From time to time, you will encounter problems while using Git. The most common of these is a merge conflict. Fortunately, git will provide solutions to many problems for you. Sometimes, though, there are certain problems that do require the assistance of more experienced people. Most of these problems that I will describe are what I have encountered personally in my line of work.

• Windows derails Chrome, Firefox installation, promotes Microsoft Edge instead [iophk: "Where are the Microsoft apologists on this? They sure have been quiet."]

  Microsoft is trying a new tactic to get people to use its Edge browser: a warning dialog box that interrupts the installation of other browsers like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

• Microsoft tests ‘warning’ Windows 10 users not to install Chrome or Firefox

  While the prompts can be turned off, they’re yet another example of Microsoft infesting Windows 10 with annoying ads and pop-ups. Some similar prompts already appear and attempt to push Chrome or Firefox users to use Edge, but this latest one steps up Microsoft’s war against Chrome even further. It’s not clear why Microsoft thinks it’s a good idea to include these irritating prompts, as all they’re likely to do is anger Windows 10 users rather than convince them to switch to Edge.

• Microsoft Tests Warning Windows 10 Users About Installing Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox [iophk: "yeah, Microsoft "loves" FOSS"]

  While the warning does not block the installation, it is a blatant move from Microsoft to try and stop users from downloading a rival's Web browser. As per a CNET report, test was confirmed in Windows 10 version 1809, build 17758.1. It is worth noting that it is a preview release, which will not be available to the general public for another month or so. In a statement to CNET, Microsoft referred to its Windows test programme, and said, "We're currently testing this functionality with insiders only. The Windows Insider Program enables Microsoft to test different features, functionality and garner feedback before rolling out broadly. Customers remain in control and can choose the browser of their choice." The Verge, on the other hand, cites its sources to say the warning will not make its way to the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

Both deepin 15.6 and 15.7 were released at June and August 2018. Here's a short summary of them showing the new features and improvements. You will find new Welcome Intro, new Dark Theme, new Power Saving Mode, reduced RAM usage and smaller ISO size, improvements in System Settings, and new ability of File Manager (renaming partition by right-click, for example). You will see them in this article with GIF animations and screenshots. This article also shows in brief why 15.7 is far better than 15.6 so you can choose it to start deepin for your first time. Enjoy!

With each video I experiment with new workflows. Traditionally I have been involved in every step of the production apart from the voice-over with very few opportunities for others to step in and contribute. With Gitlab’s powerful issue tracking system, this no longer needs to be the case. This has meant that I can spend more time on production in Blender and spread out the other aspects of production to the GNOME community.

• Alpine Halo9 review: Android Auto and CarPlay are big and brilliant

• Google remotely changed the settings on a bunch of phones running Android 9 Pie

• Android TV Set-Top Box running Android Pie shown off at IBC

• OnePlus 6 with Android 9 Pie: A sweeter experience

• Gboard bug breaks glide typing for some Android users

• The best iOS and Android games

• Apple iPhone XS vs the Android competition

• Android Circuit: Galaxy S10 Hardware Leaks, OnePlus 6T Confirmed, Samsung's Impressive Note 9 Update

• Ubuntu Podcast S11E27 – Twenty-Seven Bones

  This week we’ve been moonlighting on other podcasts and started using DuckDuckGo. Trend Micro get booted from the Apple Store, Intel adopts an AMD display standard, a cheesy history of Linux gaming is published, Amazon Echo now Looks at you and we round up the community news.

• New Life to KDE – Edu

  Some seeds take a while to grow, and what a while. I’v met Karina Mochetti five years ago when I moved to Campinas, back then I had just started working at Intel and I had finished one of my most glorious software developer tasks, good subversive terrorist that I’m, I made Linus Torvalds program in C++ and talking with a friend that lives in Rio de Janeiro I heard “I have a programmer friend in Campinas, wanna meet?”, well, yes, always.

• API Changes in Clang

  I’ve started contributing to Clang, in the hope that I can improve the API for tooling. This will eventually mean changes to the C++ API of Clang, the CMake buildsystem, and new features in the tooling. Hopefully I’ll remember to blog about changes I make.

