Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/426

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Show Notes: linuxactionnews.com/209

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Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/370

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Show Notes/Links: linuxunplugged.com/272

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LG Announces webOS Open-Source Edition

LG in cooperation with South Korea’s NIPA government agency are working on making webOS suitable as a more open platform with open connectivity. They are still looking to commercialize it as an open-source platform, LG announced this morning.

GNOME 3.28 Release Notes

GNOME 3.28 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 25832 changes, made by approximately 838 contributors.

• Bolt Will Tackle Thunderbolt 3 Security on Linux

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

New Major GStreamer Release

The GStreamer team is proud to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

Firefox 59 released, these are the key changes

Performance enhancements to the Firefox Home page mean it should now load quicker than before. The speed up comes by leveraging cache files.

Off-Main-Thread Painting – https://t.co/3MllKmqOaO

On Linux it has to be enabled manually: set “layers.omtp.enabled” to true.

— Adam Brodziak (@AdamBrodziak) March 19, 2018

Private Internet Access goes Open Source

Today marks the start of an exciting shift over here at Private Internet Access. As long-time supporters of the Free and Open Source Software community, we have started the process of open sourcing our software, and over the next six months we will be releasing the source code for all our client-side applications, as well as libraries and extensions.

DigitalOcean

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OpenSnitch

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall.

Spotifyd: A spotify daemon

An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight, and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol, which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.

Spotifyd requires a Spotify Premium account.

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

  SCaLE16x Report

• Ilan Rabinovitch (@irabinovitch) | Twitter

VP, Product & Technical Community at @datadoghq, recovering SysAdmin, SCALE Conference Chair, and other FL/OSS fun.

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Follow Up / Catch Up

Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha is released, with support for next-gen onion services and KIST scheduler

Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha is the first release in the 0.3.2.x series. It includes support for our next-generation (“v3”) onion service protocol, and adds a new circuit scheduler for more responsive forwarding decisions from relays. There are also numerous other small features and bugfixes here.

Introducing Keybase Teams

But Keybase teamwork is end-to-end encrypted, which means you don’t have to worry about server hacks

An open letter to the W3C Director, CEO, team and membership | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Firefox, Thunderbird and VLC Are the Most Popular Apps Among Ubuntu Users

Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland attended this year’s UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu users and developers in Paris, France, where he revealed the results of the Ubuntu desktop survey and the apps that users want to see by default in future Ubuntu releases.

Dustin Shares Software Survey Results for the First time

Linux Academy

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Launching PipeWire!

Pipewire, the linux multimedia gamechanger, is here! – https://t.co/ayXhrCF6eu

— Christian Schaller (@Uraeus2) September 19, 2017

We are finally ready to formally launch pipewire as a project and have created a Pipewire website and logo.

• Wim Taymans (@wtaymans) | Twitter

Wim Taymans

DigitalOcean

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Linux “Journalism” is in a Nose Dive

More than ever I believe very deeply that Linux “journalism” is in a nose dive of quality. Fewer and fewer “reporters” are going to the story or creating anything new, and instead have chosen the easy and lazy route of clickbait, virtue signaling journalism. It’s a well proven business model after all, and saves quite a bit of time.

ACCESS TO THE BATCAVE VIA BATPOLES#AdamWestDay pic.twitter.com/kaaoyIzjpr

— Batman 66 Labels (@BatLabels) September 19, 2017

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Linux Foundation Head Calls 2017 ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’… While Running Apple’s macOS Himself

Sitting on a plane, watching Jim Zemlin use OS X.

— Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) July 23, 2013

Perhaps I am creating unnecessary controversy. Perhaps this simply should be ignored.

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Episode Links

• Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017 — We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline. The result is 3% CPU usage to play an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell. 4K h265 HEVC is also playable but requires a Skylake or later processor.
• 2017 Linux Laptop Survey — So we’ve established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties — this survey isn’t just for our own benefit and enjoyment at Phoronix.
• Jolla Summer 2017: CEO’s Update — It has been a while since our last update about the remaining Jolla Tablet refunds — we are committed to it and we will be progressing on it in a pace our financial situation permits us to do. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
• Mozilla launches Firefox Focus for Android — Like the iPhone and iPad version, the Android app is free of tabs and other visual clutter, and erasing your sessions is as easy as a simple tap.  
• Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView — Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView. Barbara Bermes, product manager for Firefox Mobile at Mozilla, told eWEEK.
• Project Common Voice — Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
• Opus 1.2 — Speech quality improvements especially in the 12-20 kbit/s range
• Improved VBR encoding for hybrid mode
• More aggressive use of wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s
• Music quality improvements in the 32-48 kb/s range
• Generic and SSE CELT optimizations
• Support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms
• DTX support for CELT mode
• SILK CBR improvements
• Support for all of the fixes in draft-ietf-codec-opus-update-06 (the mono downmix and the folding fixes need –enable-update-draft)
• Many bug fixes, including integer wrap-arounds discovered through fuzzing (no security implications)
• Comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 — Here’s a comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 so you can hear for yourself how the quality has improved and how Opus now sounds in general. As an anchor (OK, and also to make us look good!), we’ve also included MP3 samples.

