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November 2019

Android Leftovers

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 10:37:50 PM Filed under
Android
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Android Leftovers

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 07:28:32 PM Filed under
Android
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Proprietary Software and Digital Jails

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 05:26:39 PM Filed under
Hardware
Software
  • checkra1n on Linux nearing release, Apple TV DFU helper coming too

    Despite being a closed ecosystem, iDevice users enjoy an advanced level of control over the OS through jailbreaking. But, not many opt for it because the Cupertino tech giant denies warranty claims for jailbroken gadgets.

    Moreover, one has to choose the jailbreaking tool so carefully that an incompatible selection will make your iPhone/iPad a fiasco. Owing to the frequent vulnerability fixes released by Apple, we can’t use a single tool for every iOS iteration.

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  • Jony Ive is no longer on Apple's leadership page

                         

                           

    His new firm is called LoveForm, which sounds an awful lot like LoveFilm - right down to the fact that both will score you 16 in a Scrabble match, assuming you're competing without someone that plays fast and loose with the ‘no brand names' rule. That's where the similarities end though: it's more focused on design than posting DVDs to people.

                           

    Unlike most people starting their own business, Ive won't have to hustle for new clients right away. Apple led the press release announcing Ive's exit by saying it would be one of LoveForm's clients, which is kind of like writing a blank cheque. But, hey, if anybody can write a blank cheque and not worry about the consequences then it's Cook & Co.

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  • Security firm Prosegur hit by Windows Ryuk ransomware

                         

                           

    Well-known British security researcher Kevin Beaumont was one of the first to point to a statement on on the Spain-based company's website in which it said that there had been "a security information incident on its telecommunications platforms".

                           

    Prosegur is the largest security firm in Spain and listed on Madrid Stock Exchange in 1987.

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Entrapment in Microsoft GitHub

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 05:25:20 PM Filed under
Microsoft
  • Alibaba Cloud makes available its self-developed algorithm via open source on Github [Ed: Outsourcing one's code to a proprietary spying and censorship platform of a foreign firm and foreign regime]

    Launched in 2009 and headquartered in Singapore, the cloud subsidiary of Alibaba Group offers cloud computing services to enterprises.

  • Alibaba Publishes AI Algorithms on Github [Ed: Alibaba gives its code to Microsoft to further facilitate surveillance]
  • GitHub Seeks Security Dominance With Developers [Ed: GitHub is proprietary software in NSA PRISM, so assume back doors. Ignore these Forbes puff pieces of Microsoft (lots of them).]
  • Rav1e Picks Up More Speed Optimizations For Rust-Written AV1 Encoding [Ed: Still stuck inside GitHub]

    The Rust-based "rav1e" AV1 video encoder continues picking up performance optimizations. 

    During the month of November we've seen SSE4.1 and various x86 Assembly optimizations, other CPU performance optimizations, and also happening recently was the initial tagged release of rav1e (v0.1). 

  • Daniel Stenberg: curl: 25000 commits [Ed: Unhealthy dependence on GitHub]

    The first ever public release of curl was uploaded on March 20, 1998. 7924 days ago.

    3.15 commits per day on average since inception.

    These 25000 commits have been authored by 751 different persons.

    Through the years, 47 of these 751 authors have ever authored 10 commits or more within a single year. In fact, the largest number of people that did 10 commits or more within a single year is 13 that happened in both 2014 and 2017.

    19 of the 751 authors did ten or more changes in more than one calendar year. 5 of the authors have done ten or more changes during ten or more years.

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Openwashing by Microsoft and the US Air Force

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 05:24:28 PM Filed under
Microsoft
  • Microsoft Teams spurs open source in Aussie channel [Ed: Gross case of openwashing. How on Earth did Microsoft manage to have proprietary software that's mass surveillance inside businesses framed as "open source"?

    Qbot is the brainchild of UNSW senior lecturer David Kellermann. Antares helped bring Qbot to life and, as it is the bot's primary developer, supports the code.

