Mozilla's open source project, Common Voice, is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest repository of human voice data to be used for machine learning. Common Voice recently made its way into Black Duck's annual Open Source Rookies of the Year list.

What’s special about Common Voice is in the details. Every language is spoken differently—with a wide variation of speech patterns, accents, and intonations—throughout the world. A smart speech recognition engine—that has applications over many Internet of Things (IoT) devices and digital accessibility—can recognize speech samples from a diverse group of people only when it learns from a large number of samples. A speech database of recorded speech from people across geographies helps make this ambitious machine learning possible.

• Introducing the Vault Operator

  Today, Red Hat is pleased to announce a new open source project, the Vault Operator. In keeping with earlier projects, including the etcd Operator and the Prometheus Operator, the Vault Operator aims to make it easier to install, manage, and maintain instances of Vault – a tool designed for storing, managing, and controlling access to secrets, such as tokens, passwords, certificates, and API keys – on Kubernetes clusters.

  We are supporters of Vault, for important reasons. Authentication is fundamental to modern applications. As application design shifts from monolithic to distributed architectures, the various components of an application must communicate with each other over a network in ways that are designed to be trusted and secure. This typically requires authentication, which in turn requires credentials, or secrets. The problem is that there is no de facto way to centrally locate and manage these secrets.

• Expanding architectural choices to better arm Red Hat Enterprise Linux developers

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to deliver the best possible experience for enterprise system administrators and developers, as well as provide a solid foundation for moving workloads into both public and private clouds. One of the ways to enable such ubiquity is Red Hat’s multi-architecture initiative, which focuses on bringing Red Hat’s software portfolio to different hardware architectures.

  Last week, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 went live. It brought forward several improvements relevant to developers and system administrators such as advanced GUI system management via the Cockpit console, which should help new Linux administrators, developers, and Windows users to perform expert tasks without having to get into the command line.

• Altran and Red Hat latest to join 5TONIC 5G Innovation Lab

  Two more companies have joined the specialist 5G mobile research and innovation laboratory in Spain called 5TONIC. Altran and Red Hat are the latest companies to become members of the 5TONIC initiative joining existing companies such as Telefónica, Intel and Ericsson.

  Hosted by its co-founder - research organisation IMDEA Networks Institute - on its campus in Madrid, and chaired by Telefónica, the 5TONIC laboratory has been designed to provide a vehicle for member companies to "co-create" and test breakthrough 5G services and solutions - focused on collaborating with other industries.

• Surescripts speeds DevOps work with Red Hat Ansible Automation

• An API Journey: From Idea to Deployment the Agile Way–Part II

• Moving Production Workloads to OpenShift Online

• Red Hat Executive Briefing Center named a World Class Center by the Association of Briefing Program Managers

• How to engage with Technical Account Managers at Red Hat Summit 2018

• Taking a Look at the Data Behind Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Hackers once stole a casino's high-roller database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank

  Hackers are increasingly targeting "internet of things" devices to access corporate systems, using things like CCTV cameras or air-conditioning units, according to the CEO of a cybersecurity firm.

  The internet of things refers to devices hooked up to the internet, and it has expanded to include everything from household appliances to widgets in power plants.

  Nicole Eagan, the CEO of Darktrace, told the WSJ CEO Council Conference in London on Thursday: "There's a lot of internet-of-things devices, everything from thermostats, refrigeration systems, HVAC systems, to people who bring in their Alexa devices into the offices. There's just a lot of IoT. It expands the attack surface, and most of this isn't covered by traditional defenses."

• Certificate Transparency and HTTPS

  CT stands for “Certificate Transparency” and, in simple terms, means that all certificates for websites will need to be registered by the issuing Certificate Authority (CA) in at least two public Certificate Logs.

• Security updates for Thursday

• IBM introduces open-source library for protecting AI systems

• How to combine SSH key authentication and two-factor authentication on Linux

• openSUSE Heroes loves Let’s Encrypt™ – Expect certificate exchange

  openSUSE loves Let's Encrypt™

  Maybe some of you noticed, that our certificate *.opensuse.org on many of services will expire soon (on 2018-04-23).

  As we noticed that – as well – we decided to put a bit of work into this topic and we will use Let’s Encrypt certificates for the encrypted services of the openSUSE community.

