That’s why Proton is one of the biggest developments in the history of gaming on Linux. Proton is a tool developed by Valve to allow Steam users to run Windows-exclusive games under Linux. That decades-old PC game you have lying around your Steam library? You can get it up and running on Linux. Want to play more recent, critically acclaimed titles like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice? No problem – it runs on Linux. If you do most of your gaming through Steam, Proton lets you switch to Linux and still play the vast majority of your library with minimal issues. Who needs developers supporting Linux when you have Valve and Proton?

RAK Wireless’ $99 “RAK7246 LoRAWAN Developer Gateway” runs a Raspbian LoRa stack on a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a RAK2246 Pi HAT for 8x uplink channels and a single downlink. A $114 RAK7246G model adds GPS.

RAK Wireless has introduced a cheaper alternative to its Raspberry Pi 4-based RAK7244 LoRaWAN Developer Gateway. The RAK7246 LoRAWAN Developer Gateway, which runs on a WiFi/BT enabled Raspberry Pi Zero W, sells for only $99 model or $114 for a RAK7246G model that is identical except for adding a Ublox MAX-7Q GPS module and a GPS antenna.

• TurboTax Is Still Tricking Customers With Tax Prep Ads That Misuse the Word “Free”

  On Dec. 30, the IRS announced it was revamping a long-standing agreement with the online tax preparation industry in which companies offer free filing to people with incomes below certain levels, a category that includes 70% of filers. The change in what’s known as the Free File program came in the wake of multiple ProPublica articles that revealed how the companies in the program steered customers eligible for free filing to their paid offerings. Under the updated agreement, the companies are now prohibited from hiding their Free File webpages from Google searches, and the IRS was allowed to create its own online tax-filing system.

  So far, it seems, the companies are abiding by their promise to make their Free File webpages visible in online searches. But the updated agreement appears to have a loophole: It doesn’t apply to advertising. Nothing in it, the agreement states, “limits or changes the rights” of participating companies to advertise “as if they were not participating in the Free File program.”

• Ransomware Shuts Gas Compressor for 2 Days in Latest Attack [iophk: Windows TCO]

  It appears likely that the attacker explored the facility’s network to “identify critical assets” before executing the ransomware attack, according to Nathan Brubaker, a senior manager at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. This tactic -- which has become increasingly popular among hackers -- makes it “possible for the attacker to disable security processes that would normally be enough to detect known ransomware indicators,” he said.

• Twitter says Olympics, IOC accounts [cracked]

  Twitter (TWTR.N) said on Saturday that an official Twitter account of the Olympics and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) media Twitter account had been [cracked] and temporarily locked.

  The accounts were [cracked] through a third-party platform, a spokesperson for the social media platform said in an emailed statement, without giving further details.

• Olympics, IOC accounts were [cracked], Twitter says

  The social media company Twitter on Saturday said that the official Twitter accounts for the Olympics as well as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have both been [cracked] and temporarily locked.

• Apple warns revenue will be lower than expected because of coronavirus impact

  In a rare investor update on Monday, Apple said the global effects of the coronavirus outbreak are having have a material impact on the company bottom line. The company does not expect to meet its own revenue guidance for the second quarter due to the impact of the virus, and warns that “worldwide iPhone supply will be temporarily constrained.” Store closures and reduced retail traffic in China are also expected to have a significant impact.

  All of Apple’s iPhone manufacturing partner sites have been reopened but are “ramping up more slowly than we had anticipated,” which means that fewer iPhones than expected will be manufactured. As a result, “[t]hese iPhone supply shortages will temporarily affect revenues worldwide,” says Apple.

• We decided to leave AWS

  For past adventures, I mostly use third-party email delivery services like Postmark, SendGrid, SES, etc. Unfortunately their pricing models are based on the number of emails, which are not compatible with the unlimited forwards/sends that SimpleLogin offers. In addition, we want SimpleLogin to be easily self-hosted and its components fit on a single server. For these reasons, we decide to run our MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) on EC2 directly.

• [Old] Kerberos (: How does Kerberos work? – Theory

  The objective of this series of posts is to clarify how Kerberos works, more than just introduce the attacks. This due to the fact that in many occasions it is not clear why some techniques works or not. Having this knowledge allows to know when to use any of those attacks in a pentest.

  Therefore, after a long journey of diving into the documentation and several posts about the topic, we’ve tried to write in this post all the important details which an auditor should know in order to understand how take advantage of Kerberos protocol.

