• Patent Troll MPEG-LA Expands From Software Patents to Patents on Life While USPTO is Virtually Headless
• Lack of Independence of the Boards of Appeal at the European Patent Organisation (EPO) a Fatal Blow for the UPC
• [DE] STRASBOURG: Vertreter der Lufthansa wegen Korruption angeklagt
• The Bizarre World of US Patents and Ongoing Pursuit/Granting of Software Patents in Spite of Section 101
• Battistelli’s EPO Abuses May Soon Lead to the Death of the UPC and Return of the Old Order (‘EPO Glory’)
• Links 21/7/2017: New Wine, Ubuntu EoL
• Links 20/7/2017: Qt Creator 4.4 Beta, Libgcrypt 1.8.0

Given that I have been writing the odd article here and there about server work, hosting, VPS and the like, I thought that perhaps an article about editing configuration files / text documents in a command line scenario might be a good idea.

There are a few major text editors out there, some more user-friendly while some are more complex but bring extra power and configuration (I'm looking at you Vim.)

The editor that most users who are new to the world of working with text only will likely start with, is called Nano.

• Top five virtualization trends of 2017

  July marks the second half of the year, making it an ideal time to reflect upon what the journey through 2017 has been like and where it is going. With respect to virtualization, developers have played an increasingly important role in how companies deal with network agility, flexibility and security. While the direction data centers will head over the next six months remains open, a handful of virtualization trends are shaping the path forward.

 
 

• GoDaddy Terminates Its OpenStack Cloud Server Business

  Hosting vendor GoDaddy first debuted its own OpenStack-powered cloud service in March 2016, with high hopes of success. Those hopes have been dashed, as GoDaddy sent out notices to its customers this week advising them that the service will be shut down.

• How to Monitor Nginx using Netdata on Ubuntu 16.04

• Linux - Switch between GUI and CLI live without reboots (no Ctrl + Alt + Fn)

• Configure static IP for Linux

• Increase your Linux server Internet speed with TCP BBR congestion control

• Multi-Server Samba Installation to Protect Your Network Against Outages and Network Attacks

• How To Allow A Normal User Or Group To Run Commands As Root In Linux

• How to Configure a Sharded Cluster in MongoDB

• Linux Fu: Better Bash Scripting

• MITS signs MoU with Redhat Academy

  Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science (MITS) signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Redhat Academy to bring awareness among students on Red Hat operating system.

   The academy offers training to the students of MITS. The students can take up a project by registering their names with Red Hat licence operating system.  After registration, students will get an ID and they will be trained at the college itself. They can also collaborate with the one who has involved in project development, across the world.  

• Lynne Chamberlain: Open Source Tech Key to Red Hat’s Market Growth

• News Bits: Samsung, Cavium, HPE, Datrium, Red Hat, Scale Computing, SUSE, & Supermicro

• Sales Growth Analysis: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Stein Mart, Inc. (SMRT)

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Position Reduced by Diversified Trust Co

• Q2 2018 Earnings Estimate for Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Issued By Oppenheimer Holdings

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Shares Sold by DnB Asset Management AS

• Shares in Focus: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Ratio & Valuation Review

• 7 Flatpak Apps You Can Install Right Now from Flathub

  Distro-agnostic app distribution and management tools like Snappy, Flatpak and AppImage are trend du jour right now.

  But I often wonder how many people out there are actually using these next-gen formats compared to existing ones, like PPAs and regular repositories.

  Snaps seem super popular, and there are AppImages for just about everything we mention on this site. But what of Flatpak?

• [Video] Fedora 26 Workstation - See What's New

• [Older] GHOSTHOOK ATTACK BYPASSES WINDOWS 10 PATCHGUARD

  A bypass of PatchGuard kernel protection in Windows 10 has been developed that brings rootkits for the latest version of the OS within reach of attackers.

  Since the introduction of PatchGuard and DeviceGuard, very few 64-bit Windows rootkits have been observed; Windows 10’s security, in particular its mitigations against memory-based attacks, are well regarded. Researchers at CyberArk, however, found a way around PatchGuard through a relatively new feature in Intel processors called Processor Trace (Intel PT).

• [Slackware] OpenJDK 8 security round-up for July ’17

  Sooner than I anticipated, there is an update for OpenJDK 8. Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) announced the release of IcedTea 3.5.0. The new icedtea framework compiles OpenJDK 8 Update 141 Build 15 (8u141_b15). This release includes the official July 2017 security fixes.

