• Huawei Mate 20 Pro quietly removed from Google’s Android Q Beta page

• What a permanent split between Huawei and Android could mean for SA users

• Huawei’s Android ban could benefit alternative OS like Sailfish: Jolla CEO

• Android Q features you'll love: Games will be better on weaker hardware

• Possible new Galaxy Xcover 5 spotted on Wi-Fi Alliance with Android Pie

• OnePlus 3/3T get stable Android Pie with OxygenOS 9.0.2

• Best/ top data transfer apps from iPhone to Android

• 10 really good hidden gem apps for Android!

• How to wipe your Android phone before selling or trading it in

• How to Remap the Buttons on Your Android Device to Do Nearly Anything You Want

• Android at I/O 2019: The Project Mainline update system and other highlights

• The Dish AirTV Mini is an upcoming 4K Android TV streaming stick

• Android and iOS devices impacted by new sensor calibration attack

If the success of the open source company Red Hat can be ascribed to one thing, it's the Enterprise Linux operating system that it releases

The company recently unveiled the general release of the latest version, RHEL 8, and it serves as a bellwether for how software development has changed over the years.

Developers are now shouldering more operational responsibilities, which is largely due to the rise in the use of containers. This enables teams to use microservices to build applications. With RHEL 8, Red Hat has also placed container tools such as Buildah, Podman and Skopea directly into the operating system.

• Rook-Ceph storage Operator now on OperatorHub.io

  We are excited to announce the addition of the Rook-Ceph storage Operator to OperatorHub.io. Operators are design patterns that augment and implement common day one and day two activities with Kubernetes clusters, simplifying application deployments and empowering developers to focus on creation versus remediation. The Rook-Ceph Operator is an upstream effort that Red Hat is leading and is using as part of its work towards Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.

  Developing and deploying cloud-native applications at scale can be complex and challenging. The new Rook-Ceph storage Operator is designed to automate the packaging, deployment, management, upgrading, and scaling of Ceph clusters that provide persistent storage to stateful applications as well as infrastructure services (logging, metrics, registry) in Kubernetes clusters. The release of Rook’s Ceph Operator augments Kubernetes scheduling with a complement of stateful storage services including block, filesystem and object storage.

• Red Hat Satellite 6.4.3 has been released

  Red Hat Satellite 6.4.3 is generally available. The main drivers for the 6.4.3 release are a Request for Feature Enhancement (RFE) for capsule syncing control as well as general stability fixes.

  The capsule syncing control feature enables the user to have control over when capsule syncs occur. Traditionally the capsule sync occurs automatically after a content view is updated, but some customers may want more granular control over when the synchronization occurs. Satellite 6.4.3 introduces a new setting in Administer —> Settings —> Content —> Sync Capsules after Content View promotion.

• Contributors are Empowered When They Know the Process
  

  There is a saying in the legal profession that you should never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. Despite how this sounds, it is actually a rule most people follow in life. This is the source of that feeling you get when you’re too scared to raise your hand and ask a question. In Open Source we need to make sure that contributors feel like they already “know” the answers, so they will feel confident in making the request.

  As a university lecturer, I always encouraged my students to first think about what they thought the answer was and then ask the question. In some cases, I encouraged them to actually write down what they thought the answer was. In this way, they could judge both their skills and their ability to grow based on what the answer turned out to be. It created an additional feedback loop.

• Alisha and Shraddha: Positive feedback loops in Fedora

  This post is the second introduction to the Fedora Summer Coding interns Class of Summer 2019. In this interview, we’ll meet Alisha Mohanty and Shraddha Agrawal, who are both working on Fedora Happiness Packets to promote positive feedback loops in the Fedora community.

• The OpenStack User Survey is now open

  The 2019 OpenStack User Survey is now open and waiting for your input. Whether you’re a user of OpenStack, or an operator utilising it to power your offerings, the OpenStack Foundation (and the rest of the community) want to hear about your usage.

  2018 saw the 11th OpenStack User Survey unveiled at the Berlin OpenStack Summit, giving some fantastic insight into how and where people are using OpenStack across 63 different countries. Usage in Asia surged dramatically in 2018, with 48% of respondents based in that continent, with Europe 2nd at 26% and North America 3rd with 20% of respondents.

• Team OpenCensus or OpenTracing? It'll be neither and both now: Hello, OpenTelemetry

  Something odd happened at KubeCon 2019. Rather than snipe at each other from the safety of Twitter, two very similar open-source projects opted to pool their ideas into one: OpenTelemetry.

