Android Leftovers

• ZTE Potentially Losing Access to Android Could Cripple Its Phones

• ZTE's potential catastrophic Android problem (The 3:59, Ep. 388)

• How the US's export ban could truly sink ZTE

• Thousands of Android apps may be improperly tracking kids' data

• EU antitrust chief says investigation of Google's Android, AdSense is advancing

• Vulnerabilities Abound in Popular Android Apps: Report

3 tips for organizing your open source project's workflow on GitHub

Managing an open source project is challenging work, and the challenges grow as a project grows. Eventually, a project may need to meet different requirements and span multiple repositories. These problems aren't technical, but they are important to solve to scale a technical project. Business process management methodologies such as agile and kanban bring a method to the madness. Developers and managers can make realistic decisions for estimating deadlines and team bandwidth with an organized development focus.

How will the GDPR impact open source communities?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016, and will be enforced beginning May 25, 2018. The GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC which was designed "to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy." The aim of the GDPR is to protect the personal data of individuals in the EU in an increasingly data-driven world.

Trisquel 9.0 Development Plans and Trisquel 8.0 Release

• Trisquel 9.0 development plans

  Just as we release Trisquel 8.0, the development of the next version begins! Following the naming suggestions thread I've picked Etiona, which sounds good and has the fewest search results. We currently do our development in a rented dedicated server in France, and although it is functional it has many performance and setup issues. It has 32 gigs of RAM, which may sound like plenty but stays below the sweet spot where you can create big enough ramdisks to compile large packages without having to ever write to disk during the build process, greatly improving performance. It also has only 8 cores and rather slow disks. The good news is that the FSF has generously decided to host a much larger dedicated build server for us, which will allow us to scale up operations. The new machine will have fast replicated disks, lots of RAM and two 12 core CPUs. Along with renewing the hardware, we need to revamp the software build infrastructure. Currently the development server runs a GitLab instance, Jenkins and pbuilder-based build jails. This combination was a big improvement from the custom made scripts of early releases, but it has some downsides that have been removed by sbuild. Sbuild is lighter and faster and has better crash recovery and reporting.

• Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas

  Trisquel 8.0, codename "Flidas" is finally here! This release will be supported with security updates until April 2021. The first thing to acknowledge is that this arrival has been severely delayed, to the point where the next upstream release (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) will soon be published. The good news is that the development of Trisquel 9.0 will start right away, and it should come out closer to the usual release schedule of "6 months after upstream release". But this is not to say that we shouldn't be excited about Trisquel 8.0, quite the contrary! It comes with many improvements over Trisquel 7.0, and its core components (kernel, graphics drivers, web browser and e-mail client) are fully up to date and will receive continuous upgrades during Flidas' lifetime. Trisquel 8.0 has benefited from extensive testing, as many people have been using the development versions as their main operating system for some time. On top of that, the Free Software Foundation has been using it to run the Libreplanet conference since last year, and it has been powering all of its new server infrastructure as well!