• Liberado MiniNo Queiles 3.1 LTS

• The Blue Bird Effect: Scanning with an Epson XP 231 multifunction printer on Elive 3

  Mamerto Menapace, an Argentinian monk, wrote a story entitled "El Pajaro Azul" ("The Blue Bird").  In this story, a prince gradually falls very sick and no doctor can determine the source of his disease. A hermit is brought from his mountain as the last hope, and this wise man tells everyone that the prince is dying of nostalgia.  To get cured, the prince must start a journey looking for a rare blue bird. 

  [...]

  In Elive, one has to basically use SciTE as root to open the files dll.conf (to add the line example-backend), epson.conf, and epson2.conf (to add the values that one gets with the comand sane-find-scanner in Terminology).  In my case, I had to uncomment, in both files, the line usb 0x01aa 0x0001 and modify it to read:

  usb 0x04b8 0x1102

  That was it.

  Now I can both print and scan on Elive 3.0

• Recommendations for software?

  Secondly the excellent Have I Been Pwned site provides an API which allows you to test if a password has been previously included in a leak. This is great, and I've integrated their API in a couple of my own applications, but I was thinking on the bus home tonight it might be worth tying into PAM.

  Sure in the interests of security people should use key-based authentication for SSH, but .. most people don't. Even so, if keys are used exclusively, a PAM module would allow you to validate the password which is used for sudo hasn't previously been leaked.

  So it seems like there is value in a PAM module to do a lookup at authentication-time, via libcurl.

• Top 3 Open Source Trading Bots With Binance Implications

  Some cryptocurrency traders may be familiar with the Blackbird bot. It is primarily designed for arbitrage purposes and is coded n a language most people can get familiar with. That latter aspect is not unimportant when dealing with open source trading bot solutions. It also means users can change the features of this bot as they see fit, assuming they possess the necessary coding knowledge.

  At this current stage, Binance is not officially supported by the bot. Unlike what people assume, the developers are working on implementing access to this trading platform, at least to open long positions through Blackbird. Anyone with the necessary knowledge can implement this feature as well, thus it will be interesting to see what the future holds for this bot accordingly.

• The new developer role centers on open source technology

  At the same time, the network core is providing developers with massive compute capabilities that were unheard of not too long ago. That core can power compute-intensive applications such as machine learning and blockchain.

  Many of these improved capabilities, and the potential for innovation, have been fed by open source development. Now, we've got major enterprise initiatives built upon a foundation of open source, developed organically from community-driven products and accessible to anyone, anywhere.

  The result is a whirlwind of creative growth and, not incidentally, a new developer role. Developers are becoming the leading forces for creative development within organizations and a competitive advantage for businesses that are trying to move into the digital age.

• MDN Changelog for August 2018

  A lot of these were migration PRs, and the migration is now 95% complete, with 10,000 features over 6,300 pages. Some of the remaining migration work will be straightforward. Other data sources will require strategy and format discussions, such as Event support and summary pages. These discussions will be easier with the experience of migrating thousands of simpler features.

  Existing data also got some love. Contributors fixed incorrect data, clarified if and when a browser supported a feature, and celebrated support in new browser releases. We expect a steady stream of maintenance PRs as the project transitions from migration to ongoing maintenance.

  Florian Scholz has worked to make this a community project, organizing the effort with spreadsheets and transitioning to issues as the remaining work becomes manageable. This has been a successful effort, and GitHub insights shows that most contributions were not from MDN staff.

• FLOSS Weekly 497
  LibreOfficeOnline

  Michael Meeks is the General Manager of Collabora Productivity, leading Collabora Office and Online products, supporting customers and consulting on development alongside an extremely talented team. He serves as a Director of the The Document Foundation, and on the LibreOffice Engineering Steering Committee. Prior to Collabora he was a Novell/SUSE Distinguished Engineer working on various pieces of Free Software infrastructure across the Linux stack to MeeGo, GNOME, CORBA, Nautilus, Evolution and Open Source accessibility, among others.

• Updated LibreOffice growth infographic (2018)

  Numbers are growing and the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) is very popular now, with currently over 7.5 million Docker image pulls! Also, this year we are the top code contributors to LibreOffice with 5302 code commits.