  This is just a short notice / announcement for all of you, that we are working on this topic at the moment. We will announce, together with the deployment of the new certificate, the regarding hashes and maybe some further information on our way of implementing things.

Hardkernel has launched a stackable single-unit Solo version of its 4-board Odroid-MC1 cluster computer. The system runs Linux on a octa-core Samsung Exynos5422 based Odroid-XU4S SBC.

Hardkernel has spun a single-unit version of its four-unit, 32-core Odroid-MC1 cluster computer for running Docker Swarm, Build Farm, and other parallel computing applications. The octa-core Odroid-MC1 Solo costs $48 instead of $220 for the original. The design offers greater flexibility, enabling users to combine Odroid-MC1 Solo units for a “single unit, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or n stackable cluster” or combine one or more Solo units with the original 4-unit MC1 to act as a single cluster,” says Hardkernel.

• Apple’s cloud database FoundationDB now open source

  Apple has just released a new open source project on Github. FoundationDB is described as “a distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers”. The database system is focused on performance, scalability and fault-tolerance. Meaning projects that use the database for their backend are faster and less expensive to maintain.

• Apple Open Sources FoundationDB

• Apple continues open source campaign by releasing FoundationDB on GitHub

• Apple-owned FoundationDB open sources the core technology at the heart of iCloud

• FoundationDB, a very interesting NoSQL database owned by Apple, is now an open-source project

• ​Learn to use GitHub with GitHub Learning Lab

  The most popular open-source development site in the world is GitHub. It's used by tens of millions of developers to work on over 80 million projects.

  It's not just a site where people use Linus Torvalds' Git open-source distributed version control system. It's also an online home for collaboration, a sandbox for testing, a launchpad for deployment, and a platform for learning new skills. The GitHub Training Team has now released an app, GitHub Learning Lab, so you can join the programming party.

  GitHub Learning Lab is not a tutorial or webcast. It's an app that gives you a hands-on learning experience within GitHub. According to GitHub, "Our friendly bot will take you through a series of practical, fun labs that will give you the skills you need in no time--and share helpful feedback along the way."

• Atom 1.26

  Atom 1.26 has been released on our stable channel and includes GitHub package improvements, fuzzy-finder support for Teletype and file system watcher improvements.

• Atom Hackable Text Editor Gets GitHub Package, Filesystem Watcher Improvements

  GitHub announced the release of the Atom 1.26 open-source and cross-platform hackable text editor for Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms with more improvements and bug fixes.

  In Atom 1.26, the GitHub package received various improvements and new features, among which we can mention the ability of the ’s Git pane to display a read-only list of recent commits for quick reference, and support for storing your GitHub username and password credentials in the Git authentication dialog.

• Satellite Reign is currently free in the Humble Store, lots of Linux games on sale across different stores

  It seems every week there's a new deal going on you don't want to miss! Right now Humble Store is offering free copies of Satellite Reign and other stores also have sales on.

  The current Humble Monthly will also allow you to unlock the recently released Linux port of RUINER along with Kerbal Space Program.

• Check your privacy settings on GOG, as they're rolling out a new profile system

  Buried in the GOG forum, a staff member has noted that GOG accounts have new privacy options ahead of the release of their own version of user profiles. It seems GOG are continuing to become a little like Steam as time goes on, with their Galaxy client that still isn't on Linux (and isn't a priority last we heard) and now this.

• Sword fighter 'Blade Symphony' has delayed the next update that was due to get Linux support

  It seems the developer of Blade Symphony [Steam] has had a case of feature-creep and so the next update that was due with Linux support is going to be late.

• V3D DRM Driver Steps Towards Mainline Kernel, Renamed From VC5

  The Broadcom VC5 driver stack is being renamed to V3D and developer Eric Anholt is looking at merging it into the mainline Linux kernel.

  The VC5 DRM/KMS and Mesa code has been for supporting the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore 5 graphics hardware that's only now beginning to appear in some devices, well, it seems one device so far. Though as I pointed out a few months back, there's already "VC6" activity going on too as the apparent successor to VC5 already being in development.

• Azure Sphere Makes Microsoft an Arm Linux Player for IoT [Ed: Microsoft marketing at LF (only runs on/with Windows and Visual Studio etc.)]

