• Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi lets Google's Android into its dashboards

• Google wins major Android deal with auto partnership Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi

• Bluestacks 4 released: Your Android apps on PC could run faster than your flagship phone

• 5 handy hidden features in the Gmail Android app

• Android Security Bulletin September 2018: What you need to know

• Google Family Link adds much-needed teen Android management

• Forget the iPhone XS – here are all the Android phones coming in October 2018

• BlueStacks, an Android emulator for PC, gets update with major performance upgrade

• Android Confidential: Why these 3 upcoming Android phones could put the iPhone XS to shame

• Exclusive: This is Android Pie with Samsung Experience 10 on the Samsung Galaxy S9+

• Google Is Testing A Floating Keyboard On Android

• Big Dolby donation to UCSF; Android cars are coming; OPEC supports Iran

Chrome OS 69 is the first release of the Linux-based operating system that enables support for running Linux apps on Chromebooks. However, the Linux app support is still in development and it's presented to users in a beta form, available only on select devices due to hardware restrains. A complete list with the Chromebooks supporting Linux apps is available here.

"While we would like to be able to bring this work to all Chromebooks, the required kernel and hardware features limit where we can deploy this," says Google in the blog announcement. "A lot of features we use had to be backported, and the further back we go, the more difficult & risky it is to do so. We don't want to compromise system stability and security here."

Upsilon is Kickstartering a “BioControle” I/O add-on board for the RPi 3 designed for aquaponics and hydroponics. The $89, open-spec add-on offers power-protected 12-bit ADC and DAC, 4x relays, servo outputs, and sensor and logical I/O.

We knew it was only a matter of time before we covered a board from Luxembourg, and that time has come. Rodange, Luxembourg based Upsilon Engineering, which is led by embedded engineer Yann Leidwanger, has gone to Kickstarter to launch its BioControle add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 3. The board can be used as a general purpose I/O and DAQ add-on but is specifically designed as a control board for aquaponics and hydroponics gardening.

• First results of the ROSIN project: Robotics Open-Source Software for Industry

  Open-Source Software for robots is a de-facto standard in academia, and its advantages can benefit industrial applications as well. The worldwide ROS-Industrial initiative has been using ROS, the Robot Operating System, to this end.

  In order to consolidate Europe’s expertise in advanced manufacturing, the H2020 project ROSIN supports EU’s strong role within ROS-Industrial. It will achieve this goal through three main actions on ROS: ensuring industrial-grade software quality; promoting new business-relevant applications through so-called Focused Technical Projects (FTPs); supporting educational activities for students and industry professionals on the one side conducting ROS-I trainings as well as and MOOCs and on the other hand by supporting education at third parties via Education Projects (EPs).

• Baidu To Launch World’s First Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure Cooperative Systems Open Source Solution By End Of 2018

  Baidu Inc. has announced it will launch the Apollo Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure Cooperative Systems (IVICS) open-source solution by the end of 2018, leveraging its capabilities in autonomous driving to bring together intelligent vehicles and infrastructure to form a “human-vehicle-roadway” interplay – an important step toward developing future intelligent transportation.

• Versity Open Sources Next Generation Archiving Filesystem

  The ScoutFS project was started in 2016 to address the rapidly growing demand for larger POSIX namespaces and faster metadata processing. The design goal for ScoutFS includes the ability to store up to one trillion files in a single namespace by efficiently distributing metadata handling across a scale out cluster of commodity compute nodes.

• Moving from Wordpress

• Epic Clock Clocks The Unix Epoch

  Admit it: when you first heard of the concept of the Unix Epoch, you sat down with a calculator to see when exactly 2³¹-1 seconds would be from midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Personally, I did that math right around the time my company hired contractors to put “Y2K Suspect” stickers on every piece of equipment that looked like it might have a computer in it, so the fact that the big day would come sometime in 2038 was both comforting and terrifying.

