• Google Chrome Labs: Use our open-source Squoosh image tool for faster page loads

  The tool is aimed at helping web developers quickly compress images and reduce image quality to an acceptable level, with the aim of making web apps that are light and fast.

  However, it will also help Google promote its WebP image lossy and lossless image-compression format, which until recently was only supported by Chrome.

  WebP aside, Squoosh is a progressive web app (PWA) that works with any browser on desktop and mobile, and offers several "best-in-class codecs" to compress and compare images within the browser.

• Google Chrome Labs unveils Squoosh, an open-source image compression tool that runs in your browser

  Google Chrome Labs has just revealed Squoosh, an in-browser image compression tool that can use non-browser image codecs to compress images without much loss in quality. The app can also be run offline after it is loaded in a browser at least once. Squoosh is aimed at web designers that hope to reduce web page load times by using compressed images.

• Google ‘Squoosh’ apps makes reducing image file sizes a breeze

• Recap: What Google announced at the 2018 Chrome Dev Summit

• Scale down the images through Google’s new web app “Squoosh”

• This Nifty Web Tool Lets You Mess With Image Compression

• Google's 'Squoosh' Image Compression Tool Shows Off the Power of Web Apps

• WebP images won’t load in Microsoft Edge with Application Guard

  This issue affects a lot of prominent websites who’ve opted to take advantage of the higher compression gains they get with a modern image format like WebP. You can also see it here on Ctrl blog where most images will just not work in Microsoft Edge.

  There isn’t really anything web developers can do to work around this issue other than strip out unsupported photo formats when encountering the Microsoft Edge User-Agent. The images won’t fire an error even when it fails to display, and you can’t detect that Microsoft Edge is running in Application Guard mode from the web platform.

• SBC showcases Qualcomm’s 10nm, octa-core QCS605 IoT SoC

  Intrinsyc’s compact “Open-Q 605” SBC for computer vision and edge AI applications runs Android 8.1 and Qualcomm’s Vision Intelligence Platform on Qualcomm’s IoT-focused, octa-core QCS605.

  In April, Qualcomm announced its QCS605 SoC, calling it “the first 10nm FinFET fabricated SoC purpose built for the Internet of Things.” The octa-core Arm SoC is available in an Intrinsyc Open-Q 605 SBC with full development kit with a 12V power supply is open for pre-orders at $429. The products will ship in early December.

• Second-gen Intel Neural Compute Stick shows off new Myriad X VPU

  Intel has launched a $99 “Neural Compute Stick 2” AI accelerator built around a new Myriad X VPU that adds a Neural Compute Engine and more cores for up to 8x greater performance.

  Intel may be scaling back a bit on its IoT business, but it continues to push hard with the Myriad neural network acceleration technology it acquired when it bought Movidius. Intel has just released its third-gen “Myriad X” technology for AI acceleration on edge devices, debuting on a $99 Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2).

• That Domain You Forgot to Renew? Yeah, it’s Now Stealing Credit Cards

  If you own a domain name that gets decent traffic and you fail to pay its annual renewal fee, chances are this mistake will be costly for you and for others. Lately, neglected domains have been getting scooped up by crooks who use them to set up fake e-commerce sites that steal credit card details from unwary shoppers.

  [...]

  If you’re on the fence about whether to renew a domain and it’s one of several you own, it may make sense to hold onto it and simply forward any incoming traffic to a domain you do want people to visit. In the event you decide to relinquish a domain, make sure you take stock of any online accounts you created with email addresses tied to that domain and move those to another email address, as those accounts will likely come under someone else’s control when the domain expires.

• Stolen credit card details of nearly 250,000 British Airways customers on sale for up to £9.4m

• Watch a real hacker hack into Hollywood's hacky hacking scenes
  

  As with bad sex, most bad hacking scenes in movies and television involve someone needing to announce, “I’m in!” Since not long after people started connecting computers to other computers, Hollywood has been depicting fictional people attempting to use those connections for nefarious means. Naturally, Hollywood has also spent a lot of its time getting those depictions wrong. In the above clip from Wired, security researcher Samy Kamkar assesses a number of famous hacking scenes from TV and film to see just how off they are.

