Debian, Elive, and Ubuntu

• Re-elected as Debian Project Leader

  I have been extremely proud to have served as the Debian Project Leader since my election in early 2017. During this time I've learned a great deal about the inner workings of the Project as well as about myself. I have grown as a person thanks to all manner of new interactions and fresh experiences. I believe is a privilege simply to be a Debian Developer, let alone to be selected as their representative. It was therefore an even greater honour to learn that I have been re-elected by the community for another year. I profoundly and wholeheartedly thank everyone for placing their trust in me for another term.

• Elive 3.0 is ALMOST here!

  Elive's latest beta, 2.9.90, was released a couple of weeks ago. According to the description, this is the last beta before the official release of version 3.0. I have been waiting for Elive for quite a long time. My first contact with it was through a live CD of version 2.0 Topaz in 2010, when I had recently migrated to Linux. I was truly impressed by the beauty and polish of the distro. I never installed it, though. I was put off by the fact that it was the only distro that could not be installed unless one paid for an installing module. Back then, I assumed that free software had to be "gratis".

• NGINX Updates: Ubuntu Bionic, and Mainline and Stable PPAs

  Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 now has 1.14.0 in the repositories, and very likely will have 1.14.0 for the lifecycle of 18.04 from April of 2018 through April of 2023, as soon as it is released.

• gksu removed from Ubuntu

More Android Leftovers

 

• How To Track Lost Android Phone? — Locate, Remotely Control, And Erase Stolen Device

• “Internet” – Amazon Launches A Lightweight Web Browser For Android

• Amazon launches a ‘lite’ Android web browser app in India

• When Will Your Phone Get Android Oreo?

• Google Working On Mysterious “AltOS” For Pixelbook, Could Dual-Boot Windows: Report

• Google is working on an “AltOS” mode for the Google Pixelbook

• Learn To Code For Free With Google’s New “Grasshoppers” App

OSS Leftovers

• Prospects for free software in cars

  Car manufacturers, like most companies, navigate a narrow lane between the benefits of using free and open-source software and the perceived or real importance of hiding their trade secrets. Many are using free software in some of the myriad software components that make up a modern car, and even work in consortia to develop free software. At the recent LibrePlanet conference, free-software advocate Jeremiah Foster covered progress in the automotive sector and made an impassioned case for more free software in their embedded systems. Foster has worked in automotive free software for many years and has played a leading role in the GENIVI Alliance, which is dedicated to incorporating free software into in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. He is currently the community manager for the GENIVI Alliance. First, Foster talked about the importance of software in modern vehicles. He pointed out that software increasingly becomes the differentiator used to market cars. Horsepower no longer sells these vehicles, Foster says—features do. He claims that some companies even sell the car at cost (the old "razor/blades" or "printer/ink" business model) and make their money on aftermarket apps and features. Companies are finding it effective to get hardware from other manufacturers while improving the user experience through their software. Some of these features contribute to safety (such as alerts that help you drive within the lane or parallel park), and some may be critical, such dashboard icons that warn the driver of electrical system problems or low brake fluid.

• Productising open source integration

  We asked Lumina Networks’ CEO Andrew Coward, how companies can make best use of open source. “Open source is not a spectator sport,” says Andrew. “Sitting around and waiting for somebody to show up and deliver the equivalent of your existing vendor’s offering is not the right approach. So we work best when our customers are very engaged. And really, it’s all about how you automate things.”

• Riot: A Distributed Way of Having IRC and VOIP Client and Home Server

  Riot is a free and open source decentralized instant messaging application that can be considered an alternative to Slack. We take a look at features of Riot, installation procedure and usage. It’s surprising that many Linux users and open source projects use a proprietary messaging service like Slack. Even we at It’s FOSS use Slack for our internal communication which I don’t like. This is why I came up with the proposal of using an open source alternative to Slack, called Riot.

• Announcing the 2018 Fractal Hackfest

  For the past few months, I’ve been contributing to a new group messaging app called Fractal. Its aim is to be so good that we can maybe, eventually, finally replace IRC as the primary communication channel for GNOME development.

• The ticking time bomb: Fake ad blockers in Chrome Web Store

  People searching for a Google Chrome ad blocking extension have to choose from dozens of similarly named extensions. Only few of these are legitimate, most are forks of open source ad blockers trying to attract users with misleading extension names and descriptions. What are these up to? Thanks to Andrey Meshkov we now know what many people already suspected: these extensions are malicious. He found obfuscated code hidden carefully within a manipulated jQuery library that accepted commands from a remote server.

• Google Chrome now blocks autoplaying video with sound

  Video that plays without audio, or that a user has tapped or clicked on, will still play. On mobile, autoplaying videos will be allowed on sites that have been added as a bookmark to the home screen, while desktop sites that a user frequently actively watches video on will be allowed to autoplay videos with sound as ranked by the firm’s new Media Engagement Index (MEI).

• Israeli Government Is Open Sourcing Its Software Code

  Just yesterday, we told you about German government’s decision to go ahead with an open source solution for creating its private cloud. The government announced a partnership with Nextcloud, which is a popular open source solutions provider. In another encouraging development for the open source enthusiasts, the Israeli government has decided to open source its software code. As a result, the released code will be available to public and free to reuse.

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