  [Forklift] is similarly entranced by the idea of the Unix Epoch and built a clock to display it, at least for the next 20 years or so. Accommodating the eventual maximum value of 2,147,483,647, plus the more practical ISO-8601 format, required a few more digits than the usual clock – sixteen to be exact. The blue seven-segment displays make an impression in the sleek wooden case, about which there is sadly no detail in the build log. But the internals are well documented, and include a GPS module and an RTC. The clock parses the NMEA time string from the satellites and syncs the RTC. There’s a brief video below of the clock in action.

• 3 top Python libraries for data science

  Python's many attractions—such as efficiency, code readability, and speed—have made it the go-to programming language for data science enthusiasts. Python is usually the preferred choice for data scientists and machine learning experts who want to escalate the functionalities of their applications. (For example, Andrey Bulezyuk used the Python programming language to create an amazing machine learning application.)

  Because of its extensive usage, Python has a huge number of libraries that make it easier for data scientists to complete complicated tasks without many coding hassles. Here are the top 3 Python libraries for data science; check them out if you want to kickstart your career in the field.

• PortableCL 1.2 Still Coming While POCL 1.3 Will Further Improve Open-Source OpenCL

  It's been a number of months since last having any major news to report on POCL, the "PortableCL" project providing a portable OpenCL/compute implementation that can run on CPUs, select GPUs, and other accelerators.

  POCL 1.1 from March remains the current stable release while POCL 1.2 has been in the release candidate stage. The POCL 1.2 release candidates began last month with a few highlights like LLVM 7.0 support, device-side printf support, and HWLOC 2.0 library support.

CloudBees is bringing a set of products into a new CloudBees Suite that it said will help companies of all sizes streamline the software development process. The new software is set to be announced Sept. 18 at the company’s DevOps World / Jenkins World conference in San Francisco. Jenkins is the open-source version of CloudBees, which is a commercial offering.

A central piece of the CloudBees Suite is the CloudBees Core for unified governance of continuous delivery operations and processes used in DevOps. Software pipelines can also use Core to run software pipelines more efficiently in a self-managed way in the cloud or on-premises.

Also: CloudBees Announces Availability of Support for Jenkins Open Source

• Google releases Chrome OS 69 with new Material Theme design and Linux support

  Google’s big Chrome overhaul that arrived on desktop and mobile earlier this month is coming to Chromebooks today with the release of Chrome OS version 69. The really noticeable change is the new Material Theme redesign of Chrome itself, which brings tabs with rounded corners and some softer aesthetic elements, like a blank white new tab page, to the overall look and feel of the browser.

• Chrome OS revamp delivers a new look and Linux app support

• Chrome OS 69 Brings New Look, Linux App Support

• Chrome OS 69 rolling out w/ Google Material Theme, Night Light, Linux, dictation, more

  Chrome OS 69 is rolling out today following the Android and desktop release last week. Version 69 includes the Google Material Theme to coincide with the browser’s 10th anniversary. Meanwhile, Linux apps are launching on the stable channel for select devices, while Chrome OS adds Night Light and easier to access system-level voice dictation.

• Microsoft Windows U-turn removes warning about installing Chrome, Firefox [Ed: Microsoft showed us its true colours though]

  The feature raised some hackles and brought back memories of Microsoft's strong-arm tactics promoting its old Internet Explorer browser in the first browser wars two decades ago. But Microsoft isn't alone in such tactics: Google promotes its Chrome browser as faster and safer to people who visit its own websites with other browsers.

  Microsoft didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the change of direction.

Divided into 2 parts, in this first part I will introduce the concept that everything is file and present the special devices / dev / null, / dev / zero, / dev / random and / dev / full. Part 2 will be to present didactically interesting features about this, for example, how to turn a file into a partition!

• AutoFill your passwords with Firefox Lockbox in iOS

  Today Firefox Lockbox 1.3 gives you the ability to automatically fill your username and password into apps and websites. This is available to anyone running the latest iOS 12 operating system.

