• 'Osiris: New Dawn', a graphically impressive multiplayer adventure and survival game coming to Linux

  If you're going to post in that forum topic to give your support, remember that just "+1" is considered spam by Steam. It's also rather unhelpful, voice your support properly.

• 'Sunless Skies', the next game after 'Sunless Sea' to support Linux, will go to Kickstarter next year

  Failbetter Games [Official Site] have announced their next game titled 'Sunless Skies' as the follow-on from 'Sunless Sea'. Linux will be supported.

• 'We Are The Dwarves' now available DRM free for Linux on GOG

  We Are The Dwarves [Official Site, GOG], an action-based tactical adventure is now available for you GOG fans in their usual DRM free form.

• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Chaos Rising and Retribution released for Linux, port report and thoughts

  Feral Interactive have ported another set of cracking good games. This time we have Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Chaos Rising and Retribution to fill our strategy needs!

• Minecraft: The Exploration Update announced, new monsters, new animals and more [Ed: Microsoft.]

• Unity have released a preview of the Unity editor with the Vulkan API [Ed: Microsoft Mono.]

I’m happy to announce that today we’re releasing Qubes OS 3.2!

This is an incremental improvement over the 3.1 version that we released earlier this year. A lot of work went into making this release more polished, more stable and easier to use than our previous releases.

One major feature that we’ve improved upon in this release is our integrated management infrastructure, which was introduced in Qubes 3.1. Whereas before it was only possible to manage whole VMs, it is now possible to manage the insides of VMs as well.

While the smallest in terms of revenue contribution, Asia is Red Hat's fastest growing region and is likely to continue its upwards trajectory as emerging markets roll out new infrastructure.

Developing nations in the region were embarking on many net new infrastructure projects, rather than replacement for existing technology, and open source would be involved in a large share of such projects. The decisions on which technology to deploy would rarely be between proprietary or open source, but rather on which open source vendor to go with or to do so internally, said Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst.

Today, September 29, 2016, Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation informs Softpedia via an email announcement about the general availability of the first point release of the LibreOffice 5.2 open-source and cross-platform office suite.

On September 28, the LibreOffice project celebrated its 6th anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than to push a new update of the popular open source and cross-platform office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide. Therefore, we would like to inform our readers about the general availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, which comes just three weeks after the release of LibreOffice 5.2.1.

"Just one day after the project 6th anniversary, The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family," says Italo Vignoli. "LibreOffice 5.2.2, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August."

• But is it safe? Uncork a bottle of vintage open-source FUD

  Most of the open source questioners come from larger organisations. Banks very rarely pop up here, and governments have long been hip to using open source. Both have ancient, proprietary systems in place here and there that are finally crumbling to dust and need replacing fast. Their concerns are more oft around risk management and picking the right projects.

  It’s usually organisations whose business is dealing with actual three dimensional objects that ask about open source. Manufacturing, industrials, oil and gas, mining, and others who have typically looked at IT as, at best, a helper for their business rather than a core product enabler.

  These industries are witnessing the lighting fast injection of software into their products - that whole “Internet of Things” jag we keep hearing about. Companies here are being forced to look at both using open source in their products and shipping open source as part of their business.

  The technical and pricing requirements for IoT scale software is a perfect fit for open source, especially that pricing bit. On the other end - peddling open source themselves - companies that are looking to build and sell software-driven “platforms” are finding that partners and developers are not so keen to join closed source ecosystems.

  These two pulls create some weird clunking in the heads of management at these companies who aren’t used to working with a sandles and rainbow frame of mind. They have a scepticism born of their inexperience with open source. Let’s address some of their trepidation.

• Real business innovation begins with open practices

  To business leaders, "open source" often sounds too altruistic—and altruism is in short supply on the average balance sheet. But using and contributing to open source makes hard-nosed business sense, particularly as a way of increasing innovation.

  Today's firms all face increased competition and dynamic markets. Yesterday's big bang can easily become today's cautionary tale. Strategically, the only viable response to this disruption is constantly striving to serve customers better through sustained and continuous innovation. But delivering innovation is hard; the key is to embrace open and collaborative innovation across organizational walls—open innovation.

