• The USPTO and EPO Pretend to Care About Patent Quality by Mingling With the Terms “Patent” and “Quality”
• Yannis Skulikaris Promotes Software Patents at EPOPIC, Defending the Questionable Practice Under António Campinos
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is Working for Patent Trolls and Patent Maximalists

• Don't use AirPods with Android

• Easily Change Your Phone's Font Without Tripping SafetyNet

• Samsung's foldable smartphone reportedly arriving in March for a price that'll make your eyes bleed

• Samsung's updated 'One UI' Android skin will come to Galaxy S8, Note 8 devices

• Gboard now suggests GIFs, stickers, and emoji based on your conversation

• Google Play Store has denied Tasker access to Android call and SMS capabilities

• Google Contacts 3.2 adds dark theme, respects system Night mode in Android Pie

• Motorola Moto X4 beta testers are getting an Android Pie soak test

• Xiaomi opens up Android Pie beta program for the Mi A2 Lite

• Developers could test stock Android Q on devices very early

• Turn any photo into a WhatsApp sticker with this free Android app

• You can now initiate manual Android backups to Google Drive

Imagine what the world would look like if growth, innovation, and development were free from fear. Innovation without fear is fostered by consistent, predictable, and fair license enforcement. That is what the GPL Cooperation Commitment aims to accomplish.

Last year, I wrote an article about licensing effects on downstream users of open source software. As I was conducting research for that article, it became apparent that license enforcement is infrequent and often unpredictable. In that article, I offered potential solutions to the need to make open source license enforcement consistent and predictable. However, I only considered "traditional" methods (e.g., through the court system or some form of legislative action) that a law student might consider.

When I worked with the Mozilla Foundation, long before the organization boasted more than a hundred and fifty staff members, we conducted a foundation-wide Myers-Briggs indicator. The Myers-Briggs is a popular personality assessment, one used widely in career planning and the business world. Created in the early twentieth century, it's the product of two women: Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who built the tool on Carl Jung's Theory of Psychological Types (which was itself based on clinical observations, as opposed to "controlled" scientific studies). Each of my co-workers (53 at the time) answered the questions. We were curious about what kind of insights we would gain into our individual personalities, and, by extension, about how we'd best work together.

• OpenStack Foundation Board Expands Mission to Host New Open Source Projects as Part of Open Infrastructure Transformation

• Wind River and CENGN Assist Open Source Developers in Accelerating StarlingX Adoption for Edge Computing Applications

• Slidecast: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark

  In this video, Beenish Zia from Intel presents: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark.

• Man embraces open source in push to lure tech talent

  The chief risk officer at one of the world’s largest hedge funds is competing with Google for technologists. And the applicants are asking to keep their open-source allegiance.

  The Man Group’s Darrel Yawitch said new hires are looking for assurances from the hedge fund that they will be permitted to contribute to the open-source coding communities that have underpinned some of the biggest advances in technology’s brief history, from the World Wide Web to the Android operating system.

There are several ways to build large scale Linux server environments, with x86 and public cloud being obvious ones. But there’s another option too, as I reminded myself when I caught up with Adam Jollans, program director for LinuxOne product marketing at IBM. LinuxOne is a solution built by IBM using the mainframe platform as its base, but it’s solely focused on running Linux workloads.

We discussed the way some organisations are using LinuxOne to keep mission-critical open source solutions running without service interruption and, just as importantly, to keep them secure. Typical workloads his customers run include core banking services – where resilience is essential, not just desirable – and similar solutions for Telcos and SPs. These are services that must scale to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, doing so both cost-effectively and without risk.

The characteristics of such mission-critical workloads clearly resonate with the traits of the venerable mainframe. After all, the mainframe is regarded by many, even those who have never seen one, as the gold standard for IT resilience and availability. Unfortunately for IBM, and arguably for the wider world, the mainframe is also widely thought of as being out-dated, expensive, and difficult to manage – even though this hasn’t been true for a long time, and is certainly not the case with LinuxOne.

