• Firefox Reality Developers Guide

  Firefox Reality, Mozilla's VR web browser, is getting closer to release; so let's talk about how to make your experiences work well in this new browser.

• PHP version 5.6.38, 7.0.32, 7.1.22 and 7.2.10

• Xonsh – A Python-Powered Shell Language and Command Prompt

  Xonsh (pronounced “Konk“,) is a cross-platform, Python-powered, Unix shell language and command prompt designed for the use of experts and novices alike.

  The Xonsh language is a Python 3.4+ superset and it features additional shell primitives that make it familiar to working from IPython and Bash.

  Xonsh is easily scriptable and it allows you to mix both command prompt and python syntax coupled with a rich standard library, man-page completion, typed variables, and syntax highlighting, among other features.

• How to Find Free iOS and Android Apps

• Gboard's 'Mini' emoji stickers are now rolling out on Android

• SBI to Roll Out Ripple DLT-Based Payments App on iOS, Android in Fall

• Chrome 70 beta enables Android/Mac fingerprint sensors, removes mobile OS build numbers

• Google experiment accidentally turned on battery saver for users on Android Pie

• Android Pie Yet to Open Account on Android Distribution Chart, Nougat Continues Its Domination in September

• Android 9 Pie, thoroughly reviewed

• Nagra ups Android security

Nextcloud has announced the release of version 14 of their software. The update brought improved security, collaboration features, and more. Take a look at the new features in detail.

• Max Planck Institute Pours More Water on the Dying Unitary Patent (UPC)
• EPO Seals Many Death Sentences With Acceptance of EP 2604620
• Links 13/9/2018: Compiz Comeback, ‘Life is Strange: Before the Storm’

With several users reporting problems with the recently released Raspberry Pi Power-over-Ethernet HAT, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is offering to refund customers that have purchased the faulty board.

In the days since its release in late August, users had been reporting limitations in the power supplied by the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT. The HAT is an add-on to the popular Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ SBC. Over the intervening weeks, engineers at the Raspberry Raspberry Pi Foundation have been wrestling to figure out the nature of the problem. And interesting play-by-play can be followed on the Raspberry Pi forums.

• Chromebooks gain faff-free access to Windows file shares via Samba

  Google’s Chrome OS tanks crept a little further onto Microsoft’s manicured enterprise lawns with hints that Windows file-share support will arrive out-of-the-box in an upcoming version of Chrome OS.

  Those brave enough to be on the Canary version of Chrome 70 already have the functionality, assuming the preview software stays upright long enough to connect. The code uses the Samba project's libsmbclient to access the file shares.

  Veteran Windows blogger Paul Thurrott spotted a posting on Google+ by "Chromium Evangelist" François Beaufort indicating that the functionality was inbound. In the post, Beaufort linked to a Chromium code commit with the text: "Set NativeSmb flag to enabled by default – Network File Shares for ChromeOS will be available by default starting in M70."

• [Gentoo] We mostly protect against script kiddie attacks

  The recent efforts on improving the security of different areas of Gentoo have brought some arguments. Some time ago one of the developers has considered whether he would withstand physical violence if an attacker would use it in order to compromise Gentoo. A few days later another developer has suggested that an attacker could pay Gentoo developers to compromise the distribution. Is this a real threat to Gentoo? Are we all doomed?

  Before I answer this question, let me make an important presumption. Gentoo is a community-driven open source project. As such, it has certain inherent weaknesses and there is no way around them without changing what Gentoo fundamentally is. Those weaknesses are common to all projects of the same nature.

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, August 2018

  I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 8 hours from July. I worked only 5 hours and therefore carried over 18 hours to September.

• TeX Live contrib updates

  It is now more than a year that I took over tlcontrib from Taco and provide it at the TeX Live contrib repository. It does now serve old TeX Live 2017 as well as the current TeX Live 2018, and since last year the number of packages has increased from 52 to 70.

• Core i5-7500-based signage player supports NVIDIA MXM graphics cards

  Ibase launched its “SI-614” signage player that runs Linux or Windows 10 on a Core i5-7500 processor with up to 16GB DDR4, a choice of NVIDIA MXM NV1050 graphics cards and a 128 GB 2.5-inch SSD storage device.