  Open source communities' values and practices generate open innovation, and working in open source is a practical, pragmatic way of delivering innovation. To avoid the all-too-real risk of buzzword bingo we can consider two definitions of "innovation":

  creating value (that serves customer needs) to sell for a profit; or
  reducing what a firm pays for services.

• This Week In Servo 79

  In the last week, we landed 96 PRs in the Servo organization’s repositories.

  Promise support has arrived in Servo, thanks to hard work by jdm, dati91, and mmatyas! This does not fully implement microtasks, but unblocks the uses of Promises in many places (e.g., the WebBluetooth test suite).

  Emilio rewrote the bindings generation code for rust-bindgen, dramatically improving the flow of the code and output generated when producing Rust bindings for C and C++ code.

  The TPAC WebBluetooth standards meeting talked a bit about the great progress by the team at the University of Szeged in the context of Servo.

• Servo Web Engine Now Supports Promises, Continues Churning Along

  It's been nearly two months since last writing about Mozilla's Servo web layout engine (in early August, back when WebRender2 landed) but development has kept up and they continue enabling more features for this next-generation alternative to Gecko.

  The latest is that Servo now supports JavaScript promises. If you are unfamiliar with the promise support, see this guide.

  The latest Servo code has improvements around its Rust binding generator for C and C++ code plus other changes.

• Riak TS for time series analysis at scale

  Until recently, doing time series analysis at scale was expensive and almost exclusively the domain of large enterprises. What made time series a hard and expensive problem to tackle? Until the advent of the NoSQL database, scaling up to meet increasing velocity and volumes of data generally meant scaling hardware vertically by adding CPUs, memory, or additional hard drives. When combined with database licensing models that charged per processor core, the cost of scaling was simply out of reach for most.

  Fortunately, the open source community is democratising large scale data analysis rapidly, and I am lucky enough to work at a company making contributions in this space. In my talk at All Things Open this year, I'll introduce Riak TS, a key-value database optimized to store and retrieve time series data for massive data sets, and demonstrate how to use it in conjunction with three other open source tools—Python, Pandas, and Jupyter—to build a completely open source time series analysis platform. And it doesn't take all that long.

• Free Software Directory meeting recap for September 23rd, 2016

• security things in Linux v4.5

• Time to Kill Security Questions—or Answer Them With Lies

  The notion of using robust, random passwords has become all but mainstream—by now anyone with an inkling of security sense knows that “password1” and “1234567” aren’t doing them any favors. But even as password security improves, there’s something even more problematic that underlies them: security questions.

  Last week Yahoo revealed that it had been massively hacked, with at least 500 million of its users’ data compromised by state sponsored intruders. And included in the company’s list of breached data weren’t just the usual hashed passwords and email addresses, but the security questions and answers that victims had chosen as a backup means of resetting their passwords—supposedly secret information like your favorite place to vacation or the street you grew up on. Yahoo’s data debacle highlights how those innocuous-seeming questions remain a weak link in our online authentication systems. Ask the security community about security questions, and they’ll tell you that they should be abolished—and that until they are, you should never answer them honestly.

  From their dangerous guessability to the difficulty of changing them after a major breach like Yahoo’s, security questions have proven to be deeply inadequate as contingency mechanisms for passwords. They’re meant to be a reliable last-ditch recovery feature: Even if you forget a complicated password, the thinking goes, you won’t forget your mother’s maiden name or the city you were born in. But by relying on factual data that was never meant to be kept secret in the first place—web and social media searches can often reveal where someone grew up or what the make of their first car was—the approach puts accounts at risk. And since your first pet’s name never changes, your answers to security questions can be instantly compromised across many digital services if they are revealed through digital snooping or a data breach.

• LibreSSL and the latest OpenSSL security advisory

  Just a quick note that LibreSSL is not impacted by either of the issues mentioned in the latest OpenSSL security advisory - both of the issues exist in code that was added to OpenSSL in the last release, which is not present in LibreSSL.

• Record-breaking DDoS reportedly delivered by >145k hacked cameras

  Last week, security news site KrebsOnSecurity went dark for more than 24 hours following what was believed to be a record 620 gigabit-per-second denial of service attack brought on by an ensemble of routers, security cameras, or other so-called Internet of Things devices. Now, there's word of a similar attack on a French Web host that peaked at a staggering 1.1 terabits per second, more than 60 percent bigger.