• Pixel 3 vs. OnePlus 6T: Which Android should you buy?

• LineageOS 15.1 Oreo is moving to nightly builds, 14.1 Nougat will switch to monthly releases

• SD Times news digest: Android Foldable support, Telerik's Fiddler Everywhere, and Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1

• Android apps in split-screen soon won't pause thanks to 'Multi-resume'

• What the Chromebook needs before it's going to be considered a real computer

• Baruch students can print from their phones

• Team UPC, Fronting for Patent Trolls From the US, is Calling Facts “Resistance”
• The Federal Circuit Bar Association (FCBA) Will Spread the Berkheimer Lie While Legal Certainty Associated With Patents Remains Low and Few Lawsuits Filed
• Links 12/11/2018: Linux 4.20 RC2, Denuvo DRM Defeated Again

• Google open-sources AI that can distinguish between voices with 92 percent accuracy

  Diarization — the process of partitioning out a speech sample into distinctive, homogeneous segments according to who said what — doesn’t come as easy to machines as it does to humans, and training a machine learning algorithm to perform it is tougher than it sounds. A robust diarization system must be able to associate new individuals with speech segments that it hasn’t previously encountered.

• Google Chrome Labs releases open source, browser-based image optimization tool, Squoosh

  Demonstrated briefly at the Chrome Dev Summit, Squoosh’s top priority is speed, and is primarily just a demo of new capabilities that recent improvements to Chrome already bring to the table. For example, by using WebAssembly, Squoosh is able to use image codecs that are not typically available in the browser.

• Why the Linux console has sixteen colors (SeaGL)

  At the 2018 Seattle GNU/Linux Conference after-party, I gave a lightning talk about why the Linux console has only sixteen colors. Lightning talks are short, fun topics. I enjoyed giving the lightning talk, and the audience seemed into it, too. So I thought I'd share my lightning talk here.

• Kernel Developers Debate Having An Official Linux System Wrapper Library

  As new system calls get added to the Linux kernel, these syscalls generally get added to Glibc (and other libc libraries) for developers to make easy use of them from their applications. But as Glibc doesn't provide 1:1 coverage of system calls, sometimes is delayed in their support for new calls, and other factors, there is a discussion about providing an official Linux system wrapper library that could potentially live as part of the kernel source tree.

  This weekend was the initial proposal for having an official Linux system wrapper library. Though that initial proposal is a bit flawed in saying that "glibc is basically not adding new system call wrappers", as they are, just sometimes it takes a while among other factors. But it is accurate in reflecting a problem with the status quo.

• Linux Getting Two-Line Patch To Finally Deal With The Quirky Microsoft OEM Mouse

  While Microsoft is self-proclaimed to love Linux, their common and very basic Microsoft OEM Mouse has not loved the Linux kernel or vice-versa... The Linux kernel HID code is finally getting a quirk fix to deal with the Microsoft OEM mouse as it would disconnect every minute when running at run-levels one or three.

  The basic Microsoft OEM Mouse that's been available for years (appearing as a PixArt vendor and USB ID 0x00cb) would disconnect every 60~62 seconds on Linux systems when connected out-of-the-box. This isn't some high-end gaming mouse but Microsoft's dead basic OEM optical mouse.

• Linux Poised To Remove Decade-Old EXOFS File-System

  The Linux kernel will likely be doing away with EXOFS, a file-system that had been around since the Linux 2.6.30 days.

  EXOFS is a file-system originally derived from EXT2 file-system code for basing it on an external object store. This object-based file-system was originally developed by IBM.

  Veteran kernel developer Christoph Hellwig is now seeking to remove the EXOFS object-based file-system on the basis of it being "just a simple example without real life users."