• Red Team 101: Understanding Kali Linux

  Your security environment is complicated. You’re invested in multiple security tools – antivirus, firewalls, IDS, IPS, SIEM, DLP, and more. If you haven’t invested in a red team, however, you’re doing security wrong. How could you know that your expensive defenses are working unless you’ve tested them out?

  A red team is a great way to test your defenses. In brief, a red team is a small group of employees whose job is to try to hack into your organization, understand its vulnerabilities, and then help you patch them up.

• Adobe Flash Player Update Version 31.0.0.148 Addresses a Significant Vulnerability Issue

Welcome to a new series here at Forbes that zeroes in on your very first experience with a new desktop Linux operating system: the installer. In this debut review I'm going to explain why the heck I'm doing this, and give you a closer look at the relatively new Pop!_OS installer from boutique PC manufacturer System76 -- the same installer that actually inspired these articles. (Spoiler: yes it's that good.)

[...]

That tagline, present in the default wallpaper for Pop!_OS, also says a little something about the installer itself. This is, in my experience, sets a benchmark for other installers in the desktop Linux world. Even the most complex aspect of installing a Linux OS -- partitioning -- is explained in detail. Granted, the simplest partitioning tasks will take rookies a few tries to comprehend and master (myself included), but System76 did an exemplary job with the included help pages, and the interface is the most intuitive I've used. So far anyway!

Seriously folks, I never thought I'd walk away from an installer and feel excited. Nor did I imagine it would inspire an entire series of articles. But here we are! System76 has crafted an intuitive, fast and streamlined installation process that improves the incoming perception of desktop Linux for newcomers, and may perhaps feel like a breath of fresh air for Linux veterans. Overall, it looks fantastic and made me eager to dig into the daily Pop!_OS experience.

• LF Deep Learning Delivers First Acumos AI Release Making it Easier to Deploy and Share Artificial Intelligence Models

  The LF Deep Learning Foundation, a project of The Linux Foundation that supports open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), today announced the availability of its first software release of the Acumos AI Project – Athena.

  Acumos AI is a platform and open source framework that makes it easy to build, share and deploy AI applications. Acumos AI standardizes the infrastructure stack and components required to run an out-of-the-box general AI environment. This frees data scientists and model trainers to focus on their core competencies and accelerate innovation.

• Linux Foundation's Acumos Wants To Make It Easier Deploying AI Apps

  The latest software initiative out of the Linux Foundation -- and in particular their Deep Learning Foundation -- is the Acumos AI "Athena" release that tries to make it easier dealing with artificial intelligence apps.

  Acumos Athena is an effort to make it easier to deploy AI applications across private/public clouds and other environments. Acumos is a framework for building, sharing, and deploying AI applications and provides a standardized stack for these components.

• The Thunderbird project is hiring: Software Engineers

  We need your help to improve and maintain Thunderbird. Moving Thunderbird forward includes replacing/rewriting components to be based primarily on web technologies, reducing the reliance on Mozilla-internal interfaces. It also includes boosting the user experience of the product.

  Maintenance involves fixing bugs and regressions, as well as addressing technical debt and enhancing performance. Most tasks have a component of both maintenance and improvement, and any new component needs careful integration with the existing system.

  We have compiled a high level list of tasks here; the work assigned to you will include a subset of these items. Let us know in your cover letter where you believe you can make most impact and how.

• Firefox 64 Beta 12 Testday, November 23th

  We are happy to let you know that Friday, November 23th, we are organizing Firefox 64 Beta 12 Testday. We’ll be focusing our testing on: Multi-Select Tabs and Widevine CDM.

• New & Experimental Web Design Tools: Feedback Requested

  A year ago, the Firefox DevTools team formed a subgroup to focus on new tools for working in web design, CSS, and HTML. Motivated by the success of the Grid Inspector, and with help from the Developer Outreach, Gecko Platform, and Accessibility teams, we launched the Variable Fonts Editor and the Shape Path Editor, added an Accessibility Inspector, and revamped our Responsive Design Mode.

  [...]

  We’re just getting started, and now we want to learn more about you. Tell us about your biggest CSS and web design issues in the first-ever Design Tools survey!