  The attacks were first reported on September 19 by Octave Klaba, the founder and CTO of OVH. The first one reached 1.1 Tbps while a follow-on was 901 Gbps. Then, last Friday, he reported more attacks that were in the same almost incomprehensible range. He said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were delivered through a collection of hacked Internet-connected cameras and digital video recorders. With each one having the ability to bombard targets with 1 Mbps to 30 Mbps, he estimated the botnet had a capacity of 1.5 Tbps.

  On Monday, Klaba reported that more than 6,800 new cameras had joined the botnet and said further that over the previous 48 hours the hosting service was subjected to dozens of attacks, some ranging from 100 Gbps to 800 Gbps. On Wednesday, he said more than 15,000 new devices had participated in attacks over the past 48 hours.

• Exchange email down for Android and iOS users

  Microsoft Exchange mobile users on Android and iOS users have been unable to access emails on their phones due to a planned shift away from its Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol.

  The issue first appeared yesterday and is still affecting users.

  One customer got in touch to say: "Exchange Mobile device access seems to be up the Swanny for iOS and Android users." They quipped: "Fortunately neither of the Windows Mobile users are affected."

• Latest Fitbit Blaze firmware update finally makes the tracker worth buying

  The Fitbit Blaze is a deceptive little fitness tracker. It may look like a smartwatch on the surface, but dive a little deeper and you’ll find it’s actually missing most of the smartwatch-y features we’ve come to expect from fitness tracker/smartwatch hybrids. When we reviewed the Blaze a few months ago, the lack of third-party notification support and poor selection of watch faces were some of our biggest gripes with this tracker. Thankfully Fitbit has finally heard our cries and released a new update that fixes these issues.

• Android Wear watches aren’t connecting to the iPhone 7

  One of Android Wear’s biggest strengths is it that the platform is designed to be cross compatible with Android and iOS. However, a number of consumers are reporting that they can’t connected a range of Android Wear smartwatches up to the new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus.

• Multiple Android Wear smartwatches are not pairing with the iPhone 7

• Google Allo rockets past 5 million downloads

• BlackBerry to stop developing its own hardware, will rely on manufacturing partners instead

• How to copy music to your Android phone

• Spaces v1.7 adds capability to save posted images [APK Download]

• Firefox Aurora arrives on the Play Store in "unreleased" state

• PyCon 2016

  I come from a place where everyone worships competitive coding and thus cpp, so the experience of attending my first pycon was much awaited for me.

  This year’s PyCon India happened in Delhi and i along with a couple of my friends reached on 23rd September, the first day. We were a bit late but it was all right because, we didn’t miss anything.

• What do you have to say? Share it at LibrePlanet 2017

• LibrePlanet returns March 25-26, 2017, call for proposals for annual free software conference now open

  LibrePlanet is an annual conference for free software enthusiasts. The conference brings together software developers, policy experts, activists and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments and face challenges to software freedom. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2017 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.

  This year, the theme of LibrePlanet is "The Roots of Freedom." This encompasses the historical "roots" of the free software movement -- the Four Freedoms, the GNU General Public License and copyleft, and a focus on strong security and privacy protections -- and the concept of roots as a strong foundation from which the movement grows.

  "LibrePlanet is an impactful, exciting free software conference. Attendance has grown each year, yet the community-minded atmosphere has grown even stronger," said John Sullivan, executive director of the FSF.

• The Linux Foundation Announces Session Lineup for MesosCon Asia

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the schedule for MesosCon Asia, taking place November 18-19 in Hangzhou, China.

• Moscow Drops Microsoft on Putin’s Call for Self-Sufficiency

  Moscow city will replace Microsoft Corp. programs with domestic software on thousands of computers in answer to President Vladimir Putin’s call for Russia’s authorities to reduce dependence on foreign technology amid tensions with the U.S. and Europe.

  The city will initially replace Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Outlook on 6,000 computers with an e-mail system installed by state-run carrier Rostelecom PJSC, Artem Yermolaev, head of information technology for Moscow, told reporters Tuesday. Moscow may expand deployment of the new software, developed by Russia’s New Cloud Technologies, to as many as 600,000 computers and servers, and may also consider replacing Windows and Office, Yermolaev said.

