Android Leftovers

• Sony launches the mid-range Xperia XA1 Plus in India

• The Inventor of Android On the Future of Smartphones and Beyond

• How Google-HTC Deal Will Pressure Samsung, Huawei In Android

• Android adds zero-touch provisioning for corporate devices

• Google's Android One Moto X4 is the first of its kind in the US

• Mobile Ad Fraud: Twice as High On Android As iOS

Red Hat: Patent 'Promise', Proprietary 'Gifts', Imminent Results, Fedora 27 Delays

• Red Hat pledges patent protection for 99 per cent of FOSS-ware [Ed: And when Red Hat gets taken over (like Sun and Oracle) this promise will be worthless]

  Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open source software. The company's made more or less the same offer since the year 2002, when it first made a “Patent Promise” in order to “to discourage patent aggression in free and open source software.” In 2002 the company didn't own many patents and claimed its non-enforcement promise covered per cent of open source software. The Promise was revised in order to reflect the company's growing patent trove and to spruce up the language it uses to make it more relevant. The revised promise “applies to all software meeting the free software or open source definitions of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI)”. That verbiage translates into any software licensed on terms the OSI approves on this list, or which meet the Initiative’s definition of open source offered here. Licenses listed by the Free Software Foundation as a free software license at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses also come under the Promise's purview, as do those here as of the date this edition of Our Promise is published.

• Red Hat Open Source Day rewards with proprietary hardware. For the fourth time

  The above is an excerpt of the 2017 event announcement. Which, as you can see below, will be at least the fourth consecutive one in which Red Hat Italia will award participants with some of the most proprietary devices around. Please note the absence of anything like, e.g. Matchstick, “100% Linux compatible laptop, with Linux preinstalled”, or a Fairphone, in the screenshots...

• Red Hat (RHT) to Report Q2 Earnings: Will it Beat Estimates?

  We expect Red Hat Inc. RHT to beat expectations when it reports fiscal second-quarter 2018 results on Sep 25.

• Needle Action Activity Spotted in Enbridge Inc (ENB) and Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Fedora 27 Beta Hit By A Second Delay

  Last week it was decided to delay the Fedora 27 beta due to bugs while this week they've been forced to delay the release a second time. The first beta delay wasn't too bad as the F27 schedule already had a built-in "rain date", in acknowledging Fedora's frequent release delays. But today a second unplanned delay is pushing back F27 Beta by at least one more week. This will now also push back the Fedora 27 final release by at least one week.

• Fedora 27 Beta status is NO-GO

• News: The new Krita 3.3.0

Security: Apple's Betrayal, Intel ME Back Doors Backfire, and Optionsbleed

• iOS 11 Muddies WiFi and Bluetooth Controls

  Turning WiFi and Bluetooth off is often viewed as a good security practice. Apple did not rationalize these changes in behavior.

• How To Hack A Turned-Off Computer, Or Running Unsigned Code In Intel Management Engine

  Intel Management Engine is a proprietary technology that consists of a microcontroller integrated into the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) microchip with a set of built-in peripherals. The PCH carries almost all communication between the processor and external devices; therefore Intel ME has access to almost all data on the computer, and the ability to execute third-party code allows compromising the platform completely. Researchers have been long interested in such "God mode" capabilities, but recently we have seen a surge of interest in Intel ME. One of the reasons is the transition of this subsystem to a new hardware (x86) and software (modified MINIX as an operating system) architecture. The x86 platform allows researchers to bring to bear all the power of binary code analysis tools.

• Optionsbleed: Don’t get your panties in a wad

  To be honest, this isn’t the first security concern you’ve run in to, and it isn’t the first security issue you’re vulnerable to, that will remain exploitable for quite some time, until after someone you rely on fixed the issue for you, meanwhile compromising your customers. [...] Is it a small part of the SSL public key? A small part of the web request response? A chunk of the path to the index.php? Or is it a chunk of the database password used? Nobody knows until you get enough data to analyse the results of all data. If you can’t appreciate the maths behind analysing multiple readings of 8 arbitrary bytes, choose another career. Not that I know what to do and how to do it, by the way.

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