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Follow Up / Catch Up

Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 computer with WiFi and Bluetooth

In the case of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, the W signifies exactly what is new: wireless connectivity. It boasts exactly the same specifications (1GHz single-core Broadcom BCM2835 CPU, 512MB of RAM, 40-pin header) as its predecessor but the Zero W adds both 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 to the existing Zero design.

• New product! Raspberry Pi Zero W joins the family – Raspberry Pi

To recap, here’s the full feature list for Zero W:

• 1GHz, single-core CPU
• 512MB RAM
• Mini-HDMI port
• Micro-USB On-The-Go port
• Micro-USB power
• HAT-compatible 40-pin header
• Composite video and reset headers
• CSI camera connector
• 802.11n wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 4.0

Mozilla acquires Pocket to gain a foothold on mobile devices

The nine-year-old company, which makes tools for saving articles and videos to view them later, is Mozilla’s first acquisition. It represents a homecoming of sorts for Pocket, which began life as a Firefox extension before eventually expanding its team and building a suite of apps for every major platform. Pocket has been Firefox’s default read-it-later service since 2015.

AMD’s Ryzen Will Really Like A Newer Linux Kernel

So with Linux 4.10 looks to be — and reaffirmed by this trusted confidant — a good point for AMD Ryzen testing and usage. So far in the Linux 4.11 cycle we haven’t seen anything Ryzen-specific appear to come through.

#Ryzen will work best with #Linux 4.10 and later. In other words… #ARCH pic.twitter.com/KARy0RjhIg

— Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) February 27, 2017

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Do we really need swap on modern systems?

• Do we really need swap on modern systems?

Can I run without swap? Is further tuning possible?

Systems without swap can make sense and are supported by Red Hat – just be sure the behaviour of such a system under memory pressure is what you want. In most environments, a bit of swap makes sense.

• /proc/meminfo Committed_AS field shows how much memory processes have requested.
• Using sysctl, we can enable/disable overcommit, and configure how much overcommit should be allowed. The defaults need to be changed only in rare cases, and after properly testing the new settings. The RHEL Performance Tuning Guide has details.
• A solution document with details regarding the likeliness of swapping – for example in changing vm.swappiness. This also requires good testing with your applications.
• Without swap, the system will call the OOM when the memory is exhausted. You can prioritize which processes get killed first in configuring oom_adj_score.
• If you write an application, want to lock pages into RAM and prevent them from getting swapped, mlock() can be used.
• If you design your applications to regularly use swap, make sure to use faster devices, like SSD – starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, ‘swapon –discard’ can be used to send TRIM to SSD devices, to discard the device contents on swapon. *

The Storage Administration Guide has also a section on swap configuration.

Linux Update Fixes 11-Year-Old Flaw

Andrey Konovalov, a security researcher at Google, found a use-after-free hole within Linux, CSO Online reported. This particular flaw is of interest because it appears to be situational. It only showed up in kernels built with a certain configuration option — CONFIG_IP_DCCP — enabled.

Unfortunately, many popular Linux distributions have enabled this option by default. A new Linux update has since patched the vulnerability, although the exploit has been present in Linux kernels since 2005.

Telegram is no longer open source :: lucb1e.com

Telegram for Android is now a closed source application. According to the repository and the Telegram website, it is covered by the GPL license which states one must publish changes. However, since early October 2016, there have been many releases but no updates of the source code. Everyone involved is pretending there is no issue because they have their fingers in their ears:

• the original author did not respond to the criticism for months;
• Telegram’s chat support does not respond in over a week;
• Telegram’s Twitter account is active (30 minutes ago) but ignores my tweet of a week ago;
• Markus Ra (the face of Telegram) does not respond in over a week; and

• Telegram has no other, official contact method nor a physical mail address.

• telegram-history-dump: Backup Telegram chat logs using telegram-cli

This utility is the successor of telegram-json-backup, written from the
ground up in Ruby. It can create backups of your Telegram user and (super)group
dialogs using telegram-cli’s remote control feature.

Compared to the old project, telegram-history-dump:

• Has better support for media downloads
• Supports output formats other than JSON and is extensible with custom formats
• Supports incremental backup (only new messages are downloaded)
• Does not depend on unstable Python/Lua bindings within telegram-cli
• Has a separate YAML formatted configuration file

The default configuration will backup all dialogs to a directory named output in JSON format, without downloading any media.

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Internet-Connected Teddy Bear Leaks Millions Of Voice Messages and Password

Now, in the latest security failing of the internet-connected smart toys, more than 2 Million voice recordings of children and their parents have been exposed, along with email addresses and passwords for over 820,000 user accounts.