  Ibase Technology has announced the SI-614, its latest digital signage player based on 7th Gen Intel Core desktop processors and supporting NVIDIA MXM GeForce GTX 10 Series graphics. These cards provide 3X the performance of previous-generation graphics cards, according to the company. This is the sixth signage player Ibase has introduced this year, the most recent being its AMD Ryzen V1000 based system, the SI-324, released in late August.

 

• YouTube Begins Rolling Out AV1 Support In Beta

  YouTube has begun transcoding videos into the new royalty-free AV1 video codec.

  So far just a handful of videos are available with this AV1 beta support on YouTube. The Google company is supporting AV1 in MP4 within the Media Source for Chrome 70+ and the newest Firefox Nightly builds as of today. The Firefox Nightly support also requires media.av1.enabled and media.mediasource.experimental.enabled preferences enabled.

• The Evolving Role of Build Engineering in Managing Open Source

• NetBSD 7.2 comes with Security & Stability Enhancements as well as USB 3.0 Support

  NetBSD has come out with a new release for the 7.x series. The second feature update of NetBSD 7, NetBSD version 7.2, comes with a few new features and enhancements including, most prominently, the support of the USB 3.0 device as well as improvements for the Linux emulation. The latest release also supports the Raspberry Pi 3 computer range, adapting the release to be compatible for running on those devices, and the release ramps up updates for several drivers to make all of this possible.

  The release announcement for the NetBSD 7.2 states that this update incorporates substantial bug fixes and enhancements for overall improvement of the stability and security of NetBSD. The update also introduces new features such as the few mentioned above and other fixes in binary compatibility for ancient NetBSD executables. The iwm(4) driver for Intel Wireless 726x, 316x, 826x, and 416x has also been incorporated and a legacy network adapter has been improved to resolve a setup interruption found in the Hyper-V VMs.

• LibreJS 7.17 released

  GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman's article The JavaScript Trap*. LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial.

• What We Mean When We Say "Data Portability"

  “Data portability” is a feature that lets a user take their data from a service and transfer or “port” it elsewhere. This often comes up in discussions about leaving a particular social media platform and taking your data with you to a rival service. But bringing data to a competing service is just one use for data portability; other, just-as-important goals include analyzing your data to better understand your relationship with a service, building something new out of your data, self-publishing what you learn, and generally achieving greater transparency.

  Regardless of whether you are “porting” your data to a different service or to a personal spreadsheet, data that is “portable” should be easy to download, organized, tagged, and machine-parsable.

  EFF supports users’ legal right to obtain a copy of the data they have provided to an online service provider. Once you move beyond that, however, the situation gets more complicated. Data portability interacts, and sometimes even conflicts, with other digital rights priorities, including privacy and security, transparency, interoperability, and competition. Here are some of the considerations EFF keeps in mind when looking at the dynamics of data portability.

• Hortonworks plans to revamp Hadoop and its big data tools with cloud best practices in mind

  One big disadvantage that comes with a hybrid cloud strategy is forcing your developers to learn and understand the different techniques required by cloud providers and on-premises software vendors for lots of applications. Hortonworks, the company behind several tools for big-data darling Hadoop, plans to revamp its software over the next few years in order to make modern cloud-native development practices part of its on-premises tools, giving hybrid cloud developers one less thing to worry about.

  Hortonworks plans to announce the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative Monday, kicking off the project that will allow customers running Hadoop and Hortonworks tools on their own servers to take advantage of newer infrastructure ideas that have become popular since the big-data analysis software was created, said Arun Murthy, co-founder and chief technical officer of Hortonworks. It’s yet another sign that while self-managed servers aren’t disappearing as fast as people once thought they might, the infrastructure concepts of the cloud-native era are going to eventually become de facto standards.

• Curlew: Still Great Multimedia Converter That Uses FFmpeg for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  Right now there are handful of multimedia converters available for Linux. It is an free and open-source application that converts to plenty of formats using FFMpeg and avconv. It is written using Python programming language and GTK3 for GUI. Currently has ability to convert more than 100 different formats.
  Curlew multimedia converter is around from quite sometime and known to have some extra features such as: ability to show file information(duration, progress, approx size, duration etc.), preview file before conversion, convert part of specified file, attach subtitles to videos, show errors in details if occurs, allow to skip files or remove during conversion process, and fairly simple user interface. It is available for all currently supported Ubuntu 18.04/16.04/14.04/Linux Mint 19/18/17 and other Ubuntu based distributions.