  The project is geared towards solving the problem of working out just what the heck is happening in today's microservices or container-based apps. Logging without incurring a chunky overhead both in terms of generating useful telemetry and actually collating the output.

  Distributed tracing is a bit more than fancy logging, as one commentator put it. Think more a transaction log over all the containers, services and components used in an application.

  Two projects emerged to deal with the challenge – OpenCensus from Google and OpenTracing, co-created by Ben Sigelman of Lightstep.

• PHP 7.4 as Software Collection.

  Version 7.4.0-alpha1 will be soon released. It's now enter the stabilization phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.

  RPM of this upcoming version of PHP 7.4, are available in remi repository for Fedora 29, 30 and Enterprise Linux 7, 8 (RHEL, CentOS, ...) in a fresh new Software Collection (php74) allowing its installation beside the system version.

  As I strongly believe in SCL potential to provide a simple way to allow installation of various versions simultaneously, and as I think it is useful to offer this feature to allow developers to test their applications, to allow sysadmin to prepare a migration or simply to use this version for some specific application, I decide to create this new SCL.

• HEIC / HEIF images support

  The HEIF image format (High Efficiency Image File Format) is now widely used, especially since iOS 11, so it make sense to be able to process these images.

• EuroPython 2019: First batch of accepted sessions

• Hello CodeGrades!

  This is a blog about CodeGrades, an experiment to help folks learn about programming (initially in Python). We’ll use it to celebrate the successes, learn from the failures and reflect upon the feedback of participants. We’ll also share project news here too.

• Setting Up GitLab CI for a Python Application

  This blog post describes how to configure a Continuous Integration (CI) process on GitLab for a python application.

• How OpenTracing & OpenCensus Merger Helps Users Like GitLab

  In this episode of Let’s Talk, Andrew Newdigate – Staff Site Reliability Engineer at GitLab talks about OpenTracing, OpenCensus, and the newly announced OpenTelemetry project.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 287

• Kushal Das: Game of guessing colors using CircuitPython

• Linux Mint Beginners Guide Part 01 - Introduction and Installation

• Linux Mint Beginners Guide Part 02 - Exploring the Desktop

• Linux Mint Beginners Guide Part 03 - Installing and Updating Applications

• Securing telnet connections with stunnel

• How to Browse Facebook Anonymously Using Tor Browser

Drill is a new file search utility that uses "clever crawling" instead of indexing, for Linux, Windows and macOS.

The application can locate files and folders, but it does not search file contents. It's designed for desktops, using a Gtk GUI by default, but there's also a command line frontend available, albeit quite minimal right now (a Ncurses backend is on the todo list as well).

There are a ton of great music players for Linux, and most of them have a pretty strong following. What makes DeaDBeeF stand out? In a word, it’s customization. DeaDBeeF is as close to a DIY music player as you’re going to get without making the jump to the command line.

DeaDBeeF lets you customize the entire layout of your music player, how your library is arranged, and which information is displayed when you play a song. Plus, it’s highly extensible, and there are plenty of excellent plugins that open up even more options for how you can customize and control your listening experience.

It's been three months now since the AMD Radeon VII 7nm "Vega 20" graphics card was released and while we hopefully won't be waiting much longer for Navi to make its debut, for the time being this is the latest and great AMD Radeon consumer graphics card -- priced at around $700 USD. Here are some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon VII on Linux and compared to various high-end NVIDIA graphics cards while all testing happened from Ubuntu 19.04.

Fortunately, the open-source Radeon VII Linux support is in fact in great shape. There was some confusion for some weeks and a lack of benchmarks recently since I had been unable to get my Vega 20 graphics card running reliably. Under different OpenGL/Vulkan workloads and even some desktop tasks, the graphics card would freeze and spewing from dmesg would most often be a load of VMC page faults and other errors stemming from AMDGPU. But after a lot of testing, ultimately it was figured out the graphics card became defective in some manner. The original card was a pre-launch Radeon VII review sample and was my lone Vega 20 GPU but has now been fortunately replaced by AMD. I received a new Radeon VII last week and since then has been under near constant load/testing. This new card has been working out well and I haven't encountered any issues with this retail card, unlike the woes I experienced with the original VII a few weeks after launch. It was a bit surprising the original Radeon VII failed especially without having done any over-clocking to it (granted was pushed very hard for a few weeks with all of my benchmarking workloads), but whatever the case, this retail Radeon VII is working out fine on Ubuntu 19.04 and various kernel/Mesa upgrades.