  • US Air Force says they are developing an Open Source Jet Engine

    The Responsive Open Source Engine (ROSE) is designed to be cheap enough that it can be disposable, which has obvious military applications for the Air Force such as small jet-powered drones or even missiles. But even for the pacifists in the audience, it’s hard not to get excited about the idea of a low-cost open source turbine. Obviously an engine this small would have limited use to commercial aviation, but hackers and makers have always been obsessed with small jet engines, and getting one fired up and self-sustaining has traditionally been something of a badge of honor.

    The economies of scale generally dictate that anything produced in large enough numbers will eventually become cheap. But despite the fact that a few thousand of them are tearing across the sky above our heads at any given moment, turbine jet engines are still expensive to produce compared to other forms of propulsion. The United States Air Force Research Laboratory is hoping to change that by developing their own in-house, open source turbine engine that they believe could reduce costs by as much as 75%.

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Red Hat, IBM and SUSE

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 05:22:15 PM Filed under
Red Hat
SUSE
  • Raytheon Leans on Red Hat to Advance DevSecOps

    Jon Check, senior director for cyber protection solutions for Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, said Raytheon has developed a set of DevSecOps practices for organizations building applications deployed in highly secure environments, involving government contracts.

    Raytheon and these customers have been challenged by a chronic shortage of IT professionals with the appropriate level of clearance to work on these classified projects. To overcome that issue, Check said Raytheon developed what it describes as a “code low, deploy high” approach to DevSecOps. Developers who lack security clearances can still build applications; however, those applications can only be deployed by IT professionals having the appropriate security clearance.

    In addition, Check said Raytheon has developed integrations between its DevSecOps framework and various IT tools based on the ITIL framework, which so many IT operations teams depend on to foster collaboration across the application development and deployment process. For example, he said, whenever code gets checked into a repository, an alert can be sent to an IT service management application from ServiceNow.

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  • [Older] IBM: ‘Mac users are happier and more productive’ [iophk: duh]

                         

                           

    IBM CIO Fletcher Previn talked up fresh IBM findings that show those of its employees who use Macs are more likely to stay with IBM and exceed performance expectations compared to [Windows] users.

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  • [Older] IBM: Mac users perform better at work and close larger high-value sales compared to [Windows] users

                         

                           

    Today, IBM announced some major news showing the benefits of using a Mac over a [Windows machine] at work. According to IBM research, there are 22% more macOS users who exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. High-value sales deals also tend to be 16% higher for Mac users compared to [Windows] users.

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  • [Older] IBM: Our Mac-Using Employees Outperform Windows Users in Every Way

                         

                           

    According to IBM, one staff member can support 5,400 Mac users, while the company needed one staff member per 242 [Windows] users. Only 5 percent of Mac users called the help desk for assistance, compared with 40 percent of [Windows] users. This Mac-IBM love affair has been ongoing for a few years, and the same IBM PR points out that in 2016, IBM CIO Fletcher Previn declared that IBM saves anywhere from $273 to $543 when its end users choose Mac over [Windows].

  • Centiq receives highest SUSE Solution Partner certification to bolster best-in-class enterprise cloud application migration and implementation expertise for SAP projects
  • Noop now named none

    Lately more and more people approached me with saptune warnings regarding ‘noop’ being an invalid scheduler.
    With new Servie Packs we see a transition from non-multiqueue schedulers (noop, cfq, deadline) to multiqueue schedulers (none, mq-deadline, bfq, kyber).
    This transition will be finished with kernel 5.x (SLES 15 SP2). Only multiqueue schedulers will remain.
    Even if you do not have upgraded lately, new hardware like NVMe’s can come with multiqueue support only.

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Games and Programming: Epic Games, Godot, Haskell and Python

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 05:19:55 PM Filed under
Development
Gaming
  • Epic Games have awarded the FOSS game manager Lutris with an Epic MegaGrant

    The Lutris team announced yesterday that Epic Games have now awarded them a sum of money from the Epic MegaGrants pot.

    In the Patreon post, the Lutris team announced they've been awarded $25,000. While this might be quite a surprise to some, Tim Sweeney the CEO of Epic Games, did actually suggest they apply for it which we covered here back in April. To see it actually happen though, that's seriously awesome for the team building this free and open source game manager.