• Happy birthday Kiwi TCMS

• ScreenCloud: The Screenshot++ App

  ScreenCloud is an amazing little app, that you don’t even know you need. The default screenshot procedure on desktop Linux is great (Prt Scr Button) and we even have some powerful screenshot utilities like Shutter. But ScreenCloud brings one more really simple yet really convenient feature that I just fell in love with. But before we get into it, let’s catch a little backstory.

  I take a lot of screenshots. A lot more than average. Receipts, registration details, development work, screenshots of applications for articles, and lot more. The next thing I do is open a browser, browse to my favorite cloud storage and dump the important ones there so that I can access them on my phone and also across multiple operating systems on my PC. This also allows me to easily share screenshots of the apps that I’m working on with my team.

  I had no complaints with this standard procedure of taking screenshots, opening a browser and logging into my cloud and then uploading the screenshots manually, until I came across ScreenCloud.

• KStars on Microsoft Store

  I'm glad to announce that KStars is now available on Microsoft Store in over 60 languages! It is the first official KDE App to be published by KDE e.V on the MS Store.

• Fractal contribution report: improvements for the context menu

  These past weeks, I’ve been mainly working on my side project (rlife) but I’ve also done some small improvements for the context menu in Fractal.

  [...]

  I also have an open MR for hiding the option to delete messages in the context menu when the user doesn’t have the right to do so (i.e. for the user’s own messages or when it has the right to do so in the room (e.g. for moderators or owners)). It’s pending for now because there are work done to reliably calculate the power level of a user given a certain room.

• WinMagic delivers enterprise-class managed full drive encryption solution for Linux [Ed: WinMagic is proprietary. Never trust anything proprietary for encryption (typically has back doors).]

• WinMagic Enables Enterprise-Class Full Drive Encryption for Linux

  WinMagic, an award-winning encryption and key management solution provider, announces today that it has recently delivered the first known enterprise-class managed full drive encryption solution for Linux. The new capability empowers the company to assist enterprises struggling with managing encryption of their Linux-based devices.

• Brisbane open-source database specialist Open Query acquired by Catalyst IT Australia

  Queensland-based open-source database expert Open Query has been acquired by Catalyst IT Australia, the local arm of New Zealand-born open-source technology integrator.

  Open Query delivers training and support for MySQL, MariaDB, Percona XtraDB and related open source technologies, and offers system administration and security services.

  Open Query's flagship service offering is the support and maintenance of databases on the aforementioned open-source platforms, with offerings spanning initial health checks and ad-hoc consulting, to subscription-based proactive support and remote database monitoring.

• Linux Academy Announces Acquisition of Jupiter Broadcasting

  Linux Academy, a leading provider of hands-on online training in Linux and cloud technologies, today announced it has acquired Jupiter Broadcasting, a podcasting network covering Linux, security, privacy, community and other open source content, to further strengthen its contributions to the open source and free software industry. Linux Academy will acquire Jupiter Broadcasting's shows, assets, and employees.

Researchers say the open-source software, called PySight, acts as a photon counting add-on for laser scanning microscopes. Because it can image deep into tissue, a laser-based technique known as multiphoton microscopy is often used to study the rapid activity of neurons, blood vessels and other cells at high resolution over time. The method uses laser pulses that excite fluorescent probes, eliciting the emission of photons, some of which are detected and used to form 2D and 3D images.

• Hortonworks, IBM & Red Hat Partner on Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative

  Hortonworks (Nasdaq: HDP), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) have entered into a partnership in an effort to help customers utilize hybrid cloud environments to field and run big data workloads, ExecutiveBiz reported Tuesday.

  Red Hat said Monday the collaborative Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative aims to develop a common enterprise deployment model for big data workloads and utilize the Red Hat OpenShift enterprise container and Kubernetes platform to support Hortonworks Data Platform, Hortonworks DataFlow, Hortonworks DataPlane and IBM Cloud Private for Data.

• Red Hat Announces Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3

  Red Hat, Inc. recently introduced Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 - the newest iteration of its enterprise framework for automating and orchestrating IT operations. Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 gets improved scaling and the ability to run Ansible Tower on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform, and an updated user interface.

• IBM Relies on Kubernetes to Advance Analytics Strategy

  IBM this week extended the reach of the IBM Cloud Private (ICP) for Data platform to include the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes. ICP also aligns with Red Hat and Hortonworks on the Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative for building hybrid big data applications on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

  In addition, IBM today announced it has extended ICP for Data to enable analytics queries to access data anywhere, by leveraging container-based technologies.