• Google gets up to speed: Android Q will support wide-color gamuts natively

• Google silently removes Huawei Mate 20 Pro from Android Q Beta page

• Google Removes Huawei Mate 20 Pro from Android Q Beta

• Digging into Android Q Beta 3: Better gesture nav, a new update system, and more

• Huawei's Android rival is incoming and will be compatible with Play Store apps

• Huawei Android ban: Time for Honor to rise to the challenge?

• Chinese media reports claim Huawei’s Android alternative could launch this year

• The privacy-focused Tor browser is now officially on Android

• Android Go-powered Galaxy A2 Core launched in South Africa

The initial PHP 7.4 Alpha 1 release is just two weeks away already... Curious about the performance of this yearly update to PHP7, I ran some benchmarks on the latest development code as of this morning compared to the earlier PHP7 releases and even PHP-8.0 that is in development on Git master.

PHP 7.4 has been working on preloading options, short closures, custom object serialization, FFI work that didn't end up making it for PHP 7.3, the null coalescing assignment operator has been added, and various other changes. The PHP 7.4 alpha releases are supposed to kick off on 6 June while the betas will then fire up starting on 18 July followed by at least six release candidates beginning at the end of August. If all goes well, PHP 7.4.0 will make its debut around the end of November or early December. PHP-7.4 has been branched since January while PHP-8.0 development is on Git master for that next major PHP8 release with JIT functionality and other changes in the works.

Linux container technology was introduced more than a decade ago and has recently jumped in adoption in IT environments. However, the OT (operational technology) environments, typically made up of heterogenous embedded systems, have lagged in the adoption of container technologies, due to both the unique technology requirements and the business models that relied on proprietary systems. In this article, I explore recent innovation in open-source offerings that are enabling the use of containers in OT use cases, such as industrial control systems, IoT gateways, medical devices, Radio Access Network (RAN) products and network appliances.

Enterprise IT leaders have adopted “cloud-native” computing architectures because of the innovation velocity and cost benefits derived by the approach. To leverage containers, developers segment applications into modular micro-services that enable flexible development and deployment models. These micro-services are then deployed as containers where the service itself is integrated with the required libraries and functions. On containerization, these application components have small footprints and fast speeds of deployment. The applications become highly portable across compute architectures due to the abstraction away from the hardware and the operating system.

Onion’s $99, sandwich-style Omega2 LTE SBC for remote sensor applications with a MIPS-based, WiFi-enabled Omega2S+ compute module, a Quectel EC25 chipset with LTE Cat 4 and GNSS, plus USB Type-C, microSD, and battery support.

Last December, Onion updated its MIPS-based, WiFi-enabled Omega2 board with a similarly OpenWrt-driven Omega2 Pro SBC that increased RAM to 512MB and flash to 8GB and added real-world USB host and micro-USB ports. Now, the company has returned to Crowd Supply with a similarly open source, OpenWrt Linux driven Omega2 LTE model with 4G LTE and GNSS location connectivity. Pricing ranges from $99 for the board alone to $199 for a fully loaded “Ultimate Collection” kit, all with early August shipments.

Today’s release of the openSUSE Leap 15.1 brings professional users, entrepreneurs and Independent Software Vendors updated support for modern hardware.

The release of Leap 15.1 improves YaST functionality and the installer.

“Continuity and stability are what we are providing users with Leap 15.1,” said Haris Sehic, a member of the openSUSE community. “With Leap 15, we have introduced a huge number of new features and innovations in security, performance and tool/desktop area. Having in mind how stable, efficient and reliable Leap has become, with this release, we managed to keep the level of quality to the point that our private and Small Business users can, actually more than ever, profit from the enterprise background of an openSUSE Linux Distribution. Let’s continue to have a lot of fun!”

Leap releases are scalable and both the desktop and server are equally important for professional’s workloads, which is reflected in the installation menu as well as the amount of packages Leap offers and hardware it supports. Leap is well suited and prepared for usage as a Virtual Machine (VM) or container guest, allowing professional users to efficiently run network services no matter whether it’s a single server or a data center.

Also: openSUSE Leap 15.1 Officially Released, Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1

OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 Released - Based Off SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1

• Linux 5.1.4

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.1.4 kernel.

  All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade.