• How to Install phpMyAdmin with Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04

• Avoiding senior moments with command-line functions

• How to display the times in various time zones from the LXDE Panel

• How to Mount S3/Wasabi/Digital Ocean Storage Bucket on CentOS and Ubuntu using S3FS

• iSH - A iOS Linux Shell for Your iPhone or iPad
  

  Have you ever wanted to run a Linux shell on your iOS device to transfer files, write shell scripts, or simply to use Vi to develop code or edit files? Now you can, with a project called iSH that is currently available as a TestFlight beta for iOS devices.

  iSH is a project that aims to bring a Linux shell to iOS devices using a usermode x86 emulator. iSH is built on the Alpine Linux distro, which is designed to have a small footprint, be secure, and easy to use with little or no distracting bells and whistles.

• How to Install Cockpit on Ubuntu 18.04

• Print a horizontal line

• Sort by IP address

• Print a horizontal line

• Show OS release incl version.

• Echo string over and over until CTRL-C

• Verify that local machine’s IP matches DNS:

• Produce 10 copies of the same string

Open-source cloud application infrastructure can be a confusing landscape to navigate with multiple projects, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. While there are some points of overlap, each technology has its own merits and use-cases.

Among the vendors that uses and contributes to OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes is SUSE, which also has commercial products for all three technologies as well. In a video interview with eWEEK, Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO at SUSE explains how the three open-source technologies intersect at his company.

"We see that our customers don't use a single open-source project, most of the time they to use different ones, with different lifecycles and sometimes they overlap," Di Giacomo said.

• Review: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Laptop

  Canonical recently made an official announcement on its company blog stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop (that is, Project Sputnik) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I'm a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop eventually arrived, and like a child on Christmas morning, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first time.

  This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it's mobile (which is very important in my book), thin and sleek. Not only does the device look good, but it also performs very well.

  [...]

  Overall, I had a very positive experience with the 7th generation Dell XPS 13. It's a powerful machine and fully capable of handling all sorts of developer workloads. And if used in a professional environment, it's very mobile as well. You can carry it from conference room to conference room and resume your work with little to no disruption. Ubuntu is well integrated with the machine, and it shows. You can't ask for more in a developer's laptop. I definitely consider this device to be well worth the investment.

• What does your Linux setup look like?

  Jim Hall: I run Fedora Workstation on a Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop, with an ASUS 24" external display. That gives me a dual-display configuration that lets me work in one window on the larger display while having a separate space to run my music player or other apps. I love my Perixx ergonomic keyboard and my Microsoft Classic Intellimouse. When I'm feeling nostalgic, I swap out the ergo keyboard with my replica IBM Model M keyboard by Unicomp; the buckling spring keys are really easy to type with. My printer is an HP color LaserJet, which works seamlessly with Linux.

• An illustrated tour of Unix history

  Unix pioneer Rob Pike was there from the start, physically transporting key elements of the "Toronto distribution" of Unix to Berkeley when he started grad school, and then to Bell Labs, working alongside Dennis Ritchie and other key Unix programmers to develop and refine everything from modern editors to compilers to windowing systems.

  His hour-long "illustrated memoir" of the deep history of Unix is delightful, touching on the people and institutional forces that shaped the operating environment that has come to dominate modern computing (he even gives a mention to Cardiac, the cardboard computer that shaped my own computing life).

• All Servers Are Now On Linux!

  The next step for these servers is to massage them into actual Linux Daemons, which shouldn't be HUGE, but it will take a minor rewrite of some bits of code. Not a huge issue until I have a real server though. So, really the next step is to get the base functionality built out in the next 3 Servers(Mob, Narrative, & Social)

• IoT security and Linux: Why IncludeOS thinks it has the edge [Ed: Promoting IncludeOS by bashing Linux even though security of IncludeOS is yet unproven; Linux devices' Achilles heel: weak/consistent passwords, open ports]

  Per Buer, CEO and co-founder of Norwegian software company IncludeOS, thinks the growing use of Linux as an embedded operating system is giving it a role for which it is far from perfect.

  "Linux has impressive hardware and software support. It supports just about any protocol and any peripheral. It is all dynamic so anything at any time can connect to a Linux system," he wrote recently.