• Innovation, we deliver! The Red Hat Mobile Portfolio Center is on the move

  Pay attention when you’re driving - you might just see Red Hat’s Shadowman in the next lane. You see, innovation is on the move at Red Hat! Or as Program Manager, Chris Hawver would say – the Mobile Portfolio Center (MPC) – is bringing Red Hat’s innovative solutions to the customer at venues near their offices.

  The annual Red Hat Summit, or the Red Hat Executive Briefing Centers around the globe, are great ways to catch up with the latest from Red Hat. But, due to travel and scheduling constraints, many of our customers miss those opportunities. So we’re expanding our reach with the MPC. We have many more stops planned as part of this initiative, there is a good chance the MPC is coming to a venue near you.

• Red Hat’s OPEN FIRST road tour rolls on -- and into D.C.

  Two years ago, the U.S. government took an important step towards its technological future. The issuance of the Federal Source Code Policy in 2016 called for “efficiency, transparency, and innovation through reusable and open source software.” Since then, a number of important programs and initiatives have been created, including Code.gov, code.mil and others.

  Yet we believe there is still a significant amount of untapped potential for open source in government. That’s why we have created the Red Hat OPEN FIRST Road Tour, a nationwide seminar series aimed at bringing the open source discussion to government leaders across the U.S.

• Futures Directions for Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Flagship Harbor Advisors LLC Grows Holdings in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Financial Review: Red Hat (RHT) vs. Weibo (WB)

• Fedora: LibreOffice remote connection.

In 2003, Microsoft stopped supporting the Windows NT4 desktop operating system. As a result, Munich's city government had to migrate over 15,000 personal computers (PCs) to a new operating system. This made the disadvantages of dependence on big proprietary software providers obvious to local policy makers.

In 2004, the City Council decided to migrate its PCs to Linux, a free and open-source operating system, to achieve more independence and stimulate the local economy by using local developers for the migration. The choice for Linux was made despite the fact that Microsoft's CEO personally offered Munich a 90 percent discount on new software. The project, called LiMux, took seven years to complete and saved Munich over 11 million euros ($12.3 million). Other advantages include more flexibility in software management, better security, and a lower number of support calls.

• Going to Hyperledger school

  Hyperledger (or the Hyperledger project) is an umbrella project of open source blockchains and related tools.

  The project was founded by the Linux Foundation at the end of 2015 with the intention of encouraging the collaborative development of blockchain-based distributed ledgers.

• Linux Foundation's OpenDaylight Fluorine Release Brings Streamlined Support for Cloud, Edge and WAN Solutions

  The OpenDaylight Project, the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, today announced its ninth release, OpenDaylight Fluorine. The latest version brings major advancements for solution providers through key enhancements to the platform, including simplified packaging to speed solution development and enhanced capabilities for key use cases.

• OpenDaylight Advances Open Source Software Defined Networking in Fluorine Release

  OpenDaylight is made up of a collection of different networking capabilities that can be combined into an architecture to enable a complete SDN platform. Among the new features in OpenDaylight Fluorine, the Service Function Chaining (SFC) project supports Network Service Headers (NSH) for accelerated service delivery. The BGP and Path Computation Element Protocol (BGPCEP) for IP Transport has been improved to enable better SD-WAN use cases for inter-data center connectivity.

  Optical transport also gets a boost in the OpenDaylight Fluorine release, with the debut of the TransportPCE project, which is a reference implementation of Open ROADM (Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer). The TransportPCE project enables network operators to configure their WDM (Wavelength-Division Multiplexing) equipment such that it can handle requests coming from an SDN controller.

• Altair Open Sources Model-Based Development Software [Ed: That's openwashing basically. They're dual licensing there. But anyway, maybe better than 'purely' proprietary.]

  Building upon its strong reputation of providing open-architecture simulation solutions by open-sourcing its computational programming language, OML. Interested users and contributors can download the source code from the OpenMatrix website.