• Streaming RNNs in TensorFlow

  The Machine Learning team at Mozilla Research continues to work on an automatic speech recognition engine as part of Project DeepSpeech, which aims to make speech technologies and trained models openly available to developers. We’re hard at work improving performance and ease-of-use for our open source speech-to-text engine. The upcoming 0.2 release will include a much-requested feature: the ability to do speech recognition live, as the audio is being recorded. This blog post describes how we changed the STT engine’s architecture to allow for this, achieving real-time transcription performance. Soon, you’ll be able to transcribe audio at least as fast as it’s coming in.

• Explore the immersive web with Firefox Reality. Now available for Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream

  Earlier this year, we shared that we are building a completely new browser called Firefox Reality. The mixed reality team at Mozilla set out to build a web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets. Today, we are pleased to announce that the first release of Firefox Reality is available in the Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream app stores.

  At a time when people are questioning the impact of technology on their lives and looking for leadership from independent organizations like Mozilla, Firefox Reality brings to the 3D web and immersive content experiences the level of ease of use, choice, control and privacy they’ve come to expect from Firefox.

  But for us, the ability to enjoy the 2D web is just table stakes for a VR browser. We built Firefox Reality to move seamlessly between the 2D web and the immersive web.

• These Months In Servo 113

  In the past 1.5 months, we merged 439 PRs in the Servo organization’s repositories.

Linux has been around for almost 30 years. Yes, it’s that old, and it did make history. If you are interested in the history of some of the major Linux distros, here it is in a nutshell – the history of various Linux distros, like Ubuntu, Fedora, REHL, Linux Mint, Slackware, etc. The reasons for their creation and their philosophy will be briefly discussed.

• Security updates for Tuesday

• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #177

• Microsoft: Like the Borg, we want to absorb all the world's biz computers [Ed: Microsoft wants to spy on and control every single thing. It (kick)started PRISM, so it was never serious about real security.]

  The technology allows Redmond to scan and monitor enrolled devices, and push out security patches, operating system upgrades, and software updates to the kit as necessary. It will also use machine-learning code and analytics to, in its own words, "manage the global MMD device population."

• Unit 42 Researchers Discover Xbash – Malware Which Destroys Linux and Windows Based Databases [Ed: See below; so basically it targets already-screwed systems...]

  Xbash mainly spreads by targeting any unpatched vulnerabilities and weak password

• Distance, the amazing atmospheric racing platformer is now officially out

  I've been waiting on this for what feels like forever, after a great run in Early Access the atmospheric racing platformer Distance is now out. A game I've gone back to many times during Early Access! Everything about Distance hits the mark for me.

• FPS game Ballistic Overkill's Bloodlust update is out

  Ballistic Overkill, a cheap and quite decent online FPS game has released a new update named Bloodlust full of tweaks for their newer Rounds game mode.

• The Count Lucanor, a 2D mystery and horror adventure is now on GOG

  For you GOG fans, they've added another quality Linux game! The Count Lucanor, a 2D mystery and horror adventure is now up with Linux support.

• Valve have been fined 147 thousand euros in France

  Thanks to a tip in our Discord, we've found out today that Valve have been fined 147 thousand euros in France. Probably a drop in the ocean compared to Valve's revenue, but enough to turn their heads and pay attention.

• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood Should Now Be In Good Shape With RadeonSI On Mesa 18.3

  Earlier this month Valve developers began working on Mesa/RadeonSI fixes for Wolfenstein: The Old Blood to run nicely with the open-source Linux drivers while the game is running under Steam Play / Proton. The last batch of these fixes for The Old Blood are now in Git for Mesa 18.3.

  First up is a revert to fix menu hangs in id Tech games like RAGE and Wolfenstein: The New Order.