  "The result is a massive amount of code and following this a considerable number of potential bugs that could lead to compromise."

  He thinks his company's OS offers a better solution. It has created an open-source OS that links into the application at compile time, resulting in one software image where the OS functionality is inside the application and running directly on top of the hardware.

  IncludeOS links only the OS functionality that the application needs into the binary software image, thus reducing both its size and possible attack surfaces. This approach is normally termed a 'library OS'.

  IncludeOS runs in a single address space, so there are neither interprocess communications nor concepts like user space and kernel space.

• Chris Lamb: Review: The "Trojan Room" coffee

  I was recently invited to give a seminar at the Cambridge University's Department of Computer Science and Technology on the topic of Reproducible Builds.

• Results produced while at "X2Go - The Gathering 2018" in Stuttgart

  Over the last weekend, I have attended the FLOSS meeting "X2Go - The Gathering 2018" [1]. The event took place at the shackspace make spacer in Ulmerstraße near S-Bahn station S-Untertürckheim. Thanks to the people from shackspace for hosting us there, I highly enjoyed your location's environment. Thanks to everyone who joined us at the meeting. Thanks to all event sponsors (food + accomodation for me). Thanks to Stefan Baur for being our glorious and meticulous organizer!!!

  Thanks to my family for letting me go for that weekend.

  Especially, a big thanks to everyone, that I was allowed to bring our family dog "Capichera" with me to the event. While Capichera adapted quite ok to this special environment on sunny Friday and sunny Saturday, he was not really feeling well on rainy Sunday (aching joints, unwilling to move, walk interact).

• Model the brain with the NEST simulator on Fedora

  The latest version of the NEST simulator is now available in Fedora as part of the NeuroFedora initiative. NEST is a standard tool used by computational neuroscientists to make large scale computer models of the brain that are needed to investigate among other things, how the brain processes information.

• The Latest Version of the Nest Simulator Now Available in Fedora, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS Services Comes to Android, Ceph Now Has Its Own Open-Source Foundation, Valve Making a VR Headset and Sparky Linux 4.9 Released

  The Fedora team announces that the latest version of the Nest simulator is now available in Fedora as part of the NeuroFedora initiative. Nest allows computational neuroscientists to "make large scale computer models of the brain that are needed to investigate among other things, how the brain processes information". Nest provides an easy to use Python interface and it can be run on both laptops and supercomputing clusters.

• FSF Update Rules Commons Clause Non-Free

  The Free Software Foundation has added the Commons Clause to its list of non-free licenses among a number of recent updates to its licensing materials. Other changes clarify the GNU GPL position on translating code into another language and how to handle projects that combine code under multiple licenses.

• More companies want fairness to open source license enforcement

  The 16 new companies in this announcement are a diverse set of technology firms whose participation makes evident the worldwide reach of the GPL Cooperation Commitment. They comprise globally-operating companies based on four continents and mark a significant expansion of the initiative into the Asia-Pacific region. They represent various industries and areas of commercial focus, including IT services, software development tools and platforms, social networking, fintech, semiconductors, e-commerce, multimedia software and more.

  The GPL Cooperation Commitment is a means for companies, individual developers and open source projects to provide opportunities for licensees to correct errors in compliance with software licensed under the GPLv2 family of licenses before taking action to terminate the licenses. Version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), version 2 of the GNU Library General Public License (LGPLv2), and version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv2.1) do not contain express “cure” periods to fix noncompliance prior to license termination. Version 3 of the GNU GPL (GPLv3) addressed this by adding an opportunity to correct mistakes in compliance. Those who adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment extend the cure provisions of GPLv3 to their existing and future GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x-licensed code.

The latest news from the world of cheap electronics is a single board computer running Linux. It costs six dollars, and you can buy it right now. You might even be able to compile code for it, too.

The C-Sky Linux development board is listed on Taobao as an ‘OrangePi NanoPi Raspberry Pi Linux Development Board” and despite some flagrant misappropriation of trademarks, this is indeed a computer running Linux, available for seven American dollars.