• LinkedIn open-sources a tool to run TensorFlow on Hadoop

• LinkedIn open sources TonY, its framework to run TensorFlow on Hadoop

• SmartBear Reinforces Open Source Commitment with Free Access to CrossBrowserTesting

• Malicious Kodi Add-ons Install Windows & Linux Coin Mining Trojans

• Windows And Linux Kodi Users Ravaged By Nasty Monero Cryptocurrency Mining Malware

• Windows and Linux Kodi users infected with cryptomining malware

• Kodi add-ons launch cryptomining campaign

• Some Kodi add-ons are carrying cryptocurrency mining malware

• As Kodi suffers more blocks, bans and fines, users now given another stark warning

  With millions of users across the globe, Kodi is one of the most popular online TV players on the market.

  Kodi itself is safe to use and totally legal.

• Use CAT Command to Combine Text Files in Ubuntu 18.04

• Get started with REST services with Apache Camel

• How to run Julia on Jupyter in a LXD container

• iconv and illegal input sequences

• Useful Tips to Improve Emulation Performance in RetroPie

• [Older] Encrypt A Drive With VeraCrypt in Linux

• Tabs or spaces? Spaces, obviously, but how many?

• Learn Vim with these Great Free Books

• Create and view custom trace data in user Node.js code

• How to Install R on CentOS 7

• Security updates for Thursday

• Reproducible Builds 2018 Paris meeting

• Network Manager VPNC is Infected with Username Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

  A username privilege escalation vulnerability has been found in the network manager VPNC plugin. This injection vulnerability is exploited by the Metaspoilt module of the program to gain root privilege access.

  This was discovered by Denis Adnzakovic who found that the network-manager-vpnc plugin for VPNC support in NetworkManager could be exploited with a privilege escalation vulnerability using a newline character to inject a password helper parameter into the configuration scheme that is responsible for conveying information to the vpnc. This vulnerability poses a risk because it allows a local user exploiting it to get the access desired to change the system’s settings as well as execute arbitrary commands with root privilege.

• Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Apache Struts 2.x Resolved in Update

Python is the fastest-growing programming language in the world, as it increasingly becomes used in a wide range of developer job roles and data science positions across industries. But how did it become the go-to coding language for so many tasks?

"Python is very popular because of its set of robust libraries that make it such a dynamic and a fast programming language," said Kristen Sosulski, clinical associate professor of information, operations, and management sciences in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, and author of Data Visualization Made Simple. "It's object-oriented, and it really allows for everything from creating a website, to app development, to creating different types of data models."

• Bugs Ahoy: The Next Generation

  Bugs Ahoy’s time is over, and I would like to introduce the new Codetribute site. This is the result of Fienny Angelina’s hard work, with Dustin Mitchell, Hassan Ali, and Eli Perelman contributing as well. It is the spiritual successor to Bugs Ahoy, built to address limitations of the previous system by people who know what they’re doing. I was thrilled by the discussions I had with the team while Codetribute was being built, and I’m excited to watch as the project evolves to address future needs.

• Announcing Rust 1.29

  The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.29.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

• HHVM ending support for PHP

  The HHVM project has announced that the Hack language and PHP will truly be going separate ways. The HHVM v3.30 release, due by the end of the year, will be the last to support code written in PHP.

• Valve have now pushed out all the recent beta changes in Steam Play's Proton to everyone

  For those of you sticking with the stable channel of Steam Play's Proton system, Valve have today rolled out all the recent beta changes for everyone.

  Previously, you had access to Proton 3.7-3 which was what everyone used by default and you could also use the "Compatibility tool" dropdown in the Steam Play options section to switch to a beta to have the latest updates. Valve must now consider all the changes stable enough, as Proton 3.7-6 is now the default. There's another beta channel now, which is still currently at 3.7-6 but it should remain where the latest changes go.

  There's quite a lot of improvements included since the initial release, like: automatic mouse capturing in fullscreen windows by default, performance improvements, certain game compatibility improvements, an updated build of DXVK, more display resolution support and so on. You can see the full changelog here.

• Some Linux Gamers Using Wine/DXVK To Play Blizzard's Overwatch Reportedly Banned

  Multiple individuals are reporting that they have been just recently banned by Blizzard for playing their games -- seemingly Overwatch is the main title -- when using Wine with the DXVK D3D11-over-Vulkan translation layer.

  Blizzard support has said they are not banning Linux gamers for using these "emulation" techniques but not officially supported.

  However, per this Reddit thread with one of the users writing into Phoronix, there have been recent bans to Linux gamers and the only expressed common denominator seems to be the use of Wine and DXVK.