• Writing More Compact Bash Code
  

  In any programming language, idioms may be used that may not seem obvious from reading the manual. Often these usages of the language represent ways to make your code more compact (as in requiring fewer lines of code). Of course, some will eschew these idioms believing they represent bad style. Style, of course, is in the eyes of beholder, and this article is not intended as an exercise in defining good or bad style. So for those who may be tempted to comment on the grounds of style I would (re)direct your attention to /dev/null.

• How to Run Commands Simultaneously in Linux

• How to Remove Packages with Dependencies Using Yum

• How To Force APT Package Manager To Use IPv4 In Ubuntu 16.04

• How to fix Indigo Error on Kodi

You could use any audio player to listen to audiobooks, but a specialized audiobook player like Cozy makes everything easier, by remembering your playback position and continuing from where you left off for each audiobook, or by letting you set the playback speed of each book individually, among others.

The Cozy interface lets you browse books by author, reader or recency, while also providing search functionality. Books front covers are supported by Cozy - either by using embedded images, or by adding a cover.jpg or cover.png image in the book folder, which is automatically picked up and displayed by Cozy.

When you click on an audiobook, Cozy lists the book chapters on the right, while displaying the book cover (if available) on the left, along with the book name, author and the last played time, along with total and remaining time:

Today, on September 18th, 2018, the Russian-speaking KDE community launches its updated website on KDE.ru.

The new website serves as the main page for the Russian-speaking community. It provides localized information about the community, product download links and the list of social network pages we maintain. It is also meant to help new members get involved in KDE’s projects, particularly in our translation and promotion efforts.

The website was created by me and Alexander Potashev on top of Jonah Brüchert‘s work for plasma-mobile.org. It uses Jekyll and is now hosted on official KDE servers. It replaces the old forum that has significantly lost its users in the past years.

A new major version of Variety Wallpaper Changer is out. With the latest 0.7.0 release, Variety was ported to Python 3, while also receiving some improvements like support for setting the Gnome Screensaver / GDM background to match the desktop wallpaper.

As more people use the Internet everyday they are becoming more conscious about their privacy with regards to how much of the information they don’t want to share at all is being compromised. Tons of VPN services have been created to solidify users’ safety but that doesn’t seem to be enough as there seems to be an increasing need to create custom VPNs.

It isn’t a bad thing to create a VPN service for yourself and there are actually a good number of developers and organizations that favour this habit.

Today, we bring you a list of the best open-source tools that you can use to create your own VPN. Some of them are relatively more difficult to set up and use than the others and they all have their feature highlights.

Depending on the reason why you want to deploy your own VPN, choose the title that is suitable for you.

• How to get Apple-like gestures on the Linux desktop

  I understand a big part of the problem is that Apple owns patents on trackpad gestures, something which hinders the open source community's ability to create a quality experience. But that hurdle shouldn't equate to a bad experience, which many people have. Not only does Linux install without any sort of multi-touch gestures, it is sometimes over sensitive or under sensitive. I've installed Linux on laptop hardware and found the trackpad configuration was a losing battle—until I discovered Fusuma.

• How to fix missing Python for Ansible in Fedora Vagrant

• Did your open source career begin with video games?

  Certainly you don't need to be a gamer as a child to grow up and become a developer, nor does being a gamer automatically set you up for a career in technology.

  But there's definitely a good bit of overlap between the two.

  After listening to the first episode of Command Line Heroes, and reading Ross Turk's story of how MUDs led him to a career in coding, I've thought a bit about how gaming has influenced my own journey into technology, and how it lead to a career in open source.

  For me, that first important game was WarCraft II. Sure, I played games before it, and after it. But shortly after my family replaced our faithful Apple IIc with a blazing fast (by comparison) 486 PC with amazing features like color, and a sound card, and even a 2400 baud modem (that would take about three months to download the equivalent of an hour of Netflix today).

• openSUSE to Have Summit in Nashville

  The openSUSE community is headed to Nashville, Tennessee, next year and will have the openSUSE SUmmit Nashville April 5 through April 6, 2019, during the end of SUSE’s premier annual global technical conference SUSECON.