  • Play-ing with Godot

    I’ve finally come to a point where I have a project that is useful, and at a good enough quality (anyone with graphics skills who wants to help?) to be shared with the broader world: Mattemonster. What I’m trying to say is that I just went through the process of publishing a Godot app to the Google Play store.

    There is already good documentation for how you export a Godot app for Android, and detailed guides how to publish to Google Play. This blog is not a step by step tutorial, but instead mentioning some of the things I learned or noticed.

    First of all, when setting up the Android tooling, you usually have an android-tools package for your distro. This way, you don’t have to install Android Studio provided by Google.

    The configuration settings that you use to export your app goes into the export_presets.cfg file. Once you put the details for your release key in, you should avoid storing this file in a public git, as it contains sensitive data. But even before then, it contains paths that are local to your machine, so I would recommend not storing it in a public git anyway, as it makes merging with others painful.

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  • Haskell
  • Python 3.7.5 : Script install and import python packages.

    This script will try to import Python packages from a list.
    If these packages are not installed then will be installed on system.

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Security: Updates, Ken Thompson's Chess Secret, Healthcare Breaches Spike in October, "Private Internet Access Sold Out!" and Undercover Mode for the Fedora Security Lab

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 04:55:13 PM Filed under
Security
  • Security updates for Friday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (libvpx and vino), Fedora (grub2 and nss), and SUSE (cloud-init, libarchive, libtomcrypt, ncurses, and ucode-intel).

  • Friday Fluff: Chess password cracked after four decades

    A good password paired with strong encryption protects data against unexpected loss. No password is unbreakable, but some can last for quote a long time. After 39 years, recently a few old Unix passwords were cracked. Computer pioneer Ken Thompson had hidden his access behind a chess opening.

  • ThreatList: Healthcare Breaches Spike in October

    October experienced a 44.44 percent month-over-month increase in healthcare data breaches, resulting in 661,830 healthcare records exposed or stolen during the month.

    That’s according to the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights’ monthly report reported via HIPAA Journal. The department said that hospitals and other healthcare organizations reported 52 breaches to HHS during the month. Year-to-date, the total number of breached healthcare records stands at 38 million, affecting 11.64 percent of the population of the United States.

  • Private Internet Access Sold Out! | Choosing A New VPN

    This video goes over the purchase of Private Internet Access and Choosing a new VPN. I also layout the 3 points you NEED when choosing a new VPN.

  • Undercover mode for the Fedora Security Lab

    Every time when there is a new release of Kali Linux it doesn’t take long till people start to ask when a feature or tool will be added to the Fedora Security Lab.

    This time the most asked feature is the “undercover mode”.

    To make it short: Never.

    The reason is that the Fedora Security Lab live media doesn’t need this. We are running Xfce (in the meantime for several years now) with the default Fedora wallpaper and a default theme. It pretty hard to tell (reading impossible if you don’t have the menu open) for a person who only get a quick look at your desktop that you have a lot of specialized tools at your disposal.

    You are even stealthier if you only add the Fedora Security Lab toolset to your default Fedora installation. This make the Fedora Security Lab the perfect tool to perform security-related tasks in an office environment at customer’s sites.

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today's howtos

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 04:52:34 PM Filed under
HowTos
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Debian and Canonical/Ubuntu: Debian's Outreachy Interns, Debian LTS and Mir/Ubuntu Core Promotion

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 30th of November 2019 04:25:28 PM Filed under
Debian
Ubuntu
  • Debian welcomes its new Outreachy interns

    Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we'd like to welcome our new Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from December 2019 to March 2020.

    Anisa Kuci will work on Improving the DebConf fundraising processes, mentored by Karina Ture and Daniel Lange.

    Sakshi Sangwan will work on Packaging GitLab's JS Modules, mentored by Utkarsh Gupta, Sruthi Chandran and Pirate Praveen.

    Congratulations, Anisa and Sakshi! Welcome!

  • Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS/ELTS (November 2019)

    In November 2019, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 15 hours (of 15 hours planned) and on the Debian ELTS project for 5 hours (of 5 hours planned) as a paid contributor.

    For LTS, I, in fact, pulled over 1.7 hours from October, so I realy only did 13.3 hours for LTS in November.