• How to Install Collaborative Real-time Editor Etherpad on Ubuntu 18.04

• Install Ubuntu MATE on Raspberry Pi

• docker and exec permissions

• Building a multilingual static website with Hugo

• Automating OpenShift application DNS with external-dns and Red Hat’s Satellite 6 server

• DaVinci Resolve 15.2 Video Editor Released With More Improvements For Its Linux Build

  Back in August marked the release of DaVinci Resolve 15 with Linux support for this professional-grade video editing solution that also supports visual effects and audio post-production capabilities. That has now been succeeded by DaVinci Resolve 15.2.

  General work on DaVinci Resolve 15.2 includes better responsiveness out of its edit timeline, improved visual animations, a visual keyboard customization utility, user-interface improvements, support for FairlightFX and ResolveFX features, support for decoding Panasonic 8K SHV clips, an improved scripting API, and a range of other user-interface refinements, usability improvements, and other new features.

• Cockpit 182

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 182.

• Best Free Linux Computer Algebra Systems

  A computer algebra system (CAS) is mathematical software that can manipulate mathematical formulae in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. This type of system supports a wide range of mathematics including linear algebra, calculus, and algebraic and ordinary differential equations.

  A CAS offers a rigorous environment for defining and working with structures such as groups, rings, fields, modules, algebras, schemes, curves, graphs, designs, codes and many others.

  They have been extensively used in higher education.

• AMD Is Hiring Another Mesa/RadeonSI Driver Developer

  AMD is hiring another open-source Linux graphics driver developer with a focus on the Mesa/RadeonSI driver stack.

  There is a new job posting for a Senior Software Development Engineer with a focus on open-source graphics. This job role will be working on their open-source graphics driver, work on driver bring-up, debug issues, improve driver performance, coordinate with Linux distributions, and engage with the open-source graphics development community. I've been able to confirm with AMD that this is focused on their Mesa/RadeonSI driver as opposed to say just their AMDGPU kernel driver.

• AMD Stages Latest Radeon/AMDGPU Changes For Linux 4.21 Kernel

  AMD has posted their initial set of AMDGPU driver changes slated to go into the future Linux 4.21 kernel by way of DRM-Next.

  This is the first of likely two or three feature pull requests to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 4.21 kernel cycle kicks off in the final days of 2018 or early 2019.

• Fedora Perfecting Their Flicker-Free Boot Experience With A New Plymouth Theme

  The recent release of Fedora 29 the long-desired goal of a flicker-free boot experience to the Linux desktop was finally achieved... Well, assuming you are for now using Intel graphics and set a couple extra settings and don't have any quirky hardware. While all of the key components are in place, for Fedora 30 and beyond they will likely be taking care of the "rough edges" and already there is work on a new Plymouth boot theme for pairing with this flicker-free boot process.

• New plymouth theme for flickerfree boot

  Since the transition to plymouth is not entirely smooth plymouth by default will wait 5 seconds (counted from starting the kernel) before showing itself so that on systems which boot under 5 seconds it never shows. As can be seen in this video, this leads to a very non-smooth experience when the boot takes say 7 seconds as plymouth then only shows briefly, leading to a kinda "flash" effect while it briefly shows.

  Another problem with the 5 second wait, is now that we do not show GRUB the user is looking at the firmware's bootsplash for not only the often long firmware initialization time, but also for the 5 seconds plymouth waits on top, making it look as if nothing is happening.

  To fix this I've been working on a new plymouth theme which draws a spinner over the firmware boot splash, eliminating the ugly transition from the firmware boot splash to plymouth. This also allows removing the show-delay, so that we provide feedback that something is happening as soon as plymouth starts.

• Fedora Community Blog: Elections nominations now open

• Dead Dungeon is a hardcore platformer for those who like a challenge

  Dead Dungeon from developer Alexey Roenko just recently released and it's pretty good, one for those who love a bit of difficult platforming.

• Eons of War, a space 4x strategy game inspired by Risk, Civilization, and chess will be on Linux

  For those who are keen for some more 4x strategy game, Eons of War looks great and it will come to Linux.

  A recent discovery while endlessly browsing for new Linux games, I sent off a message via internet carrier pigeon (Twitter) to the developer about Linux support. Their reply was great "Yes, definitely supporting Linux as well as Mac and Windows. There's enough interest for all three platforms.".

• DELTARUNE, the successor to UNDERTALE, unofficially ported to Linux

  The surprise successor to the highly praised indie RPG adventure game UNDERTALE called DELTARUNE has been unofficially ported to Linux by a fan through clever hacks.