• Why Microsoft is getting the cold shoulder from Moscow

  Since the German city of Munich decided to ditch Microsoft Windows and Office, a growing number of European agencies have followed suit - from France's national police force to the Italian military.

  The latest authority to turn its back on Microsoft is reportedly Moscow City Hall, which is transferring employee email from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to the Russian-built MyOffice Mail.

  About 6,000 Moscow state employees will be switched over, including teachers, doctors and civil servants. If the move is a success, the city will consider shifting 600,000 PCs and servers away from Microsoft, and may also replace Windows and Office, according to Bloomberg.

• Moscow will replace Microsoft's products with local offerings

  Microsoft might lose a whole city of customers in Russia. According to Bloomberg, Moscow will begin replacing Redmond's products with homegrown software as a result of Vladimir Putin's urging to stop depending on foreign tech. Artem Yermolaev, the city's head of information technology, told reporters that Moscow will begin by dropping Microsoft's Exchange Service and by replacing Outlook on 6,000 computers with state-run carrier Rostelecom PJSC's email system. Authorities are looking to deploy the email software to as many as 600,000 computers in the future. They might even replace Windows and the Office suite entirely, though there seems to be no solid plan for that at the moment.

Sony's Xperia X Compact is basically the newest version of the Z5 Compact that hit the US earlier this year. But just because it's a newer version of the (comparatively) tiny handset doesn't mean it's an upgrade in every way. Sony is pushing the camera sensors in the X Compact and the flagship-level XZ, as well as new features like five-axis image stabilization and HDR photo mode. Sony knows cameras, so we know the shooter in the X Compact will at least be competent. However, it has to be good enough to encourage photography buffs to shell out $499 for this unlocked handset while delivering solid performance across the board as well.

We already know that work on Linux Mint 18.1, the next major release of the popular Ubuntu-based operating system loved by many users, already begun, and Clement Lefebvre shares with us today some of the improvements coming to XApps.

Canonical, through Sergio Schvezov, announced the release of yet another maintenance update to the Snapcraft open-source utility that helps application developers package their apps as Snaps.

As LJ readers well know, Linux drives many of the technologies we use every day, from smart TVs to Web servers. Linux is everywhere—except most homes and classrooms.

That's a problem if we want to help breed the next generation of engineers and computer scientists. In fact, if teenagers (or any other group of curious individuals) want to learn about Linux, they often must rely on a geeky friend or parent willing to show them the way.

This three-part series seeks to change that by offering a way for anyone to learn about Linux by building what is essentially a tiny, self-contained Internet. Using old equipment and free software, you'll build a private network (with your own domain name), build Web sites, set up an e-mail server, install and use a database, and set up a Linux distro mirror.

• IP Kat is Lobbying Heavily for the UPC, Courtesy of Team UPC
• Leaked: Conclusions of the Secretive EPO Board 28 Meeting (8th of September 2016)
• Letter From the Dutch Institute of Patent Attorneys (Nederlandse Orde van Octrooigemachtigden) to the Administrative Council of the EPO
• EPO’s Board 28 Notes Battistelli’s “Three Current Investigations/Disciplinary Proceedings Involving SUEPO Members in The Hague.”
• Cementing Autocracy: The European Patent Office Against Democracy, Against Media, and Against the Rule of Law
• Team Battistelli Intensifies the Attack on the Boards of Appeal Again
• After the EPO Paid the Financial Times to Produce Propaganda the Newspaper Continues to Produce UPC Puff Pieces, Just Ahead of EU Council Meeting
• Links 28/9/2016: New Red Hat Offices, Fedora 25 ‘Frozen’
• Links 28/9/2016: Alpine Linux 3.4.4, Endless OS 3.0

I can try and do more coding, more code reviewing, revive designing discussions… that’s cool, yet never enough. GIMP needs more people, developers, designers, community people, writers for the website or the documentation, tutorial makers… everyone is welcome in my grand scheme!