    (This is only half-true, I worked a considerable amount of hours on this libvncserver code bundle audit, but I am just not invoicing all of it).

  • Build smart display devices with Mir: fast to production, secure, open-source

    Mir is a library for writing graphical shells for Linux and similar operating systems. Compared to traditional display servers, it offers numerous benefits that are important for IoT devices: efficiency, speed of development, security, performance, and flexibility. All are required by the devices of today, and even more so for the devices of tomorrow. In this whitepaper we’ll explain how Mir, alongside Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft, lets developers build devices that are ready for the future of IoT, while offering stable, secure and performant solutions to the problems the industry faces today.

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More in Tux Machines

Events: WordPress Livestream, SUSECon, JupyterCon, LibrePlanet

  • Pop-Up Livestream on February 22

    This should be a great way to get to hear from some speakers who have yet to share their knowledge on a global stage. WordPress is enriched by a multitude of experiences and perspectives, and I hope you are as excited as I am to hear new voices from a part of the world that is frequently underrepresented in the WordPress open source project.

  • Get Expert Guided Hands-On Experience at the SUSECON 2020 Pre-Conference Workshops
  • Get Certified During SUSECON 2020
  • JupyterCon 2020 is a go!

    Just over a year ago, Project Jupyter announced it was reevaluating its annual community conference. An advisory committee of volunteers recommended a JupyterCon 2020 emphasizing a focus on access and leadership. We are now thrilled to announce a global Jupyter conference...

  • Announcing JupyterCon 2020

    NumFOCUS is excited to be a part of JupyterCon 2020. JupyterCon will be held August 10 – 14 in Berlin, Germany at the Berlin Conference Center.

  • Hot off the presses: a sneak peek at the LibrePlanet 2020 schedule

    LibrePlanet 2020 is organized by the FSF. Hundreds of people from across the globe will converge to explore this year's theme, "Free the Future." We'll be delving into the threats to user freedom that we've all been reading about every day in the media, as well as the unique role the free software movement plays in solving these problems. In addition to the first keynote we announced last month, Brewster Kahle, LibrePlanet 2020 will feature a panoply of presentations. Our lineup includes some talks we absolutely can't wait to see, and we think you'll feel the same way! You can now dive in to the speakers already confirmed and start planning your itinerary. [...] LibrePlanet 2020 offers lots of opportunities for socializing, too! The annual FSF open house will take place on the evening of Friday, March 13th, at the FSF office. And the LibrePlanet Saturday night party will feature a sparkling new location. As we have in the past, we'll organize a dinner specifically for women, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming attendees, please mail campaigns@fsf.org if you're interested in joining. If you are looking to organize your own dinner or meetup, you can do so using the LibrePlanet wiki 2020 conference social and dinner pages as a central place for communication about this.

Graphics: RADV Vulkan Driver, Intel Codecs and Defects, NVIDIA Firmware

  • RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Option For Zeroing Out Video Memory

    New to Mesa 20.1-devel is a new option for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to enable zeroing out video memory allocations. This isn't a new concept with other graphics drivers offering similar functionality for zeroing out the vRAM either for security reasons or working around pesky game/app issues. For example, RadeonSI OpenGL zeros out the vRAM for Rocket League to workaround buggy behavior with that game. But zeroing out the video memory normally isn't done by default for all allocations due to performance reasons. With the new flag to zero vRAM allocations for the RADV Vulkan driver it was done by Valve's Samuel Pitoiset. In this case he mentions it's in part for "future work."

  • Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics To Support 12-Bit HEVC/VP9 Decode

    We are learning more about the media engine capabilities with the forthcoming Intel "Gen12" (Xe) Tiger Lake graphics. The documentation for Intel's open-source media-driver that exposes VA-API capabilities on the Linux desktop was recently updated. That updated Intel VA-API Media Driver points to Intel Gen12 dropping VP8 video capabilities but expanding when it comes to 12-bit codec support.