  DELTARUNE, or rather its first chapter, was released with a cryptic announcement on http://www.deltarune.com for free on Windows and Mac but a Linux version was sadly not released at launch. However, thanks to a DELTARUNE fan on Reddit, we now have unofficial native port of the game.

  The Reddit user JohnWatson78 posted their port on the DELTARUNE subreddit and afterwards updated their post with instructions on how they managed to make the game run on Linux.

  Essentially, they extracted the officially released version of the game, made sure the files were in the correct places and in lowercase letters and found a compatible GameMaker "runner" executable that could then load the game assets. The main issue was finding a suitable runner file by browsing existing Linux GameMaker ports. You can naturally find the more detailed step-by-step guide in JohnWatson78's Reddit post.

• Getting Clarity on the Private vs. Public Cloud Decision

  News flash: Private cloud economics can offer more cost efficiency than public cloud pricing structures.

  Private (or on-premises) cloud solutions can be more cost-effective than public cloud options, according to "Busting the Myths of Private Cloud Economics," a report 451 Research and Canonical released Wednesday. That conclusion counters the notion that public cloud platforms traditionally are more cost-efficient than private infrastructures.

  Half of the enterprise IT decision-makers who participated in the study identified cost as the No. 1 pain point associated with the public cloud. Forty percent mentioned cost-savings as a key driver of cloud migration.

  "We understand that people are looking for more cost-effective infrastructure. This was not necessarily news to us," said Mark Baker, program director at Canonical.

• ​OpenStack: Beyond the cloud

  Kata "Containers" is something of a misnomer. Rather than true containers, such as LXC, Kara Containers are lightweight VMs designed to feel and perform like containers. Why bother? Eric Ernst, an Kata Containers Architecture Committee member, explained, they "provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs."

• 6 Best Practices for High-Performance Serverless Engineering

  When you write your first few lambdas, performance is the last thing on your mind. Permissions, security, identity and access management (IAM) roles and triggers all conspire to make the first couple of lambdas, even after a “hello world” trial just to get your first serverless deployments up and working. But once your users begin to rely on services your lambdas provide, it’s time to focus on high-performance serverless.

The results of the 2018 election for members of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board have been posted; the members elected this time around are Chris Mason, Laura Abbott, Olof Johansson, Dan Williams, and Kees Cook. Abbott and Cook are new members to the board this time around. (The other TAB members are Ted Ts'o, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet, Tim Bird, and Steve Rostedt).

It is difficult to find a Linux computer that is not connected to the network, be it server or workstation. From time to time it becomes necessary to diagnose faults, intermittence or slowness in the network. In this article, we will review some of the Linux commands most used for network diagnostics.

Variscite’s “VAR-SOM-MX8X” COM runs Linux or Android on NXP’s up to quad -A35 core i.MX8X SoC with up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC, plus WiFi/BT, dual GbE controllers, and -40 to 85°C support.

Variscite has launched its first i.MX8X-based computer-on-module. The 67.6 x 51.6mm VAR-SOM-MX8X runs Yocto Project based Linux or Android on NXP’s dual- or quad-core Cortex-A35 based, 1.2GHz i.MX8X. The up to -40 to 85°C tolerant module is aimed at industrial automation and control, defense, medical, telematics, building control, failover displays/HMI, and robotics applications. The only other i.MX8X module we’ve seen is Phytec’s Linux-compatible, 55 x 40mm phyCORE-i.MX 8X module.

• freenode #live 2018 - Doc Searls and Simon Phipps - In Conversation

• How to edit themes in Linux Mint Cinnamon - Tutorial

• KDE Bugsquad – Okular Bug Day on November 17th, 2018

  Thank you to everyone who participated last Bug Day! We had a turnout of about six people, who worked through about half of the existing REPORTED (unconfirmed) Konsole bugs. Lots of good discussion occurred on #kde-bugs as well, thank you for joining the channel and being part of the team!

  We will be holding a Bug Day on November 17th, 2018, focusing on Okular. Join at any time, the event will be occurring all day long!