This board is based on a NationalChip GX6605S SoC, a unique chip with an ISA that isn’t ARM, x86, RISC-V, MIPS, or anything else that would be considered normal. The chip itself was designed for set-top boxes, but there are a surprising number of build tools that include buildroot, GCC and support for qemu. The company behind this chip is maintaining a kernel, and support for this chip has been added to the mainline kernel. Yes, unlike many other single board computers out there, you might actually be able to compile something for this chip.

Also: Modular automation controller builds on UP Squared SBC

• Buttercup – A Free, Secure And Cross-platform Password Manager

  In this modern Internet era, you will surely have multiple accounts on lot of websites. It could be a personal or official mail account, social or professional network account, GitHub account, and ecommerce account etc. So you should have several different passwords for different accounts. I am sure that you are already aware that setting up same password to multiple accounts is crazy and dangerous practice. If an attacker managed to breach one of your accounts, it’s highly likely he/she will try to access other accounts you have with the same password. So, it is highly recommended to set different passwords to different accounts.

• Container Labeling

  Container policy is defined in the container-selinux package. By default containers run with the SELinux type "container_t" whether this is a container launched by just about any container engine like: podman, cri-o, docker, buildah, moby. And most people who use SELinux with containers from container runtimes like runc, systemd-nspawn use it also.

  By default container_t is allowed to read/execute labels under /usr, read generically labeled content in the hosts /etc directory (etc_t).

  The default label for content in /var/lib/docker and /var/lib/containers is container_var_lib_t, This is not accessible by containers, container_t, whether they are running under podman, cri-o, docker, buildah ... We specifically do not want containers to be able to read this content, because content that uses block devices like devicemapper and btrfs(I believe) is labeled container_var_lib_t, when the containers are not running.

  For overlay content we need to allow containers to read/execute the content, we use the type container_share_t, for this content. So container_t is allowed to read/execute container_share_t files, but not write/modify them.

• How my personal Bug Bounty Program turned into a Free Security Audit for the Serendipity Blog

  This blog and two other sites in scope use Serendipity (also called S9Y), a blog software written in PHP. Through the bug bounty program I got reports for an Open Redirect, an XSS in the start page, an XSS in the back end, an SQL injection in the back end and another SQL injection in the freetag plugin. All of those were legitimate vulnerabilities in Serendipity and some of them quite severe. I forwarded the reports to the Serendipity developers.

  Fixes are available by now, the first round of fixes were released with Serendipity 2.1.3 and another issue got fixed in 2.1.4. The freetag plugin was updated to version 2.69. If you use Serendipity please make sure you run the latest versions.

• Security updates for Monday

• Richard Hughes: More fun with libxmlb

  A few days ago I cut the 0.1.4 release of libxmlb, which is significant because it includes the last three features I needed in gnome-software to achieve the same search results as appstream-glib.

• Usability Testing in Open Source Software (SeaGL)

  I've been involved in Free/open source software since 1993, but recently I developed an interest in usability testing in open source software. During a usability testing class in my Master's program in Scientific and Technical Communication (MS) I studied the usability of GNOME and Firefox. Later, I did a deeper examination of the usability of open source software, focusing on GNOME, as part of my Master's capstone. (“Usability Themes in Open Source Software,” 2014.)

  Since then, I've joined the GNOME Design Team where I help with usability testing.

• [Krita] Second Edition of “Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita” published!

  The first edition was written forfor Krita 2.9.11, almost three years ago. A lot of things have changed since then! So Timothée has completely updated this new edition for Krita version 4.1. There are also a number of notes about the new features in Krita 4.

  And more-over, D-Booker worked again on updating and improving the French translation of Krita! Thanks again to D-Booker edition for their contribution.

• [Krita] Interview with HoldXtoRevive

  About 4 years ago I downloaded GIMP as I wanted to get back into art after not drawing for about 15 years. I got a simple drawing tablet soon after and things just progressed from there.