  Registration for the event is open and the Call for Papers is open until Jan. 15. Partners of openSUSE, open-source community projects and community members are encourage to register for the summit and submit a talk.

  The schedule for the openSUSE SUmmit Nashville will be released at the beginning of February.

• How selfless is your open organization?

  "Community" is a defining characteristic of open organizations. A community could be many things—a "team," a "group," a "department," or a "task force," for example. What makes any of these groups a true community is two distinct factors: a well-defined purpose and clear investment in or value of that purpose.

  How does a person balance a community's values with his or her own, personal values? How does that person negotiate this relationship when setting goals? Answers to these questions will expose and speak to that person's character.

• Andres Rodriguez: MAAS 2.5.0 beta 1 released

  I’m happy to announce that MAAS 2.5.0 beta 1 has been released.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 545

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 545 for the week of September 9 – 15, 2018.

• Arm delivers production-ready open source Bluetooth Low Energy software stack to unleash IoT innovation

  Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is quickly becoming the Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity protocol of choice for a variety of use cases, including smart lighting, smart cities and asset tracking, where low-cost, power consumption and small footprint are fundamental requirements. According to the 2018 Bluetooth Market Update, there will be more than 5 billion Bluetooth device shipments by 2022, with 97% of them containing Bluetooth Low Energy technology. The advances in Bluetooth 5 technology, along with the introduction of Bluetooth Mesh are driving new market opportunities across building automation, sensor networks, and other IoT solutions.

• Digital Minimalism and Deep Work

  Through Newport's blog I learned that the title of his next book is Digital Minimalism. This intrigued me, because since I started thinking about minimalism myself, I've wondered about the difference of approach needed between minimalism in the "real world" and the digital domains. It turns out the topic of Newport's next book is about something different: from what I can tell, focussing on controlling how one spends one's time online for maximum productivity.

• Juniper Expands Its Edge Networking Ambitions

  With Edge Computing, rather than having all functions occur in a centralized cloud, some data collection and compute elements can happen at the edge of a network, thanks in no small part to the emergence of 5G and SD-WAN capabilities.

  The new Contrail Edge Cloud technology was announced on Sept. 17, providing an edge optimized version of Juniper's SDN platform. Contrail Edge Cloud is based on the Linux Foundation's open source Tungsten project, which was formerly known as Open Contrail. The edge solution is integrated with Red Hat's OpenStack platform and can also support Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform as well as other Kubernetes distributions.

• Current Change:: The Procter & Gamble Company, (NYSE: PG), Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT)

• Stock Highlights: Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)

• Rampart Investment Management Company LLC Has $646,000 Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Lukas "lzap" Zapletal: Switching to Universal Ctags

  For longer coding sessions, I am trying GNOME Builder which looks great and every single release it is catching up with Submlime Text 3, except it is fully open source and it has usable Vim emulation. I’ve tried Atom and VSCode but these slow things are not for me.

• Say thank you this November during Fedora Appreciation Week 2018

• Fedora Magazine: How to install more wallpaper packs on Fedora Workstation

• Announcing Heritage: An Open Source, Public Blockchain Project

  Heritage is a project of A​3​ by Airbus, the advanced projects outpost of Airbus in Silicon Valley. Airbus Foundation is the first strategic partner within Airbus to utilize blockchain technology developed by Heritage.

  Heritage is a decentralized application for the Airbus Foundation to hold charity fundraising campaigns internal to Airbus. Through open sourcing Heritage, Airbus Foundation will help charities onboard cryptocurrency and smart contracts, opening them to a new class of donor. Heritage hopes to set a standard non-profits can replicate to continue to grow the ecosystem while aiding an underserved market.