  In this first post only basic functionality will be discussed. In later posts it will see how perform the attacks and how the more complex aspects works, as delegation.

• [Old] Kerberos (II): How to attack Kerberos?

  These attacks are sorted by the privileges needed to perform them, in ascending order. Thus, to perform the first attacks only connectivity with the DC (Domain Controller) is required, which is the KDC (Key Distribution Center) for the AD (Active Directory) network. Whereas, the last attack requires a user being a Domain Administrator or having similar privileges.

• Kerberos (III): How does delegation work?

  In this article, we will focus on understand how the different kinds of delegation work, including some special cases. Additionally, some scenarios where it could be possible to take advantage of these mechanisms in order to leverage privilege escalation or set persistence in the domain will be introduced.

  Before starting with the explanations, I will assume that you already understand Kerberos’ basic concepts. However, if expressions like TGT, TGS, KDC or Golden ticket sound strange to you, you should definitely check the article “How does Kerberos works?” or any related Kerberos’ introduction.

• Total War: THREE KINGDOMS – Mandate of Heaven DLC Is Out Now for Linux

  Feral Interactive announced today that the Total War: THREE KINGDOMS – Mandate of Heaven Chapter Pack DLC is now available for Linux and macOS systems.

  Officially released on January 16th, 2020, Mandate of Heaven is the biggest and most detailed Chapter Pack DLC (Downloadable Content) ever released for the Total War: THREE KINGDOMS award-winning turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game from developer Creative Assembly and publisher SEGA.

  It introduces a new campaign set in 182 CE, just before the Yellow Turban rebellion. The new campaign will let players adventure through the conflict deep into the Three Kingdoms period. The update also adds a total of six new playable warlords, including three new Yellow Turban warlords, Zhang Jue, Zhang Bao, and Zhang Liang, and three new Han Empire factions, Emperor Liu Hong, Prince Liu Chong, and Lu Zhi.

• Total War: THREE KINGDOMS - Mandate of Heaven plus the latest patches arrive for Linux

• Space is a little more hostile in Space Haven, with Alpha 6 introducing ship to ship combat

  One of my most anticipated releases to come from a crowdfunding campaign, Space Haven continues to get some really fun features and another huge Alpha release recently went up.

  As a little reminder: Space Haven is a colony-building sim with a bit of a difference. Instead of a static colony, you build a fleet of starships tile-by-tile and you can travel around with them. You manage your crew, their needs, make sure they have a comfy bed and deal with all the nastiness of space travel.

• Physics-based medieval siege engine battler 'Besiege' leaves Early Access after 5 years

  Five years might seem like a little long but crafting something special takes time and Besiege is definitely worthy of the time it spent in development.

  Spiderling Studios' physics-based building game isn't exactly unique now, there's plenty more physics-based building games that have come and gone in that time. However, Besiege stands tall above so many for the detail and fun factor. This week, they released the big 1.0 with a finished single-player campaign along with adding in some fun sounding logic and automation blocks.

• Android users saved from BILLIONS of dangerous apps, are YOU using this Google feature?

• Android ALERT: A ‘new era in mobile malware’ could have just infected your phone

• Poco F1 (Pocophone F1) Android 10 update rollout status

• [Realme XT as well] Support says Realme 3 Pro Android 10 (Realme UI) update released for all, but many users still waiting for it

• Honor 9X EMUI 10 (Android 10) update rolls out

• Galaxy Note 9 starts receiving Android 10 update on Verizon’s network

• Motorola One Android 10 update should roll out “in the coming days”, says Motorola Brazil; February patch available

• How to send messages and attachments confidentially from Gmail for Android: Know steps

• How to archive board on Pinterest for Android: Know steps

• Chrome 81 Will Deliver WebXR AR Experiences To Android

• Android Auto Wireless now works on select Samsung Galaxy phones (Update: S20, Z Flip)

• Avoid these 7 Android VPN apps because of their privacy sins

• Ways to Fix Slow Charging on Android

Released on September 2019, the GNOME 3.34 “Thessaloniki” desktop environment is the first to adopt a new release cycle with extended maintenance updates. Previous GNOME releases only received two maintenance updates during their support cycle.

Therefore, GNOME 3.34.4 is here as a minor bugfix release to GNOME 3.34, addressing various issues, as well as updating translations across several components and applications. Among the changes, there’s a big GTK update with better Wayland support, VP8 encoding for the built-in screen-recorder, and another major Vala update.

