Android Leftovers

• Motorola rolling out Android 9.0 Pie to Australian moto g6 phones

• Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) Starts Receiving Android Pie Update in India, With February Patch: Report

• Xiaomi Mi A1 gets support for LineageOS 16 based on Android Pie

• Google to be hit with new fines as it prompts Android users to choose browsers

• The new Blackview A60 is an Android Go phone with a big 4080 mAh battery

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ First Impressions

I have always been curious about the tiny computer called Raspberry Pi but I didn’t have the time or opportunity to buy one until now. I got the latest version (Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+) along with bundled accessories from AliExpress for $65. I think it was a good deal considering what I got which I will explain to you later on. But before that and for your convenience, here are some quick facts about Raspberry Pi that I got from Wikipedia...

GNOME Desktop: Parental Controls and More

• Parental controls & metered data hackfest: days 1 & 2

  I’m currently at the Parental Controls & Metered Data hackfest at Red Hat’s office in London. A bunch of GNOME people from various companies (Canonical, Endless, elementary, and Red Hat) have gathered to work out a plan to start implementing these two features in GNOME. The first two days have been dedicated to the parental control features. This is the ability for parents to control what children can do on the computer. For example, locking down access to certain applications or websites. Day one began with presentations of the Endless OS implementation by Philip, followed by a demonstration of the Elementary version by Cassidy. Elementary were interested in potentially expanding this feature set to include something like Digital Wellbeing – we explored the distinction between this and parental controls. It turns out that these features are relatively similar – the main differences are whether you are applying restrictions to yourself or to someone else, and whether you have the ability to lift/ignore the restrictions. We’ve started talking about the latter of these as “speed bumps”: you can always undo your own restrictions, so the interventions from the OS should be intended to nudge you towards the right behaviour. After that we looked at some prior art (Android, iOS), and started to take the large list of potential features (in the image above) down to the ones we thought might be feasible to implement. Throughout all of this, one topic we kept coming back to was app lockdown. It’s reasonably simple to see how this could be applied to containerised apps (e.g. Snap or Flatpak), but system applications that come from a deb or an rpm are much more difficult. It would probably be possible – but still difficult – to use an LSM like AppArmor or SELinux to do this by denying execute access to the application’s binary. One obvious problem with that is that GNOME doesn’t require one of these and different distributions have made different choices here… Another tricky topic is how to implement website white/blacklisting in a robust way. We discussed using DNS (systemd-resolved?) and ip/nftables implementations, but it might turn out that the most feasible way is to use a browser extension for this.

• GNOME ED Update – February

  Another update is now due from what we’ve been doing at the Foundation, and we’ve been busy! As you may have seen, we’ve hired three excellent people over the past couple of months. Kristi Progri has joined us as Program Coordinator, Bartłomiej Piorski as a devops sysadmin, and Emmanuele Bassi as our GTK Core developer. I hope to announce another new hire soon, so watch this space… There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Google API access, and GNOME Online Accounts. The latest update is that I submitted the application to Google to get GOA verified, and we’ve got a couple of things we’re working through to get this sorted.

Android Leftovers

• Top 5 trending games on Android this week (March 10-16)

• The 7 Best Android TV Launcher Apps

• Manage Your Android Notifications with These Tips and Tricks

• Imagination delivers new and enhanced developer tools for Android

• Galaxy A8+ (2018) Android Pie update rolling out in India

• Samsung Galaxy A8+ (2018) Android Pie update rollout expands

• Google to prompt Android users to choose preferred browsers to allay EU concerns

• Google to prompt Android users to choose browsers, search apps

• Here are all the enterprise features in the Android Q beta

• Source: The Motorola One Vision is an Android One phone with the Exynos 9610