• Omarine 5.3 released! (Nov 14 2018)

  This release updates dbus and glib together with all dependencies and related packages. Some of them are rebuilt, the rest are upgraded. Glib 2.58.1 can be considered a development threshold because many dependent packages must be caught it up. Below is a list of some typically upgraded packages:

• Achievement unlocked! I spoke at PythonBrasil[14]

  PythonBrasil is the national Python community conference that happens every year, usually in October, in Brazil.

  I attended PythonBrasil for the first time in 2016, the year we had started PyLadies Porto Alegre. Back then, we were a very small group and I was the only one to go. It was definitely one of the best experiences I ever had, which, of course, set a very high standard for every single tech event I attended afterwards.

  Because of the great time I had there, I wanted to bring more and more women from PyLadies Porto Alegre to experience PythonBrasil in the next editions. So, during the PyLadies Porto Alegre 1st birthday party, I encouraged the other women to submit activities to try and to go to the conference that would happen in Belo Horizonte.

• Browser Based Open Source Image Optimization Tool Squoosh Comes To Google Lab’s Latest Release

  Open source, browser-based image optimization tool Squoosh is Google’s new Chrome Lab release. This new web tool is meant to make web developers work a lot simpler to optimize web pages. Images loading in a website is usually the reason for them to take so long to load and Squoosh helps web developers shrink the image so that it consumes lesser data. Squoosh can downsize, compress, and reformat images. Its purpose is to make web developers’ work less tedious and hence quicker. Google chrome labs made this tool available offline and said it would be handy to have this tool work offline. Squoosh also supports editing image codecs that are not normally available in the browser.

• VS Code Live Share plugin [Ed: When GNU/Linux sites help Microsoft]

• Microsoft Releases Open-Source HLSL to GLSL Shader Cross-Compiler [Ed: As above, except this is just openwashing of proprietary DX]

• Upgrading OpenBSD 6.3 to 6.4 on Vultr

• iGNUit has a new homepage address

• gxmessage has a new homepage

• It Looks Like The Raptor Blackbird Open-Source Motherboard Will Sell For Just Under $900

  Many have been curious to learn more about the Blackbird from Raptor Computing Systems as a lower-cost POWER9, open-source hardware alternative to their higher-end Talos II hardware that we've been recently benchmarking. The possible price has been revealed. 

  Overnight, Raptor Computing Systems tweeted a straw poll looking to gauge the interest level in "Would you pre-order a Raptor Computing Systems Blackbird system or board this year at a mainboard cost of $875?"

• C++20 Making Progress On Modules, Memory Model Updates

  This past week was an ISO C++ committee meeting in San Diego, which happened to be their largest meeting ever, and they managed to accomplish a lot in drafting more planned changes around the C++20 language update.

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (powerdns and powerdns-recursor), Debian (ceph and spamassassin), Fedora (feh, flatpak, and xen), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, openstack-cinder, python-cryptography, and Red Hat Single Sign-On 7.2.5), and Ubuntu (python2.7, python3.4, python3.5).

• iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9, Xiaomi Mi 6 Hacked At Pwn2Own Tokyo [Ed: All so-called 'phones' nowadays have a back door at the baseband OS, so cracking them and remotely controlling them is trivial, securing them a non-starter.]

• It’s Amateur Hour in the World of Spyware and Victims Will Pay the Price

  We’re living in the golden age of spyware and government hacking, with companies rushing to join a blossoming billion dollar market. The weakest among us—activists or journalists—will suffer the consequences if we don’t regulate it appropriately.

This is the monthly rundown of the most downloaded apps from the Tizen Store for your Tizen mobile. This time its October 2018. WhatsApp still has the number #1 spot and it doesn’t look like it will be leaving that anytime soon. There are a few new entry games like Counter Terror: Pursuit, Sweet candy fever, Monster simulator trigger city, and also utilities like Transparent screen.

• Linux 4.19.2

• Linux 4.18.19

• Linux 4.14.81

• Linux 4.9.137

• OnePlus begins rolling out Android Pie beta for OnePlus 5/5T

• Xiaomi opens Android Pie Beta program for Mi A2 Lite

• [Update: Supported models] Jaguar and Land Rover confirm 2019 vehicles will get Android Auto

• Samsung's 8nm Exynos 9820 unveiled with dedicated NPU, 8K video recording

• New Google Assistant trick for Android gives you superpowers over your morning routine