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2019-18634) was discovered earlier this month by Joe Vennix in the Sudo package, a program that lets users run programs in a UNIX system with the security privileges of another user. The flaw could allow an unprivileged user to obtain full root privileges.

Affected Sudo versions included all releases from v1.7.1 to v1.8.25p1. However, it was discovered that it doesn’t affect systems that did not had the pwfeedback option enabled in the /etc/sudoers file. For more details you can check out our previous report.

Ubuntu manufacturer Canonical has announced a partnership with Bosch Rexroth to put Ubuntu Core in its app-based ctrlX AUTOMATION platform.

Ubuntu Core, which is designed for embedded environments and IoT devices, will be used alongside snaps (Linux application containers) to produce an open source platform with simple plug-and-play software.

According to Canonical, the choice of using Ubuntu instead of proprietary software means that industrial machine manufacturers "are freed from being tied to PLC specialists and proprietary systems with the software being decoupled from the hardware."

Gaming on Linux is fantastic, but it’s not always straightforward. Valve has gone to great lengths to make thousands of Windows-only games playable on the Steam for Linux client, but hardware variation and frequent updates means things can break at a moment’s notice. Good Ole Games has an easy way to find native Linux games, but the GOG Galaxy client is only available for Mac and Windows. So, enter a new player that wants to bridge the gap by providing an open source Linux gaming client focused on providing nothing but games developed for Linux.

LibreOffice is a successor project to OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), as you can see in this timeline – click to enlarge...

We release a new major version every six months – so let’s check out some of the great features our community and certified developers have added in recent years!

We are pleased to announce that Plasma 5.18.1, is now available in our backports PPA for Kubuntu 19.10. This is the 1st bugfix release of the 5.18 LTS Plasma series.

The release announcement detailing the new features and improvements in Plasma 5.18 LTS can be found here.

Also: Plasma 5.18.1

A new version of Calindori, the calendar application of Plasma Mobile, is now available. In Calindori 1.1, a set of new features has been added as well as the user interface has been improved, following the KDE human interface guidelines.

You can now add reminders to calendar events. To manage event reminders, a separate background application, calindac, has been created. Calindac looks for alarms into the Calindori ical files and triggers alarm notifications. The users may dismiss the alarm displayed or suspend it for a configurable amount of time.

• Better Fullscreen App Support on the Librem 5

  The phone’s shell is responsible for how apps are displayed. Even the smallest improvement to how apps render can have a positive impact on all Librem 5 applications – enabling more of the rich application ecosystem in PureOS to work better on mobile.

  [...]

  The UI is still accessible whenever it’s needed, but it’s now smart enough to know when to get out of the way.

  For non-convergent desktop apps you can employ UI scaling, which will allow you to run most FOSS apps on the Librem 5 in non-docked mode.

• Librem 5 Power Management Improvements up to Jan 2020

  Power-management improvements continue to find their way into PureOS. We still have a ways to go before the battery can make it through a day, but progress is steady. Let’s go over a few of the latest changes.

• Julian Sparber: Joining Purism

  This announcement is long overdue, but better late than never

  About 6 months ago I joined Purism, where I’m working on the Librem 5 phone. I’m in good company, since there are already a number of other fellow GNOME friends on the Librem 5 team, including Adrien Plazas, Tobias Bernard, and Mohammed Sadiq.

• How To Install Eclipse In Ubuntu

• How to Create Swap File in Linux

• How to Install Mautic Marketing Automation Tool in Linux

• How to Load Balance a PHP Application on Google Cloud

• How to build your own Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster

• How to install NodeJS on Linux (CentOS/Ubuntu)

• How to open a Linux terminal window

• How to use the PyCharm Memory Profiler

• diff Command Examples in Linux

• Vim search and replace

• Skul: The Hero Slayer has you swap your skull to gain new powers - now in Early Access

  Skul: The Hero Slayer is an action-packed rogue-lite platformer, where you play as the anti-hero Skul who sets off on a quest to single-handedly take on the Imperial Army and rescue his demon King from captivity.

• 2D strategy and business simulator 'Plutocracy' now available on Linux

  Want to have a go at 'big business'? Plutocracy is a 2D strategy and business sim that will let you attempt to build up your business empire along with all the politics that comes with it.