• Versity announces next generation open source archiving filesystem

  Versity Software has announced that it has released ScoutFS under GPLv2. "ScoutFS is the first GPL archiving file system ever released, creating an inherently safer and more user friendly option for storing archival data where accessibility over very large time scales, and the removal of vendor specific risk is a key consideration."

 

• Chrome Beta 70 Brings 2-Factor Authentication Via Fingerprint Sensor To Android & Mac

  With the beta version of Chrome 70 on the roll, Google has added yet another useful feature to make signing into the websites easier. As announced in an official blog post, Chrome now supports 2-factor authentication in Android and Macbook with the device’s fingerprint sensor.

• Thunderbird 60 with title bar hidden

  Many users like hidden system titlebar as Firefox feature although it’s not finished yet. But we’re very close and I hope to have Firefox 64 in shape that the title bar can be disabled by default at least on Gnome and matches Firefox outfit at Windows and Mac.

  Thunderbird 60 was finally released for Fedora and comes with a basic version of the feature as it was introduced at Firefox 60 ESR. There’s a simple checkbox at “Customize” page at Firefox but Thunderbird is missing an easy switch.

• Washington State Electronic Notary Public endorsements

  [...] This all seemed to me to be something that GnuPG is designed to do and does
  quite well. So I sent an email on Friday night to the sender of the letter
  requesting specific issues that my provider did not comply with. This
  morning I received a call from the DoL, and was able to successfully argue
  for GnuPG's qualification as an electronic records notary public technology
  provider for the State of Washington.

  In short, GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts
  <http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=42.45.140> in the State of
  Washington!

• Surprise: Bill Introduced To Finally Make PACER Free To All

      

  This would be... amazing. We've spent years highlighting the massive problems with PACER, the federal court system that charges insane amounts for basically everything you do, just to access public records, and which functions very much like it was designed around 1995. There are a few court cases arguing that PACER fees are illegal and a recent ruling in one of those cases agreed. As we noted at the time, that was hardly the final word on the matter. A bill like the ones Collins introduced would be an amazing leap forward in giving public access to court documents.

• Collins introduces bill to increase transparency and access to federal court documents

  Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) today introduced a bill to reform both parts of the federal courts’ electronic records system.

  “Americans deserve a justice system that is transparent and accessible. I introduced the Electronic Court Records Reform Act to modernize the judicial records systems and remove fee-for-access barriers that technology has rendered unnecessary,” said Collins.

  “As an attorney and the son of a law enforcement officer, I understand how crucial it is that this legislation ensures access to a freer, fairer and more accountable judiciary.”

• Software Patch Claimed To Allow Aadhaar's Security To Be Bypassed, Calling Into Question Biometric Database's Integrity

  As the Huffington Post article explains, creating a patch that is able to circumvent the main security features in this way was possible thanks to design choices made early on in the project. The unprecedented scale of the Aadhaar enrollment process -- so far around 1.2 billion people have been given an Aadhaar number and added to the database -- meant that a large number of private agencies and village-level computer kiosks were used for registration. Since connectivity was often poor, the main software was installed on local computers, rather than being run in the cloud. The patch can be used by anyone with local access to the computer system, and simply involves replacing a folder of Java libraries with versions lacking the security checks.

  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the government body responsible for the Aadhaar project, has responded to the Huffington Post article, but in a rather odd way: as a Donald Trump-like stream of tweets. The Huffington Post points out: "[the UIDAI] has simply stated that its systems are completely secure without any supporting evidence."

• New CAS BACnet Wireshark Report Tool Helps User to Quickly Locate Intermittent Issues

• Hackers For Good, Working To Gather Stakeholders To Find Answers To Cyberspace Challenges

  For a number of people, the word hacker means bad news. However, if some hackers have malevolent intentions, there are also hackers for good, and their skills were put to the challenge last week as they tried to save a fictitious city fallen into the hands of a group of cyber terrorists. The challenge was part of a two-day event organised by a young Geneva-based non-governmental organisation seeking to raise awareness about digital trust and bring accountability to cyberspace.