the early history of the product. However, while NetWare was not the first (or only) network product for IBM PCs, it quickly became the largest, displacing IBM's PC Network, and laughed at Microsoft's LAN Manager, and IBM OS/2 LAN Server.

  While NetWare did compete on UNIX, Sun had already gotten their foot in the door by porting NFS and making it the de-facto solution for all UNIXs of the era, as well as Linux. Meanwhile, Apple held onto AppleTalk which itself survived well into the early 2000s when NetWare had already disappeared into the aether. The explosion of Wintel PCs throughout the 90s had given NetWare a market position that should have been very difficult to dislodge.

  The full story of NetWare's fall from grace is a story for another time, but I do want to go into the more technical aspects that were both the boon and bane of NetWare. Much of NetWare's success can be attributed to its own IPX protocol which made networking plug and play and drastically lowered latencies compared to NetBIOS or even TCP/IP.

Programming Leftovers

• Type instances

  The particular nature of our work is up for any amount of debate, but the basic fact of it comes with a few requirements, and they are by and large inevitable if you wish to be a well-behaved, well-integrated member of the GNOME community. One of which is: “please, think of the language bindings”. These days, luckily for all of us, this means writing introspectable interfaces that adhere to fairly sensible best practices and conventions. [...] Please, please use GObject. Writing type system code is already boring and error prone, which is why we added a ton of macros to avoid people shooting themselves in both their feet, and we hammered away all the special snowflake API flourishes that made parsing C API to generate introspection data impossible. I can only recommend you go down the GTypeInstance route if you’ve done your due diligence on what that entails, and are aware that it is a last resort if GObject simply does not work within your project’s constraints.

• The joys and perils of C and C++ aliasing, Part 1

  In C, C++, and some other programming languages, the term aliasing refers to a situation where two different expressions or symbols refer to the same object. When references access that object in different ways—as both reads and stores—there are consequences for the order in which these mixed accesses can happen. The value that is stored first is expected to be read by the subsequent access. In many instances, aliasing is harmless: It is common, safe, and usually optimally efficient to use two pointers of the same type to read, and even to write to the same object. But in some cases, using aliasing symbols for mixed accesses is less benign, and can adversely affect the correctness or efficiency of your code. Although there are quite a few articles on this subject, most tend to focus on the rules and requirements outlined in the standards (such as the strict aliasing rule). In this article, I focus on the details of the C and C++ language restrictions, their challenges and pitfalls, and examples demonstrating the restrictions’ beneficial effects in optimized code. In Part 2, I will present exemptions from aliasing, which can help you get around the restrictions more or less safely. I also consider some of the common pitfalls of aliasing and mixed accesses, and the actual problems these pitfalls might cause.

• Why I switched from Java to Kotlin

  Kotlin is a cross-platform, general-purpose programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JetBrains led its implementation, which began in 2010, and it has been open source since early in its development. The great news for Java developers is that Kotlin is interoperable with Java. Standard Java code can be included in a Kotlin program, and Kotlin can be included in a Java program. That immense investment in compatibility means if you come from a Java background, picking up Kotlin will feel familiar and be a low risk since it will run alongside any of your existing Java code. To introduce you to Kotlin, I will go over some of its basic syntax, ranging from variables to defining functions and classes. If you want to follow along and learn some of the language's features, there is a great browser-based Kotlin playground you can use. [...] Kotlin's simplicity and Java interoperability equate to little risk that you will spend time learning something that isn't useful. After taking your first steps into Kotlin, you may never look at your Java code or the JVM the same way again.

• New feature highlights in Elixir Cross Referencer v2.0

  Maxime Chrétien has extended Elixir to support kernel configuration parameters. Actually, he contributed a new parser to the universal-ctags project to do so. This way, you can explore C sources and Kconfig files and find the declarations and uses of kernel parameters...

• Excellent Free Books to Learn Eiffel

  Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer (an object-orientation proponent and author of Object-Oriented Software Construction) and Eiffel Software.

• Fortran newsletter: June 2020

  Welcome to the June 2020 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out on the first calendar day of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.

• sidetable - Create Simple Summary Tables in Pandas

  Today I am happy to announce the release of a new pandas utility library called sidetable. This library makes it easy to build a frequency table and simple summary of missing values in a DataFrame. I have found it to be a useful tool when starting data exploration on a new data set and I hope others find it useful as well. This project is also an opportunity to illustrate how to use pandas new API to register custom DataFrame accessors. This API allows you to build custom functions for working with pandas DataFrames and Series and could be really useful for building out your own library of custom pandas accessor functions.

• Using pandas to plot data in Python

  In this series of articles on Python-based plotting libraries, we're going to look at an example of making plots using pandas, the hugely popular Python data manipulation library. Pandas is a standard tool in Python for scalably transforming data, and it has also become a popular way to import and export from CSV and Excel formats. On top of all that, it also contains a very nice plotting API. This is extremely convenient—you already have your data in a pandas DataFrame, so why not use the same library to plot it?

• 2020.21/22 Four by Wenzel

  Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer has written not one, not two, not three, but four blogs in the past two weeks, each addressing some feature or quirk of the Raku Programming Language.

• Monthly Report - May

  I have been doing Monthly Report since June 2018 non-stop. It has become a ritual for me now. It gives me an opportunity to look upon my activities. Since the beginning of the year 2020, I have made conscious decision to slow down as far as submitting Pull Request. I have also stopped playing CPAN game of daily upload after breaking the chain three times. I am happy that Perlancar is keeping the game alive. It has given me space to try something new. Although COVID-19 keeping us indoor all the time, still looking for interesting project to keep the mind busy.

• PHP 8.0 JIT Is Offering Very Compelling Performance Ahead Of Its Alpha

  With the PHP 8.0 schedule putting the first alpha release for the middle of June, I've been trying out its latest Git state in recent days for looking at its performance as well as when enabling its brand new JIT (Just In Time) compiler support that is new to PHP8. The results are quite compelling and here are metrics going back to the days of PHP 5.4 for comparison.