• Troy Hunt: Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids’ voice messages

CloudPets has absolutely no password strength rules. When I say “no rules”, I mean you can literally have a password of “a”. That’s right, just a single character. Not only that, check out how the tutorial demonstrates account creation and particular, how to choose a password:

DigitalOcean

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gstreamer 0.10 moved to AUR

yaourt -R gstreamer0.10 gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-bad gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins gstreamer0.10-base gstreamer0.10-base-plugins gstreamer0.10-good gstreamer0.10-good-plugins gstreamer0.10-ugly gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins

• gstreamer0.10 packages moved to AUR | Antergos Community Forum

gstreamer0.10 was maintained because of legacy software. Now that most of all audio/video software can be compiled against current gstreamer, gstreamer0.10 has no use.

• AUR gstreamer packages broke : archlinux

The packages not updating are the gstreamer0.10, not the gstreamer1.10 ones.

• Gstreamer Cheat Sheet
• Gstreamer Application Development

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Google is rebuilding some of its biggest products & services for kids under 13, Intel & Samsung feel the open source love. We’ll dig into major contributions both companies are making & their future commitments.

Plus Dropbox makes a play for business lock-in & much more!

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Intel reinvents Stephen Hawking’s voice systems and will open source the software – IT News from V3.co.uk

Intel has reinvented the speech and text communication systems used by Professor Stephen Hawking, and plans to release the software as an open source project in 2015.

The Assistive Context Aware Toolkit has helped to double Hawking’s speech and text input times, and make it up to 10 times faster for him to open files, switch between applications and browse the web.

Hawking said at an event attended by V3 that the Intel developments are “life-changing” for him.

“The Intel team and I have been working for three years on upgrading my communication systems. My old system is more than 20 years old and I find it very difficult to communicative effectively and do the things I love to do.

“With the improvement I am now able to write much faster and I can continue to give lectures, write papers and books and speak with friends and family more easily.

“This new system is life-changing for me and I hope it will serve me well for the next 20 years.”

Intel began work on the project three years ago when Hawking contacted the firm’s founder, Gordon Moore, to ask for help in impro

One major improvement is a new system making it far easier for Hawking to access files, as ‎Lama Nachman, principal engineer and manager of the Anticipatory Computing Lab at Intel Labs, explained.

One aspect of the system that has not changed is the voice, which has become synonymous with Hawking. “He was actually adamant about us not changing his voice,” said Nachman.

The new software will be made open source next year, but Swiftkey said that its involvement in the project will not be included as the technology is too similar to its core product.

Google to launch kid-friendly versions of Chrome, YouTube, others in 2015 | Ars Technica

Google is currently working on versions of products like Chrome and YouTube tailored specifically for kids under the age of 13, according to a report from USA Today. Pavni Diwanji, a VP of engineering at Google, says that the new products are due at some point next year and that they are intended to help children “be more than just pure consumers of tech, but creators, too.”

It’s not clear how these under-13 products will work, but they may change the way they look or the kinds of data they present.

In the US, one of the biggest considerations when designing online products and services for kids is the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. It dictates how information can be collected from and presented to kids under the age of 13—changes to the law effective in July of 2013 include multiple stipulations related to privacy policies, parental oversight, and security requirements for data collected from young children. Since the vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising and the value of the company’s ads is tied to its trove of user data, COPPA compliance will obviously be important to users and Google alike (Yelp was fined $450,000 earlier this year for COPPA violations).

Dropbox eyes Google and Box with launch of Business API- The Inquirer

**DROPBOX HAS ANNOUNCED **an API for third parties wishing to develop and integrate apps to work alongside its business service.

The move is designed to appeal to users of proprietary office systems.

The API launched with 20 partner organisations including Microsoft and IBM.

It will allow Dropbox for Business apps to use some of the more advanced features not available on the free service, and will also integrate with existing enterprise security systems.

But given Dropbox’s colourful history with regards to safety, what does the company which Edward Snowden described as “hostile to privacy” do to win hearts and minds?

George O’Brien, product manager for Dropbox for Business, told The INQUIRER: “Dropbox for Business is a security first product.”

Stop laughing and nobody mention Condeleezza.

He added: “We encrypt data as it travels through the API. Only a Dropbox for Business system administrator can install a Dropbox for Business API app. We’re very aggressive about who has control over the API and who has access to it.

Samsung’s Open Source Group Is Growing, Hiring Developers – Slashdot

Almost two years ago, Samsung’s open source team was just one person: Linux and FOSS advocate Ibrahim Haddad, head of the open source group at Samsung Research America. The new Open Source Innovation Group at Samsung is now 40 people strong, including 30 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and shepherding open source development into the company. The group is hiring aggressively and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years. Their first targets are project maintainers and key contributors to 23 open source projects that are integral to Samsung’s products, including Linux, Gstreamer, FFmpeg, Blink, Webkit, EFL, and Wayland. They plan to eventually start hiring more junior open source developers as well. Just about every Samsung product, from phones and tablets to home appliances, uses open source software, said Guy Martin, senior open source strategist at Samsung. Martin also mentions the importance of funding: “You already see this in the Linux kernel, where most people who contribute are paid to contribute. And you’ll see that more and more.”

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