  The updated 5.1.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.1.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

• Linux 5.0.18

• Linux 4.19.45

• Linux 4.14.121

• Linux 4.9.178

Tor Browser 8.5 is the first stable release for Android. Since we released the first alpha version in September, we've been hard at work making sure we can provide the protections users are already enjoying on desktop to the Android platform. Mobile browsing is increasing around the world, and in some parts, it is commonly the only way people access the internet. In these same areas, there is often heavy surveillance and censorship online, so we made it a priority to reach these users.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.4, the fourth bug and regression fixing release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, targeted at tech-savvy individuals: early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/, to improve LibreOffice by contributing back in one of the following areas: development, documentation, infrastructure, localization, quality assurance, design or marketing.

Also: LibreOffice 6.2.4 Open-Source Office Suite Released with More Than 100 Bug Fixes

• Intel Iris Gallium3D Driver Gets On-Disk Shader Cache Support

  In helping to speed-up game load times when switching to the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver and smooth out frame-rates for games sporadically loading shaders, Mesa 19.2-devel has added on-disk shader cache support for the driver.

  Intel's existing "i965" classic Mesa driver has long supported an on-disk shader cache along with the other Mesa OpenGL drivers while now the Gallium3D shader cache functionality has been extended for the new Iris driver.

• 10 Unknown Google Search Games for You

  Google Search by default has games hidden in it, which is a fact, not many Google users are aware of. Google has compiled some really authentic and entertaining games over a period of time, that can be played in Google.com page itself without having to visit any other Web page.

  Most of these games were made to appear as Google Doodle, in relation with certain anniversaries that have been a remarkable day in history. While some of these games are not available easily because Google Doodle keeps changing.

  However, a few of them continue to be played even today. All you need is to search the game by its name in Google and hit “search” and Voila! The games will appear right in front of your eyes and you can play them right then and there.

  Read on to know about the playable games still available, though hidden within the Google Search.

• Valve have released a new dedicated mobile Steam Chat application

  Now that Valve have upgraded the chat and friends system in the desktop Steam client, they've also rolled out a brand new dedication mobile application to do the same.

  This isn't the normal Steam mobile application, instead they've oddly decided to split them in two. Touching on that, they said the original Steam mobile application is going to get some upgrades "focused on account security" including better Steam Guard options, like QR codes and a one-touch login.

• Sci-fi first-person shooter 'Interstellar Marines' continues to live on, with a big update out now

  Interstellar Marines, a once promising sci-fi first-person shooter that slowly died is slowly making a comeback. Update 28 was released just recently, giving it an overhaul in a few places.

• Valve working on a stand-alone version of the popular Dota Auto Chess

  Dota Auto Chess, a very popular custom game mode for Dota 2 is being turned into a stand-alone game by Valve.

  The Dota 2 arcade is full of interesting games but nothing has really come close to Dota Auto Chess, looking at it right now it has over 125K people playing just this one game mode. It also has over 8 million people subscribed to it, to give you another idea of just how popular it is. Based on player-count, if it manages to keep it for the stand-alone version it would put it into the top-5 games on Steam.

• Blacksite returns alongside Sirocco for the latest Danger Zone update in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

  Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's newer Battle Royale mode, Danger Zone, continues to be tweaked and the original map has made a return.

  This should help spice things up a bit, as Blacksite is quite a good map but I've also immensely enjoyed playing on the newer and more open Sirocco map. Thankfully, Valve have now enabled Danger Zone for both maps together as a "time-based map rotation" as you can see below:

• DXVK 1.2.1 really does improve Overwatch quite a lot on Linux with NVIDIA

  In the latest release of DXVK 1.2.1 that was released last week, it included a note about improved GPU utilization. They certainly weren’t kidding, with Overwatch now performing even better on Linux with Wine.

  When I previously wrote about it, I said I was in shock at how well you could play Overwatch on Linux thanks to Wine, DXVK and a little help from Lutris. I included a video in the previous article to show it off, which showed the framerate hardly going above 100FPS and often dipped down to around 60FPS. Checking back, previous versions of DXVK didn’t let my NVIDIA 980ti GPU utilization go above 80%.

• The absolutely insane and pretty awesome twin-stick shooter 'BulletRage' is now on Kickstarter

  BulletRage is a game I firmly think is worth supporting, as the developer has had Linux support in very early and it does seem like a pretty awesome twin-stick shooter.

• Dark Style Rises | LINUX Unplugged 302

  Can the Free Desktop avoid being left behind in the going dark revolution? Cassidy from elementary OS joins us to discuss their proposal.

