foss-north 2019: Training Day

The 2019 incarnation of foss-north is less than a month away. This year we’re extending the conference in two directions: a training day and a community day. This time, I wanted to write about the training day. The training day, April 10, is an additional day for those who want to extend the conference with a day of dedicated training. I’m very happy to have two experienced and well known trainers on side: Michael Kerrisk and Chris Simmonds. Both has years of training experience. Michael will teach about the details in dynamic linking. The topic may seem trivial, but when you start scratching the surface, there are a lot of details to discover such as how to handle version compatibility, how symbol resolution really works, and so on. You can read more about the Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux training here.

Your guide to LibrePlanet 2019, March 23-24!

Are you planning on joining us for LibrePlanet 2019, coming up this weekend, March 23-24, at the Stata Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)? If you haven't registered yet, there's still time -- registration is open through Tuesday, March 19 at 10:00 EDT, and we also welcome walk-ins (space permitting)! Remember, students and Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate members get in gratis. We also hope you'll join us for the Friday night open house at the FSF office, here in Boston -- you can pick up your badge early to skip the line Saturday morning (more details below).

Will this new openness to open source heed past lessons?

 

We set out to demonstrate how open source could work in the NHS for both vendors and users, and to dispel many of the myths that existed about open source. We created the NHS Open Source Foundation (now The Apperta Foundation), a not-for-profit designed to act as a custodian for quality assured NHS open source software, adapting the model developed by OSERA in the US for VistA.  

We identified a number of issues which we worked hard to address.

France’s economic council wants a greater European role for free software

 

The European Union should encourage the use of free software, for example by setting quotas in public procurement and financing its development, says France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Conseil économique, social et environnemental, or CESE). The constitutional consultative assembly sees free software, sharing and reuse as strategic parts of the European digital culture.

Release of Opinion Paper on Open Source and FRAND by OFA Fellow Simon Phipps

The question if Open Source Software can be combined with a FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) regime is often at the centre of the debate. Possibly, this question though is not the deciding one, as such a legal compatibility would require that Open Source developers would collaborate under such a regime.

OpenForum Europe is very excited to publish the Opinion Paper by OFA Fellow and President of the Open Source Initiative, Simon Phipps. In this paper Simon posits that the core issue of Open Source Software and FRAND is not a legal one, but that Open Source developers will not collaborate under a FRAND regime.

How To Set Up a Firewall with GUFW on Linux

How to Encrypt Replication Traffic in MariaDB Galera Cluster on Ubuntu

How To Control Android Smartphone From Linux

How to create a new application with Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes launcher

Of debugging Ansible Tower and underlying cloud images

Why You Need DevOps and the Cloud

Security updates for Tuesday

US Huawei Blackballing Efforts Stall Due To Lack Of 'Actual Facts'

During the Trump era, the US government has dramatically ramped up claims that Chinese hardware vendor Huawei is a nefarious spy for the Chinese government, blackballing it from the U.S. telecom market. From pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones to the FCC's decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies, this effort hasn't been subtle. While Huawei should never be confused with a saint (what telecom company would be?) there's several problems with the effort. The biggest being that despite a decade of hand-wringing and one eighteen month investigation by the US government, there's still no public evidence Huawei uses its network gear to spy on Americans. That's not sitting well with countries we've asked to join along in the fun.

Sorry, Linux. We know you want to be popular, but cyber-crooks are all about Microsoft for now

Eight out of the ten most exploited vulnerabilities tracked by threat intelligence biz Recorded Future in 2018 targeted Microsoft products – though number two on its list was, surprise surprise, a Flash flaw. The most exploited vuln in the firm's hall of shame was a remote code execution flaw in Windows' VBScript engine that could pwn users who opened a booby-trapped web page with Internet Explorer. "Exploit kits associated with this vulnerability were noted to spread the malware Trickbot through phishing attacks," said Recorded Future in a report published today. The Flash vuln was none other than one exploited by North Korean state-backed hackers – first detected by South Korea's CERT, which discovered a flood of booby-trapped MS Office documents, web pages, spam messages and more.

NVIDIA Shows Off Quake II Path-Traced Using Vulkan RTX/Ray-Tracing

ne of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs. Q2VKPT is a path-traced version of Quake II started by a former NVIDIA intern and is rendered using Vulkan and does support Linux.

Orbital: A PlayStation 4 Emulator That Is Emulating The PS4's AMD GPU Using Vulkan

Orbital is an open-source project providing a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator that is still in its early stages but what interests us is its technical details including the use of Vulkan/SPIR-V. Orbital leverages QEMU and other open-source components. At this stage it's not running any PS4 games but is able to boot into safe mode on PS4 5.xx kernels.

Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead, a free and open source turn-based survival game had a huge update

It occurred to me today, that no one here at GOL seems to have ever written about the free and open source turn-based survival game Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. Okay, so what is it? A classic roguelike with a survival theme, set in a post-apocalyptic procedurally generated world.

System Shock 3 may see Linux support, OtherSide still working on Underworld Ascendant for Linux

OtherSide Entertainment have teased out a new short video of System Shock 3 and it may see Linux support. Not to be confused with the crowdfunded System Shock reboot that Nightdive Studios are currently working on. System Shock 3 is being made with some of the original team behind the first two games as well like Warren Spector, so it should remain faithful to the series while being a rather nice upgrade in visuals.