Chromium/Mozilla Firefox: Chrome 78 Beta, Keygen Setback and iframes

• Chrome 78 Beta: a new Houdini API, native file system access and more

  Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Find more information about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 78 is beta as of September 19, 2019.

• Chrome 78 Hits Beta With Native File System API, Much Faster WebSockets

  Google on Friday released the Chrome 78 web-browser beta following last week's release of Chrome 77. Chrome 78 Beta is coming with a new Houdini API or more formally known as the CSS Properties and Values API Level 1, which lets developers register variables as fully custom CSS properties and can better handle animations and other use-cases.

• Firefox 69 dropped support for <keygen>

  With version 69, firefox removed the support for the <keygen> feature to easily deploy TLS client certificates. It's kind of sad how used I've become to firefox giving me less and less reasons to use it...

• [Mozilla] Restricting third-party iframe widgets using the sandbox attribute, referrer policy and feature policy

  Adding third-party embedded widgets on a website is a common but potentially dangerous practice. Thankfully, the web platform offers a few controls that can help mitigate the risks. While this post uses the example of an embedded SurveyMonkey survey, the principles can be used for all kinds of other widgets. Note that this is by no means an endorsement of SurveyMonkey's proprietary service. If you are looking for a survey product, you should consider a free and open source alternative like LimeSurvey.

DM-Clone Target Added To Linux 5.4 For Efficient Remote Replication Of A Block Device

Added to the device mapper (DM) code with the Linux 5.4 kernel is an interesting addition that benefits those wanting to carry out some interesting use-cases around remote replication of block devices. As explained in the original patch proposal for dm-clone, "dm-clone produces a one-to-one copy of an existing, read-only device (origin) into a writable device (clone): It presents a virtual block device which makes all data appear immediately, and redirects reads and writes accordingly. The main use case of dm-clone is to clone a potentially remote, high-latency, read-only, archival-type block device into a writable, fast, primary-type device for fast, low-latency I/O. The cloned device is visible/mountable immediately and the copy of the origin device to the clone device happens in the background, in parallel with user I/O."

Devices: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75, PiCAN3 CAN-Bus Board and BeagleBoard

• OLPC XO-1.75 Seeing Mainline Support With The Linux 5.4 Kernel, Seven Years After Launch

  Seven years after the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1.75 Arm-based laptop entered production or nearly one decade since development began, it's now seeing mainline kernel support. The ARM MMP2-powered OLPC XO-1.75 is finally seeing support in the mainline kernel with the Arm SoC pull. The OLPC XO-1.75 was a low-power, education-focused laptop continuing the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The XO-1.75 model had lower power consumption thanks to migrating away from the earlier AMD Geode and VIA C7 designs, up to 2GB of DDR3 memory, 8GB of NAND flash memory, and other basic features.

• PiCAN3 Board for the Raspberry Pi 4 adds CAN Capabilities plus a Real-Time Clock

  Copperhill Technologies has recently announced the release of its PiCAN3 CAN-Bus Board for the Raspberry Pi 4.

• $118 BeagleBone-AI SBC is Made for AI Edge Applications

  The BeagleBoard.org Foundation introduced BeagleBone-AI SBC at Embedded World 2019 last February.

IBM, Red Hat and Fedora

• OpenShift Commons Gathering in Milan 2019 – Recap [Slides]

  On September 18th, 2019, the first OpenShift Commons Gathering Milan brought together over 300 experts to discuss container technologies, operators, the operator framework and the open source software projects that support the OpenShift ecosystem. This was the first OpenShift Commons Gathering to take place in Italy. The standing room only event hosted 11 talks in a whirlwind day of discussions. Of particular interest to the community was Christian Glombek’s presentation updating the status and roadmap for OKD4 and CoreOS. Highlights from the Gathering induled an OpenShift 4 Roadmap Update, customer stories from Amadeus, the leading travel technology company, and local stories from Poste Italiane and SIA S.p.A. In addition to the technical updates and customer talks, there was plenty of time to network during the breaks and enjoy the famous Italian coffee.

• Powering the hybrid cloud on next-generation hardware: Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System Z and LinuxONE

  For more than five years we have been driving our technology strategy around the idea that the future of enterprise IT does not reside solely in an enterprise datacenter or in the public cloud. Instead the next wave of computing is built on a blend of these technologies and infrastructure: in short, the future is hybrid. The value of hybrid clouds comes from the choice it delivers, pairing the control of the corporate datacenter alongside the scale and flexibility of public clouds. We strongly feel, however, that the most valuable hybrid clouds are those that offer not only a choice of deployment type and location, but also a choice of the underlying architecture and the capacity to run on multiple public clouds. [....] With RHEL available on Z15 and LinuxONE III, this helps pave the way for the rest of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, to emerge on IBM enterprise platforms. We’re pleased to continue our work with IBM in bringing the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to their next-generation systems.

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15 Marks End of Short-Term Support

  Red Hat OpenStack Platform 15 is the last release that will only be supported for a year, as the company moves to a new model to support the open-source cloud platform.

• Fedora rawhide – fixed bugs 2019/07