  Plus we complete our Red Hat arc by giving Silverblue the full workstation shakedown, Drew shares his complete review, and we discuss the loss of Antergros.

• mintCast 309 – Virtualization

• curl 7.65.0 dances in

  After another eight week cycle was been completed, curl shipped a new release into the world. 7.65.0 brings some news and some security fixes but is primarily yet again a set of bug-fixes bundled up.

 

• Time for school as the big Cities: Skylines - Campus expansion is out now

  Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have put school back on the map, as the Cities: Skylines - Campus expansion is out now. In terms of features and new content, this is one of the bigger expansions to be released.

  Adding in a little extra complexity for those who want it while also giving you even more freedom at the same time with the way you design your campus. Much like what came with the Parklife expansion, Campus lets you freely zone an entire area to build your fancy new education system.

• The Humble tinyBuild Bundle 2019 is live with some lovely Linux games

  Here's something to keep you going for a little while, the Humble tinyBuild Bundle 2019 went live today and it has plenty of Linux games.

• Academic Support Center BiASC connects the SUSE Academic Program with Belgium and Luxembourg

  The SUSE Academic Program has taken significant strides in new territories with the help of trusted academic partners from different regions. BiASC is an academic support organization that connects with IT academies from higher and secondary education and from non-commercial and professional training institutions. Already working with a number of universities, including the University of Luxembourg and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, we hope to see our footprint spread with support from BiASC.

• Raspberry Pi Close To Seeing CPUFreq Support

  Nicolas Saenz Julienne of SUSE has been working on CPUFreq support for the Raspberry Pi single board computers to allow for the Linux kernel to provide CPU frequency scaling controls.

  This CPUFreq support communicates with firmware running on a dedicated processor on the Raspberry Pi that is responsible for adjusting the CPU frequencies as well as that of the VPU and related blocks. The driver can request changes to the CPU frequencies though isn't necessarily honored depending upon thermal factors and other criteria. The firmware also offers the ability to request a turbo mode, but that can boost up other clocks and appears to be causing issues at least with the current state of the Raspberry Pi kernel drivers.

• Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, April 2019

  Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• RC candidate of the day (1)

  Sometimes the list of release-critical bugs is overwhelming, and it’s hard to find something to tackle.

  So I invite you to have a go at #928040, which may only be a case of reviewing and uploading the included patch.

• [GSoC – 1] Achieving consistency between SDDM and Plasma

  I’m very excited to start off the Google Summer of Code blogging experience regarding the project I’m doing with my KDE mentors David Edmundson and Nate Graham.

  What we’ll be trying to achieve this summer is have SDDM be more in sync with the Plasma desktop.

  What does that mean? The essence of the problem is quite simple: you can customize Plasma to no end, yet the only thing you can customize in SDDM is the cursor theme. As a customization-loving user, this has been a big pet peeve of mine. In my attempts to work around the issue I’ve already went as far as adding one too many config points to the Breeze SDDM theme. So to finish that project and thereby solve our GSoC issue, perhaps we could just hook up the respective KCM’s UI to those options…

• Guaranteed Hard Real-time Response and Determinism from Aitech's Space SBC Processor Using NASA cFS Linux

• Embedded PC with 6th or 7th Gen CPUs offers optional mini-PCIe and PCIe x4

  Aaeon’s barebones, semi-rugged “EPIC-KBS9-PUC” embedded PC runs on 6th or 7th Gen Core CPUs with up to 4x GbE and 2x serial plus 4x USB, mSATA, dual displays, and optional mini-PCIe, PCIe x4, or 2.5-inch HDD.

  Aaeon has spun last year’s EPIC form-factor EPIC-KBS board into an embedded system for light industrial duty including “automated warehouse robots, retail POS systems, and even a 3D printer for cakes.” The barebones, 216 x 180 x 65mm system will presumably let you load either Linux or Windows on a range of 6th (Skylake) or 7th (Kaby Lake) generation Intel Core CPUs up to 65W.

• How to install Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Ubuntu [Ed: Jack Wallen pushing Microsoft agenda and helps Microsoft impose proprietary software, MSVS, on GNU/Linux users. Wallen should know better than this, but LF now pays him.]

• Apple Is Finally Fixing the Keyboards on MacBook Pros

  Apple’s newest MacBook Pros, which are being announced today and include significant bumps in power and performance, are still using Apple’s third-generation “butterfly” keyboard. But the company says these keyboards have a change in the physical material that exists within the butterfly mechanism that will address some of the issues that MacBook users have been experiencing. The company declined to say exactly what the material change was. [...]