Many of my actions lately have been towards gathering more people, so when I heard about the GNOME newcomers initiative during GUADEC, I thought that could be a good fit. Thus a few days ago, I had GIMP added in the list of newcomer-friendly GNOME projects, with me as the newcomers mentor. I’ll catch this occasion to remind you all the ways you can contribute to GIMP, and not necessarily as a developer.

Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Its package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world. You can read more about Node.js at the project website.

The city of Moscow is contemplating ditching Microsoft’s technology as president Vladimir Putin urges state officials and local businesses to scale down their reliance on foreign software providers.

In turn, the city is replacing Microsoft’s products with solutions from local competitors.

Four years after Microsoft (MSFT) first tried to give the world unified PC/mobile operating systems via the dual fiascoes known as Windows 8 and Windows RT, Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google appears set to take its own stab at the concept. And there are reasons to think the company will see a measure of success.

Citing "two independent and reliable sources," Android Police reports Google plans to launch a notebook in the third quarter of 2017 that will likely be the first new device to showcase Andromeda, a version of Android that will integrate many features associated with Google's Chrome OS PC operating system.

The notebook will reportedly be called the Pixel 3, and carry a $788 price. Its feature set reportedly include a 12.3-inch display, an Intel (INTC) processor, a glass trackpad, a tablet mode and stylus support.

• Linux servers deliver greater performance and efficiency 'than available on any x86-based server'

• What are configuration management tools?

  For most people, computers don't stay the same. Software is added, removed, and updated. Configurations are changed. Think about the changes you've made to your computer since the first time you booted it up. Now imagine making those changes to 10, 100, or 1,000 more computers. Configuration management tools are what make implemententing and enforcing these changes possible.

• 5 new OpenStack tutorials and guides

• Ericsson: The Journey to a DevOps Future in SDN

  There are big transformations going on in the world today that are driving rapid changes to the business of networks, said Santiago Rodriguez, VP of Engineering and head of the product development unit SDN & Policy Control at Ericsson, in his keynote Tuesday at OpenDaylight Summit.

  “Society is transforming, the way we do business is transforming, and accordingly the way we build our networks is transforming,” Rodriguez said.

  The three pillars of this network transformation include: 5G, virtualization and open source.

• OpenDaylight sets product quality label, metrics for SDN solutions

  Initial OpenDaylight-based products expected to receive the "Powered by OpenDaylight" mark are offerings from Brocade, Ericsson, HPE, Inocybe and Serro.

• Telstra Sees Quadrupled Data Capacity by 2020

  The latter service led Telstra to re-think its fiber deployment strategy, choosing to use pre-provisioned fiber connections to data centers in advance of customer demand, because the company knew that demand was coming, Blackall said. The strategy worked well with Telstra's acquisition of Pacnet, which had already deployed SDN capabilities to connect its 27 points of presence around Asia.

• Valve's Steam Controller With SteamOS/Linux Support Is Now Listed For Just $35

  If you have been put off from ordering a Steam Controller for your SteamOS/Linux gaming system due to the $50 USD price-tag, it's been marked down to $35.

  Back in June it was temporarily reduced to $35 USD but then a few days later shot back up to $50 at major Internet retailers. Judging from those that clicked our Amazon links, it was of interest to many readers. If you missed that discount the first time around, the Steam Controller is back to being listed as a $34.99 product.

  It's not clear how long this deal will last or if it is permanent -- there has been speculations about a "Steam Controller 2" but I haven't seen any public confirmation yet.

• Game Developer Chooses To Connect With Pirates, Reaps Rewards As A Result

  One imagines that this kind of thing builds up goodwill amongst potential buyers of PM Studio games. Some of the comments on the thread state as much. It won't do anything with the pure-pirate folks out there, but, then again, nothing will. Worrying about those that were never going to buy the game would have been wasted time and energy. Instead, the developer chose to try to win over those that might indeed want to support its efforts.

  Here's hoping PM Games gets the positive reinforcement needed to confirm that this kind of thing is the right way to deal with piracy. And that other studios are paying attention, as well.

• InXile Entertainment announced Wasteland 3, will use crowdfunding on fig

  I'm going off their twitter and other sites for the main info right now, as it seems we are still not on InXile's press list.

  It is already confirmed to have Linux support, along with multiplayer, vehicles, and some form of base building.