cairo release 1.16.0 now available

After four years of development since 1.14.0, version 1.16.0 of the cairo 2D graphics library has been released.

Cairo 1.16 Released With OpenGL ES 3.0 Support, Colored Emojis

It's been four years since the debut of the Cairo 1.14 stable series and today that has been succeeded by Cairo 1.16. Cairo, as a reminder, is the vector graphics library for 2D drawing and supports back-ends ranging from OpenGL to PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG outputs. Cairo is used by the likes of the GTK+ tool-kit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, Gnuplot, Poppler, and many other open-source projects.

Open source MDM offers flexibility, with challenges

Open source platforms may require more effort from IT than commercial products do, but they can also address an organization's specific requirements -- if the company is willing to invest in the necessary resources. The open source mobile device management (MDM) market is very limited, but there are a few options. If organizations determine that an open source platform is worth the effort, then they can weigh a few different options for open source MDM tools.

Three-Year Moziversary

Another year at Mozilla. They certainly don’t slow down the more you have of them. For once a year of stability, organization-wise. The two biggest team changes were the addition of Jan-Erik back on March 1, and the loss of our traditional team name “Browser Measurement II” for a more punchy and descriptive “Firefox Telemetry Team.”

Citus Data donates 1% equity to non-profit PostgreSQL orgs

There’s open source and there’s open source. There’s genuine free and open source software (FOSS) and then there’s largely locked down proprietary non-dynamic library open source that is generally supplied as a commercially supported version of an open source kernel base that doesn’t see whole lot of real world code commits — and, no, there’s no acronym for that. Then, there’s other ways of evidencing real open openness such as non-technical contributions (could be language translation/localisation etc.) and then there’s plain old contributions. Scale-out Postgres database technologies ​​​​Citus Data is donating 1 percent of its equity to non-profit PostgreSQL organisations in the US and Europe.

Pagely NorthStack Makes WordPress Serverless

WordPress is getting the serverless treatment, thanks to a new effort from managed WordPress hosting provider Pagely. The new NorthStack platform disaggregates the usual stack that WordPress requires into a series of services that largely run on serverless infrastructure at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The NorthStack effort is an attempt to lower the fixed costs and infrastructure needed to deploy and run WordPress. "WordPress itself is based on 12-year-old code. It does not want to be in a serverless environment," Joshua Strebel, CEO of Pagely, told eWEEK. "WordPress wants to live on one AWS EC2 node up next to its database with everything all contained in it."

Why Open Source Healthcare is Vital for Innovation

Dana Lewis’ story is far from being a rarity. The diabetes industry is one of the worst offenders for overcharging or price gouging medication and equipment for patients. This is leading many individuals to take the same path as Dana Lewis. Open source platforms like OpenAPS, GitHub pages, and social media offer DIYers step-by-step instructions on how to build their own artificial pancreas tools. Kate Farnsworth built a DIY monitor device that keeps blood sugar levels of her diabetic daughter in constant check This tool, that has dramatically improved the life of a 15-year-old Sydney, cost her mom just $250.

The EU has approved Microsoft’s $7.5 billion GitHub acquisition

 

Microsoft’s upcoming $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub has cleared another major hurdle: the EU has approved the deal after determining that there are no antitrust concerns in Microsoft buying the popular open-source software repository, via the Financial Times.  

EU watchdog waves through Microsoft's GitHub takeover

 

The EC noted that, in making its decision, it probed whether Microsoft would leverage the popularity of GitHut to boost sales of its own DevOps tools and cloud services, and looked into whether Microsoft would have the ability and incentive to further integrate its own DevOps tools and cloud services with GitHub while limiting integration with third parties' DevOps tools and cloud services.

Microsoft’s $7.5BN GitHub buy gets green-lit by EU regulators

 

The Commission decided Microsoft would have no incentive to undermine the GitHub’s openness — saying any attempt to do so would reduce its value for developers, who the Commission judged as willing and able to switch to other platforms.

EU clears Microsoft acquisition of GitHub

Doing your civic duty one line of code at a time

When it comes to doing our civic duty in today's technologically driven world, there is a perception that we don't care like older generations did. History teaches us that in the early 20th century's New Deal, Americans stepped up to the nation's challenges on a wide range of government-financed public works projects. Airport construction. Infrastructure improvements. Building dams, bridges, hospitals. This was more than just individuals "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" but, by design, performing incredible civic duties. Quite an amazing feat when you think about it.

U.S. CMS says 75,000 individuals' files accessed in data breach

CMS Responding to Suspicious Activity in Agent and Broker Exchanges Portal

At this time, we believe that approximately 75,000 individuals’ files were accessed. While this is a small fraction of consumer records present on the FFE, any breach of our system is unacceptable.

New Security Woes for Popular IoT Protocols

Researchers at Black Hat Europe will detail denial-of-service and other flaws in MQTT, CoAP machine-to-machine communications protocols that imperil industrial and other IoT networks online. Security researcher Federico Maggi had been collecting data – some of it sensitive in nature – from hundreds of thousands of Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) servers he found sitting wide open on the public Internet via Shodan. "I would probe them and listen for 10 seconds or so, and just collect data from them," he says. He found data on sensors and other devices sitting in manufacturing and automotive networks, for instance, as well as typical consumer Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets. The majority of data, Maggi says, came from consumer devices and sensors or was data he couldn’t identify. "There was a good amount of data from factories, and I was able to find data coming from pretty expensive industrial machines, including a robot," he says.

FreeBSD 12.0-BETA1 Now Available

The first BETA build of the 12.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

FreeBSD 12.0 Now Available In Beta Form

After a series of alpha releases, FreeBSD 12.0 Beta 1 was issued today to help encourage testing ahead of this operating system update due out in early December.

Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible

XRGEARS: Infamous "Gears" Now On VR Headsets With OpenHMD, Vulkan

Well, the virtual reality (VR) demo scene is now complete with having glxgears-inspired gears and Utah teapot rendering on VR head mounted displays with the new XRGEARS. Kidding aside about the gears and teapot, XRGEARS is a nifty new open-source project with real value by Collabora developer Lubosz Sarnecki. XRGEARS is a standalone VR demo application built using the OpenHMD initiative for tracking and Vulkan for rendering. XRGEARS supports both Wayland and X11 environments or even running off KMS itself. This code also makes use of VK_EXT_direct_mode_display with DRM leasing.

Arcan versus Xorg – Approaching Feature Parity

This is the first article out of three in a series where I will go through what I consider to be the relevant Xorg feature set, and compare it, point by point, to how the corresponding solution or category works in Arcan. This article will solely focus on the Display Server set of features and how they relate to Xorg features, The second article will cover the features that are currently missing (e.g. network transparency) when they have been accounted for. The third article will cover the features that are already present in Arcan (and there are quite a few of those) but does not exist in Xorg.

Arcan Display Server Is Nearing Feature Parity With The X.Org Server

The Arcan display server, which started off years ago sounding like a novelty with being a display server built off a game engine in part and other interesting features, is nearing feature parity with the X.Org Server. While most hobbyist display server projects have failed, Arcan has continued advancing and with an interesting feature set. Recently they have even been working on a virtual reality desktop and an interesting desktop in general. Arcan is getting close to being able to offering the same functionality as a traditional X.Org Server. If you are interested in a lengthy technical read about the differences between Arcan and X.Org, the Arcan developers themselves did some comparing and contrasting when it comes to the display support, windowing, input, font management, synchronization, and other areas.