  • Intel Sends Out Latest Patches For Mitigating Graphics Flaw On Ivybridge/Haswell

    It has been one month and a few days since Intel first made public the need for graphics driver patching of Gen 7/7.5 graphics for older Ivybridge / Haswell hardware to fix a graphics hardware flaw. That vulnerability also affected the common Intel Gen9 graphics but there the mitigation was uneventful and quickly merged without causing any performance hit. But for Ivybridge/Haswell one month later the graphics driver mitigation for CVE-2019-14615 is still being addressed. This vulnerability is also known as iGPU Leak by the researchers that discovered it but for the Gen7/Gen7.5 protection the mitigation has been particularly problematic. With the initial Gen7/Gen7.5 patches posted in mid-January there was a huge hit to the graphics performance while Intel worked towards no performance loss.

  • NVIDIA Posts Firmware Needed For Open-Source GeForce 16 Series Acceleration

    As written about last week, in the works for the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring is open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" acceleration for the GeForce 16 series. That code is currently sitting in the Nouveau development tree until landing in DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has now posted the necessary firmware binaries needed for enabling the hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.

EasyOS version 2.2.11 released (Easy Buster version 2.2.11)

EasyOS versions 1.x are the "Pyro" series, the latest is 1.3. Easy Pyro is built with packages compiled from source using 'oe-qky-src', a fork of OpenEmbedded. Consequently, the builds are small and streamlined and integrated. The Pyro series may have future releases, but it is considered to be in maintenance status. The "Buster" series start from version 2.0, and are intended to be where most of the action is, ongoing. Version 2.0 was really a beta-quality build, to allow the testers to report back. The first official release was 2.1. The main feature of Easy Buster is that it is built from Debian 10 Buster DEBs, using WoofQ (a fork of Woof2: Woof-CE is another fork, used to build Puppy Linux). The advantage of Buster over Pyro is access to the large Debian package repositories. That is a big plus. Read more More in: EasyOS version 2.2.11 released Also: Working-partition ext4 filesystem shuts down unclean

Games: Dad Quest, Unrailed, SteamWorld, Dying Light, Steam and SGT Puzzles Collection

  • Children are indestructible weapons in 'Dad Quest' - Linux Beta out now

    Possibly one of the quirkiest platformers I've ever come across, Dad Quest is now officially in Beta for Linux on Steam. A story-based platformer, with what developer Sundae Month claim is their own 'unique brand of comedy'. It's set in a world where children are indestructible weapons, ready to be hurled towards enemies. As a parent, I will admit it sounds amusing. According to the description you will teach your child new combat skills using 'a variety of deadly toys'.

  • Hilarious co-op train track building game 'Unrailed!' is now officially on Linux

    After a little while being in Beta, Indoor Astronaut have today released the Linux (and macOS) versions of Unrailed! so they're officially supported.

  • The full SteamWorld series is heading to Google Stadia "soon"

    While they're seemingly not giving an exact date just yet, Thunderful Publishing and Image & Form announced today that multiple SteamWorld titles are heading to Google Stadia.

  • Dying Light gets a massive update with a 'Story Mode' plus a free weekend

    Techland are keeping their baby alive a while longer (especially after delaying Dying Light 2), and it appears they didn't forget it turned 5 last month with a huge update and celebration. Since Dying Light has been out five years they're kicking off a big celebration. It's having a Free Weekend on Steam for the first time! A really good opportunity to see what the fuss is all about and I sure do fuss about it a lot. It really is a great game! One of my absolute favourites.

  • How to use community control schemes in Steam for Linux

    Sick of plugging your gaming controller into your Linux PC, only to find that the game does not have any gamepad controls set up? As it turns out, Steam has a solution for that. Did you know that you can add custom controller layouts for your Steam games on Linux? It’s true! Thanks to Steam’s stellar controller support on Linux, anyone can bind custom controls to their gaming controller! Follow along to learn how to do it on your system!

  • SGT Puzzles Collection 0.2.5 Released

    SGT Puzzles Collection, or simply sgt-launcher, is a game launcher and wrapper for Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection, a popular collection of logic games by the developer of PuTTY. Joining the Xubuntu package set way back in Xubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark", SGT Puzzles Collection has quietly provided Xubuntu users with a variety of distracting games for several releases. If you want to learn more about the project, check out my introductory blog post.

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