• IceCat 60.2.0 Pre-release

  GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in ways that hinder freedom 0.

  GNU IceCat has multiple practical advantages as well, such as better privacy and security settings, extensive blocking of sites that may track the user's browsing habits, or the inclusion of LibreJS and other extensions that help browse without running non-free javascript.

• An open-source solution for soaring college costs

• Fedora Silverblue Test Day Next Week, Nextcloud 14 Released, Plasma 5.4 Beta Now Available, openSUSE's Recent Snapshots and Ansible Tower 3.3 Is Out

  Nextcloud announced the release of version 14 this week. This new version introduces two big security improvements: video verification and signal/telegram/SMS 2FA support. Version 14 also includes many collaboration improvements as well as a Data Protection Confirmation app in compliance with the GDPR. Go here to install.

• Working with Linux File Links

• How To Install Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 18.04

• Caching mechanism in ansible-bender

• Colorize Your GNOME Desktop in Ubuntu

• FF-Multi-Converter: A Great Application for Linux/Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  You may have heard and used multimedia converter application as audio/video files converter only. FF-Multi-Converter is an application that lets you convert audio/video files to various formats, documents to several formats and images to most used formats. isn't it great? This application is around for a while and you may or may not used it. The most recent version ported to Python3 and now supports most of the Linux distributions.

  FF-Multi-Converter uses FFmpeg for audio/video files conversion, unoconv for documents coversion and ImageMagick utility for image conversion. The main goal of this application is to offer most popular multimedia types in one application and provide different conversion options for them easily through a fairly easy to use graphical interface, you will find this application very handy and useful. It is written using Python3 and PyQt5, released under GNU General Public License (GPL V3).

Unlike other software vendors that are part of the Kubernetes community, Heptio doesn't want to build a software distribution of Kubernetes. Rather, the Heptio Kubernetes Service (HKS) is about support and services to help organizations deploy and manage upstream Kubernetes. It's an approach that Heptio has referred to as being an Un-Distribution.

"Our goal with the whole idea of the un-distribution is we want to provide the best parts of a distribution without necessarily some of the downsides that come along with that," Beda said.

Beda said that generally what happens with a distribution of an open source project is that a software vendor takes the upstream code, cleans it up so it's fit for enterprise consumption and then shipping a combination of tools that are prove to work well together.

"Upstream Kubernetes doesn't need a lot of clean up, because the community is so strong and we want to keep it that way," he said.

As such, a lot of the work that Heptio is involved with is all upstream with effort to make Kubernetes easier to install and use. Beda said that Heptio is putting a lot of effort into the kubeadm installer effort from the upstream project as well as the cluster API effort. As part of HKS, Beda said that Heptio is developing a set of validated designs, which integrate best practices for deployment.

• AMD ROCm 1.9 Available WIth Vega 20 Support & Upstream Kernel Compatibility

  For months we have been looking forward to ROCm 1.9 as the latest feature update to the Radeon Open Compute stack while on Friday that big release finally took place. This ROCm update for GPU compute purposes has a lot of new features.

  Initially we were looking forward to ROCm 1.9 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS support, which ended up being back-ported to the 1.8 series. But other headlining features of ROCm 1.9 include Vega 20 "Vega 7nm" support, a ROCm System Management Interface (ROCm SMI) library, HIP/HPCC improvements, rocprof for ROCm profling, compatibility with the upstream AMDKFD support now found in the mainline Linux kernel (Linux 4.17+), and various other improvements.

• NVIDIA Publishes An In-Depth Look At Turing

  Next week is when the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards will begin to ship while today is when NVIDIA lifted the embargo on "unboxing" videos/pictures and talking more about this new GPU microarchitecture.

  NVIDIA has posted their own in-depth Turing architecture look. Go check it out if you want to learn more about Turing's quite fascinating design and improvements over particularly the GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" series.

  Unfortunately no unboxing/reports on our end today... NVIDIA still appears to be not too interested in Linux gamers for the GeForce RTX 2080 series. While they have sent out hardware for many of the past launches, for Turing I am having a difficult time even getting them to respond to my inquiries. I am told by at least one NVIDIA'ian though that there will be Linux drivers in time for launch-day... We'll see.