• Flex PCB Fabrication

  I’ve gotten a few people asking me where I get my flex PCBs fabricated, so I figured I’d make a note here. I get my flex PCBs (and actually most of my PCBs, except laser-drilled microvia) done at a medium-sized shop in China called King Credie. Previously it was a bit hard to talk about them because they only took orders via e-mail and in Chinese, but they recently opened an English-friendly online website for quotation and order placement. There’s still a few wrinkles in the website, but for a company whose specialty is decidedly not “web services” and with English as a second language, it’s usable.

  Knowing your PCB vendor is advantageous for a boutique hardware system integrators like me. It’s a bit like the whole farm-to-table movement — you get better results when you know where your materials are coming from. I’ve probably been working with King Credie for almost a decade now, and I try to visit their facility and have drinks with the owner on a regular basis. I really like their CEO, he’s been a circuit board fabrication nerd since college, and he’s living his dream of building his own factory and learning all he can about interesting and boutique PCB processes.

• TechnicalDebt

   

  Thinking of this as paying interest versus paying of principal can help decide which cruft to tackle. If I have a terrible area of the code base, one that's a nightmare to change, it's not a problem if I don't have to modify it. I only trigger an interest payment when I have to work with that part of the software (this is a place where the metaphor breaks down, since financial interest payments are triggered by the passage of time). So crufty but stable areas of code can be left alone. In contrast, areas of high activity need a zero-tolerance attitude to cruft, because the interest payments are cripplingly high. This is especially important since cruft accumulates where developers make changes without paying attention to internal quality - the more changes, the greater risk of cruft building up.

• WannaCry? Hundreds of US schools still haven’t patched servers

  But cities aren't the only highly vulnerable targets to be found by would-be attackers. There are hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected Windows systems in the United States that still appear to be vulnerable to an exploit of Microsoft Windows' Server Message Block version 1 (SMB v. 1) file sharing protocol, despite repeated public warnings to patch systems following the worldwide outbreak of the WannaCry cryptographic malware two years ago. And based on data from the Shodan search engine and other public sources, hundreds of them—if not thousands—are servers in use at US public school systems.

• Google stored some passwords in plain text for fourteen years

  In a blog post today, Google disclosed that it recently discovered a bug that caused some portion of G Suite users to have their passwords stored in plain text. The bug has been around since 2005, though Google says that it can’t find any evidence that anybody’s password was improperly accessed. It’s resetting any passwords that might be affected and letting G Suite administrators know about the issue.

  G Suite is the corporate version of Gmail and Google’s other apps, and apparently the bug came about in this product because of a feature designed specifically for companies. Early on, it was possible for your company administrator for G Suite apps to set user passwords manually — say, before a new employee came on board — and if they did, the admin console would store those passwords in plain text instead of hashing them. Google has since removed that capability from administrators.

• Notifying administrators about unhashed password storage
  

• Google Disappoints Yet Again: Stored Some Passwords In Plain Text For 14 Years

  G Suite users were taken aback yesterday when Google disclosed that it stored some passwords for Enterprise G Suite users in plain text for 14 years.

  In a blog post, the search giant mentioned that the passwords were encrypted but not hashed, which means that Google employees had complete access to them. However, the company says that there is no evidence that passwords were illegally accessed by anyone or misused.

• Stable Version Of Tor Browser For Android Now Available On Play Store

  After eight months of testing, a stable release for the Tor browser has arrived on the Play Store. The new Android browser now brings Tor features directly into a standalone browser, replacing the Orbot/Orfox as the main way to connect to the Tor network via Android devices.

  The stable version (v8.5) of Tor for Android routes your web traffic through the Tor network — a web of encrypted computers spread worldwide.

Given there are many different video formats available, a free video converter is an extremely useful piece of software. The best video converters make the conversion process simple, and support a wide number of different codecs and formats.

Video conversion is a narrower term for transcoding. Transcoding is the process of the conversion of digital data (typically video and audio files) from one format to another. It involves extracting tracks from a digital media file, decoding the tracks, filtering, encoding, and then multiplexing the new tracks into a new container. Transcoding will reduce the quality of the tracks unless lossless formats are used.

There are many reasons to transcode media files. Some popular examples include the ability to convert files so that they are supported on a target device, and at the same time removing commercials, and reducing the file size. While transcoding is a very CPU intensive task, modern processors with a high number of cores offer impressive conversion rates provided the transcoding software supports multi-core architectures.