• Keynotes Announced for Automotive Linux Summit & OS Summit Japan [Ed: "Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft" in there; LF has once again let Microsoft infiltrate Linux events; in the words of Microsoft’s chief evangelist, “I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. […] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”]

  Automotive Linux Summit connects those driving innovation in automotive Linux from the developer community with the vendors and users providing and using the code, in order to propel the future of embedded devices in the automotive arena.

• Force: This one's for the butterfingered Android lovers

• Motorola's new Beta Experiences program will let you test new Moto features before they're public

• 9 Android settings that'll strengthen your security

• Moto G6 Plus and G6 Play photos and details pop up on Carphone Warehouse's site

ExTiX is dubbed the "Ultimate Linux System," and it's been updated earlier today by developer Arne Exton to version 18.4, based on Canonical's upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system. However, ExTiX is using the lightweight and modern LXQt 0.12.0 as default desktop environment instead of GNOME, and it's powered by the latest Linux 4.16.2 kernel.

"After removing GNOME I have installed LXQt 0.12.0," said Arne Exton in today's announcement. "Programs won’t crash or anything like that. And I haven’t discovered any bugs to report. While running ExTiX LXQt 18.4 live or from the hard drive you can use Refracta tools (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. A ten-year child can do it."

Today Feral Interactive released their much anticipated Linux port of Rise of the Tomb Raider, the game that was released for Windows in January of 2016 and then released for macOS last week. Feral's Mac port was relying upon the Apple Metal API while the Linux port is now their second game (after F1 2017) exclusively relying upon the Vulkan graphics/compute API rather than OpenGL. This morning I posted the initial Radeon results using the RADV driver while here is the NVIDIA GeForce vs. AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on Ubuntu Linux using twenty different graphics cards.

I had to keep reminding myself that I was not dealing with an extreme case of Arch Linux instead of GNU/Linux. NixOS is more demanding and definitely not a distro for users with anything less than advanced skills.

To say NixOS comes with a steep learning curve and lots of hands-on overhead is putting it mildly. If you are a typical Linux user who lacks sysadmin training, avoid NixOS like a malware attack hiding in plain sight.

Riot is a free and open source decentralized instant messaging application that can be considered an alternative to Slack. Take a look at features of Riot, installation procedure and usage.

KDE is a working on a new music player called Elisa. Can Elisa become the new default music player in most Linux distributions? Find out in this review of Elisa music player.

Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, is excited to announce a new release of its flagship enterprise-ready cloud document suite – Collabora Online 3.2, with new features and multiple improvements.

But there is an under-appreciated bit regarding images for an ARM laptop — or pre-installed Linux distro’s in general. And that’s the first-run experience. The Netrunner Pinebook image is delivered so that it boots to the Plasma 5 desktop, no passwords asked, etc. The user is called “live”, the password is “live”, and nothing is personalized. It’s possible, though not particularly secure, to use the laptop this way in a truly disposable fashion. A first-run application helps finalize the configuration of the device by creating a named user, among other things.

One of the under-documented features of Calamares is that it can operate as a first-run application as well as a system installer. This is called “OEM Mode“, because it’s of greatest interest to OEMs .. but also to distro’s that ship an image for users to flash onto (micro)SD card for use in a device.

It's a busy day in the software and hardware space today as well as a busy week for Oracle with several big releases this week. The latest is the general availability of the long-awaited MySQL 8.0 update.

MySQL 8.0 is a very significant update over the MySQL 5.7 series. MySQL 8.0 features a transactional data dictionary, a new document store with NoSQL support, and up to twice as fast MySQL database performance compared to version 5.7.

Direct: MySQL 8.0: Up to 2x Faster

• Linux 4.16.3

• Linux 4.15.18

• Linux 4.14.35

I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 18.4 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous version was 17.8 from 171012).

Linux gives you a lot of control over network and system settings. On your desktop, Linux lets you tweak just about anything on the system. Most of these settings are exposed in plain text files under the /etc directory. Here I describe some of the most common settings you’ll use on your desktop Linux system.

A lot of settings can be found in the Settings program, and the available options will vary by Linux distribution. Usually, you can change the background, tweak sound volume, connect to printers, set up displays, and more. While I won't talk about all of the settings here, you can certainly explore what's in there.