If you’re already using a Mac or planning to get one, we recommend you to thoroughly analyze the reasons to decide whether you need to switch/keep using Linux or continue using Mac.

• Open Source Security Research Group gets a new office [Ed: "Open Source Security Research Group" = anti-Open Source FUD group connected to Microsoft]

• Docker fave Alpine Linux suffers bug miscreants can exploit to poison containers

  An infosec bod has documented a remote-code execution flaw in Alpine Linux, a distro that pops up a lot in Docker containers.

  Max Justicz, researcher and creator of crowd-sourced bug bounty system Bountygraph, said on Thursday that the vulnerability could be exploited by someone with man-in-the-middle (MITM) network access, or operating a malicious package mirror, to inject arbitrary code via apk, Alpine's default package manager.

  Justicz said that the vulnerability is particularly dangerous because, first, Alpine is commonly used for Docker images thanks to its small footprint, and second, most of the packages apk handles are not served via secure TLS connections, making them more susceptible to tampering.

  In the worst-case scenario, the attacker could intercept apk's package requests during Docker image building, inject them with malicious code, and pass them along to the target machines that would unpack and run the code within their Docker container.

• Kodi users on Windows and Linux infected with cryptomining malware [Ed: 1) not many affected. 2) it's due to add-ons, not Kodi. 3) the severity is low because it's mining, not blackmail or destruction of data.]

  What just happened? Unofficial repositories serving third-party add-ons for open source media player Kodi have been serving malicious cryptocurrency mining malware for several months. Fewer than 5,000 victims are estimated but that number could grow as the malware spreads.

• Securonix Threat Research: KRONOS/Osiris Banking Trojan Attack

  The KRONOS malware was first discovered in June 2014 as a Banker Trojan available for purchase in a Russian underground forum for $7,000 [1]. After staying dormant for few years, a new variant of KRONOS, known as Osiris, was discovered in July 2018, with three distinct campaigns targeting Germany, Japan, and Poland [2]. The new variant contains features like TOR network command and control (C2), keylogging, and remote control via VNC along with older features like form grabbing and web-injection [3].

  [...]

  Infiltration vector(s): The primary infiltration vector used by KRONOS/Osiris malware is phishing email campaigns containing specially crafted Microsoft Word documents/RTF attachments with macro/OLE content that cause malicious obfuscated VB stagers to be dropped and executed. In many scenarios the malware is distributed using exploit kits like RIG EK.

  The malicious document exploits a well-known buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft Office Equation Editor Component—CVE-2017-11882—which allows the attacker to perform arbitrary code execution [4][5].

• KRONOS Trojan, Known For Hacking Bank Accounts, Gets A New Update [Ed: targets Windows]

• ​Ansible Tower 3.3 arrives to make DevOps easier than ever

  Ansible makes it easier to move your resources and applications from platform to platform as needed. In a world where your data and applications are running simultaneously on containers, virtual machines, private and public clouds, this is a must.

  As Joe Fitzgerald, Red Hat VP, said in a statement, "As more organizations move toward modernizing their infrastructure, tools that can work seamlessly across environments become a critical part of that equation. Red Hat Ansible Tower can already run anywhere it's needed across hybrid environments and now with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform functionality available in Ansible Tower 3.3 we take that a step further by making the platform consumable in more ways for even easier automation across infrastructures."

• F28-20180914 updated Live isos Released

  The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F28-20180914 Live ISOs, carrying the 4.18.5-200 kernel.
  This set of updated isos will save about 1GB of updates after install.  (for new installs.)

• Fedora 29 Beta Has Been Delayed

  As happens almost every Fedora Linux release cycle, the initial development release has been pushed back.

  Fedora stakeholders determined on Thursday that Fedora 29 Beta isn't ready to ship yet as had been scheduled. Developers/QA are still testing beta release candidates and open blocker bugs remain. Rather than shipping next week, they will now try to have the beta out on 25 September.

• FPgM report: 2018-37

• Stocks Roundup:: Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT)

• The Top Three Holders Of Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

Redis Labs tried to legally stop cloud providers from abusing its trademark, but found it difficult because of the legal resources and budgets these giant companies have.