  Developed by Redwood, who said they were directly inspired by Theodore Dreiser's the Trilogy of Desire, Plutocracy is currently in Early Access after running an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign our contributor BTRE covered on GOL back in 2018. Looks like it was a success to and as of this week, they delivered a Linux build that's available now on Steam too

• Lurking in the Dark is a sweet idea for a game and it's now open source

  Lurking in the Dark, a clever 2D game about climbing a dark tower that was made during the GMTK Game Jam last year has been made open source.

  Created with Godot Engine, the idea is that you can only see a single tile in front of you so you have to watch out for monsters and traps. The developer mentioned on Twitter that due to a lot of interest and their plans to turn it into a full game were put on hold, the source code is now open for everyone.

• Vagrus - The Riven Realms hits more milestones on Fig, funding big new features

  The hybrid Early Access/Crowdfunding model 'Open Access' on the Fig platform seems to be working really well for Vagrus - The Riven Realms.

  [...]

  Once they hit $60K they will introduce a manual save option, at $75K it will bring in the first part of their planned open-world campaign and more after that with plenty of future goals not yet announced. This mixture of releasing builds after new funding milestones is quite a clever idea, it keeps people interested and personally invested since they get to play while pulling in more people over time too.

• Repair and manage an ecosystem in 'Among Ripples: Shallow Waters' now on Kickstarter

  Acting as a sequel to their free and much smaller game Among Ripples released back in 2015, Among Ripples: Shallow Waters is an eco-tycoon sim that's looking for your funding.

  With the state the world is in, a game about taking care of at least one small part of it gives me the good feels all over. The team at Eat Create Sleep say they're actually working with "real ecologists to create a simulation of something that could happen in real life", so there's some real science behind it.

• Game Dev Unlocked, an upcoming blog and video series for aspiring game developers

  Following an interesting half-an-hour talk (that I recommend you to check), David Wehle, the creator of the third person short exploration adventure The First Tree [GOG, itch.io, Steam], recently made a formal announcement about his upcoming project: Game Dev Unlocked, a blog and video series aimed at helping aspiring indie game designers to overcome all the inherent challenges of such an enterprise, including technical aspects, marketing, etc.

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

I started my adventures with gaming in Week 15 of this blog where I evaluated home computer emulators. For this week, I’m going to look at a few retro games, all nestling in Raspbian’s repositories. While its quad-core BCM2711 system-on-chip has more powerful processing cores, and the first upgrade to the graphics processor in the project’s history, it’s important to be realistic with expectations about the RPI4’s gaming potential.

eXternOS is a free, new and exciting Linux operating system based on Nodejs, being developed by a computer engineering and computer science student who goes by name Anesu Chiodze.

It is a whole different operating system from what we usually have on our computers; it redefines your interaction with your content on a computer, by providing a modern and distinctive user interface and very different user experience, compared to long-established Linux desktop distributions and other operating systems.

It is powered by NW.js which has full support for Node.js APIs and most if not all third-party modules–bringing about limitless possibilities of app development, without looking elsewhere. It brings a new dimension to building native applications with modern web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, WebGL and more.

Like it or not, Microsoft Office is the de facto standard in most work environments, educational institutions, and government offices. As such, all MS Office alternatives for Linux are automatically measured against it and evaluated based on their compatibility with the file formats created by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
As a Linux user in 2020, you can choose from multiple mature alternatives to MS Office. Most MS Office alternatives for Linux can be downloaded and used free of charge to open, edit, and create documents in a variety of file formats, including .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx.

• China Bashing is Grounded in Fear (That They Can Simply Do Better Than the West)
• FFII Press Release: Germany Can No Longer Ratify the Unitary Patent Due to Brexit and the Established AETR Case-law, says FFII
• DRM (Proprietary Software) Already Makes Mozilla Firefox Broken, Unreliable, Undependable (Dependent on Binary Blobs)
• EPO and Other Patent Updates Over RSS
• When It Comes to a Unitary Patent System, Bad (or Intentionally Dishonest) Legal Advice Has Become the Norm
• Is Linux Foundation a Microsoft Branch Now?
• IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 18, 2020
• Links 19/2/2020: KDE Plasma 5.18.1, GNOME 3.36 Beta 2 and WordPress 5.4 Beta 2

• Google app’s dark mode now available to all beta users on Android

• 10 best local apps for Android for any local need

• Recent reports claiming Android 10 for the Mi A3 are fake, but the update is around the corner

• Android phones now harder to hack than iPhones

• How to disable read receipts in WhatsApp for Android

• How to restore deleted messages on Android