So the company took another route and decided to change the licenses of certain open-source Redis add-ons with the Commons Clause. This change sparked huge controversy within the community with many stating that Redis was no longer open source.

“We were the first significant company to adopt this and announce it in such a way that we got most of the heat from the community on this one,” said Bengal.

The reason for the uproar is because the Commons Clause is meant to add “restrictions” that limit or prevent the selling of open-source software to the Open Source Initiative’s approved open-source licenses.

“ … ‘Sell’ means practicing any or all of the rights granted to you under the License to provide to third parties, for a fee or other consideration (including without limitation fees for hosting or consulting/ support services related to the Software), a product or service whose value derives, entirely or substantially, from the functionality of the Software. Any license notice or attribution required by the License must also include this Commons Clause License Condition notice,” the Commons Clause website states.

According to the OSI, this directly violates item six of its open-source definition in which it states no discrimination against fields of endeavor. “The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research,” the definition explains.

• Scale and nuTonomy open-source massive AI dataset for self-driving cars

  Scale Inc. and Aptiv PLC’s nuTonomy group, two influential players in the autonomous vehicle ecosystem, today open-sourced a massive research dataset designed to aid self-driving car initiatives.

  Autonomous vehicles rely on artificial intelligence models to make navigation decisions. Those AI models, in turn, must be trained with large amounts of sample information to achieve the necessary accuracy, which is where the new dataset comes into the picture.

• Open Source Multi-Sensor Self-Driving Dataset Available To Public

  Scale has released what it believes to be the largest open source multi-sensor (LIDAR, RADAR, and camera) self-driving dataset published by nuTonomy (acquired by Aptiv in 2017), with annotations by Scale. Academic researchers and autonomous vehicle innovators can access the open-sourced dataset, nuScenes.

  The nuScenes open source dataset is based on LIDAR point cloud, camera sensor, and RADAR data sourced from nuTonomy and then labeled through Scale’s sophisticated and thorough processing to deliver data ideal for training autonomous vehicle perception algorithms. It provides the full dataset that includes 1,000 twenty-second scenes, nearly 1.4 million camera images, 400,000 LIDAR sweeps, and 1.1 million 3D boxes.

That said, the CFF also found that, "More and more, businesses are employing a polyglot and a multi-platform strategy to meet their exact needs." The CFF discovered 77 percent of enterprises are using or evaluating Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS); 72 percent are using or considering containers; and 46 percent are using or thinking about serverless computing. Simultaneously, more than a third (39 percent) are using all three technologies together.

For companies this "flexibility of cloud-native practices enables [companies to move] away from a monolithic approach and towards a world of computing that is flexible, portable and interoperable." That means, while Java and JavaScript are only growing ever more popular, the larger the company, the more languages are used.

Following the release candidate last week, NetworkManager 1.14 is now officially available as the latest feature release to this widely-used Linux networking software component.

Howchip has launched a sandwich-style, Nano-ITX form factor “ExSOM-8895 DVK” that runs Android 7.0 and Linux 4.4.13 on Samsung’s octa-core Exynos 8895 SoC with 4GB DDR4, dual UFS 2.1 storage interfaces, and MIPI-DSI and -CSI.

A Chinese firm called Howchip, owned by Unibest, has launched an Android Nougat Development Platform. The ExSOM-8895 DVK showcases Samsung’s Exynos 8895, an octa-core SoC that is available on EMEA-bound versions models of the primarily Snapdragon 835 based Galaxy S8 phone. The 120 x 120mm Nano-ITX form-factor board integrates an unnamed 70 x 50mm compute module that houses the Exynos 8895 and runs Android 7.0 with Linux kernel 4.4.13.

Kano has launched a $280 “Computer Kit Touch” version of its Raspberry Pi based computing education kit with an RPi 3B, a 10.1-inch HD touchscreen, plus a keyboard, speaker, mic, and 3000mAh battery.

Kano’s Raspberry Pi Model B based Kano kit computing education platform and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B based Kano Computer Kit were huge hits in both the educational and consumer markets. The company has now returned with a Computer Kit Touch version, which similarly aims to teach kids age 6 to 13 to program using visual tools and its Debian-based Kano OS.