• ROI (Not Security) the Most Immediate IoT Challenge

  According to Defining IoT Business Models, a new report from Canonical, the software company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, device security and privacy (45 percent) falls behind quantifying the return of investment (ROI) of their IoT projects (53 percent) as an immediate challenge. Canonical drew its conclusions from a survey of 361 IoT professionals conducted by IoTNow on behalf of the company.

• Apply the STIG to even more operating systems with ansible-hardening

  Tons of improvements made their way into the ansible-hardening role in preparation for the OpenStack Pike release next month. The role has a new name, new documentation and extra tests.

  The role uses the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) produced by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and applies the guidelines to Linux hosts using Ansible. Every control is configurable via simple Ansible variables and each control is thoroughly documented.

• Open Source Flaw 'Devil's Ivy' Puts Millions of IoT Devices at Risk

  Millions of IoT devices are vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks due to a vulnerability initially discovered in remote security cameras, Senrio reported this week.

• Microsoft’s secret weapon in ongoing struggle against Fancy Bear? Trademark law [Ed: Microsoft should make a start by stopping the addition of back doors to all its software]

• SECURITY FOR THE SECURITY GODS! SANDBOXING FOR THE SANDBOXING THRONE

  Last year, probably as a distraction from doing anything else, or maybe because I was asked, I started reviewing bugs filed as a result of automated flaw discovery tools (from Coverity to UBSan via fuzzers) being run on gdk-pixbuf.

  Apart from the security implications of a good number of those problems, there was also the annoyance of having a busted image file bring down your file manager, your desktop, or even an app that opened a file chooser either because it was broken, or because the image loader for that format didn't check for the sanity of memory allocations.

The internet of things is growing at a staggeringly fast pace, and is quickly coming to revolutionize virtually every aspect of modern life. Aspiring developers hoping to hop on board and profit off the growing phenomenon are constantly looking for the right tools to use. So what are the open source tools best suited for working with the IoT, and where can developers find them?

A plethora of open source tools lay at the disposal of any would-be developer eager and wise enough to use them. By utilizing these five, you’ll find yourself tackling challenges and developing successful applications in no time.

Related:

• Full-sized Arduino Uno clone adds Grove expansion, shrinks price to $7

  Seeed Studio’s $7 “Seeeduino V4.2” board is a full-sized Arduino Uno clone with a micro-USB host port, Uno-style expansion headers, and 3x Grove interfaces.

• Gigabyte jumps into SBC market with 3.5-inch Apollo Lake model

  Gigabyte’s “GA-SBCAP3350” SBC is equipped with a dual-core Celeron N3350, plus 2x GbE, SATA, and USB 3.1 ports, and HDMI, mSATA, and mini-PCIe.

• Facebook, GitHub, and the Ford Foundation donate $300,000 to bug bounty program for internet infrastructure

• Internet Bug Bounty Receives New Funding to Expand Internet Safety Program

• Internet Bug Bounty Raises New Funding to Improve Open-Source Security

  The Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) has raised new funding, in an effort to help reward and encourage security researchers to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in open-source software. The IBB is backed by Facebook, the Ford Foundation and GitHub, who are now donating a total of $300,000 to help secure the internet with an open-source bug bounty program.

  The IBB was started back in 2013 with the help of bug bounty platform provider HackerOne, which still helps to operate the platform.

• Apollo Server 1.0, GitHub’s Internet Bug Bounty donation, and the Google Cloud Platform — SD Times news digest: July 21, 2017

• Linux 4.12.3

• Linux 4.11.12

• Linux 4.9.39

• Linux 4.4.78

• Linux 3.18.62

• New stable kernels released

• Linux Foundation Blockchain Group Debuts Hyperledger Fabric 1.0

  The Hyperledger open source group, which works on blockchain code, issued its first release.

  The Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 release is the culmination of work by 159 engineers from 28 organizations that have contributed to the Hyperledger group hosted by the Linux Foundation.

• Vulkan 1.0.56 Brings One New Extension, Fixes

  Khronos' SIGGRAPH announcements are coming up in just over one week but today we have the Vulkan 1.0.56 release.

• Nouveau Gets Thermal Throttling, One Step Closer For GTX 900 Re-Clocking

  Nouveau re-clocking/power expert Karol Herbst has published a set of patches today implementing thermal throttling support for this open-source NVIDIA DRM driver.

• Mesa 17.2 Merge Window Extended To Sunday, RADV Shared Semaphores Lands

  The merging fun for Mesa 17.2 will continue through the weekend.

  Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has shared rather than going into feature freeze today, he's planning to extend it by a few days. In particular, he's planning to branch now by Sunday evening to allow for some remaining patches to be merged.

• A small Update

  I planned on writing about the Present extension this week, but I’ll postpone this since I’m currently strongly absorbed into finding the last rough edges of a first patch I can show off. I then hope to get some feedback on this from other developers in the xorg-devel mailing list.

  Another reason is that I stalled my work on the Present extension for now and try to get first my Xwayland code working. My mentor Daniel recommended that to me since the approach I pursued in my work on Present might be more difficult than I first assessed. At least it is something similar to what other way more experienced developers than myself tried in the past and weren’t able to do according to Daniel. My idea was to make Present flip per CRTC only, but this would clash with Pixmaps being linked to the whole screen only. There are no Pixmaps only for CRTCs in X.

• Revised DRI3 v1.1 Modifiers Support For Mesa

  Daniel Stone of Collabora has published a new set of 14 patches implementing DRI3 v1.1's modifiers support inside Mesa with support for EGL X11 and Vulkan X11/Wayland.

Similar to our past disk encryption benchmarks, a clean install of Fedora Linux (26, with Linux 4.11) was done without any encryption and then again when opting for the full-disk encryption setup via the Anaconda installer. EXT4 was the file-system in use with its default mount options and no other changes were made between the installations or during the benchmarking process.

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 2.13 is now available.

• Wine 2.13 Released: Unicode 10.0, Better Mouse Cursors

  If Wine 2.0.2 with 60+ bug fixes doesn't interest you, perhaps the Wine 2.13 development update will get you more excited.

  Wine 2.13 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release leading up to the eventual release of Wine 3.0 around year's end. Changes with Wine 2.13 include updating Unicode data to Unicode 10.0, nicer looking default mouse cursors are now used, support for persistent connections in WinHTTP, WebServices message framing protocol support, improved metafile support in GDI Plus, debug register support in x86-64 exception handling, and DirectWrite anti-aliasing improvements.

• Wine 2.13 has been released with a few noteworthy changes, including fixes for The Witcher 3

  Another Wine development release is now available! Just today Wine 2.13 has released and features a few noteworthy changes.

• Bixby-powered Bluetooth earset might be released alongside Note 8

• Truecaller for Android Gets Spam Folder, New Themes, and More With Latest Update

• Google is Making Android O More Secure with Seccomp

• The new smartphone from the creator of Android may start shipping in a few weeks

• A new hyperloop, Bixby launches, and Alexa hits Android

• Android Users, Don't Fret: You'll Be Able To Make Long Snapchat Vids Eventually

Following on a discussion with the HackerNews community on the things that users want to see in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, Canonical's Dustin Kirkland is now asking the Ubuntu community to vote for the default apps of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

The fourth snapshot of GNOME 3.25 is now available!

In this release several modules have continue the migration to meson
[1], which is great as its saving compilation time (thank you!)

BUT, at the same time some modules are still not including the meson
files in the tarball, so we are unable to build them; please be sure
you include them!

Also: GNOME 3.25.4 Released

The developers behind the deepin GNU/Linux distribution announced today the general availability of the first point release to the deepin 15.4 stable series, versioned 15.4.1.

Also: deepin 15.4.1 Debian-based Linux distribution now available for download

On July 20, 2017, Canonical released new kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10, and Ubuntu 17.04, fixing up to fifteen security vulnerabilities.

Also: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Users Can Now Install the Linux 4.10 Kernel from Ubuntu 17.04

• Questions about SysAdmin Training from The Linux Foundation? Join the Next #AskLF

  His #AskLF chat will take place the Monday after SysAdmin Day: a professional holiday the organization has recognized for years.

• Damn Small Linux A Lightweight Linux Distro For Old Computers

  By the name yes it’s really small and lightweight (had to utter this word too “damn!”). Damn Small Linux is a distro that offers a GUI based OS for low resource systems and some applications for normal users task-alike. It’s designed with the intention to pack all the modern features under 50 MB.
  ​Well, that may sound crazy but you cannot rely on it as a primary OS if you have a recent modern hardware. Instead take a U-turn now and see what Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE has to offer.

  Damn Small Linux latest version is v4.11rc2 and development has been in a long pause since 2015. Don’t be put off by that because that’s how some people roll. Slow and steady until they sort things out.

• Emacs and Magit

  The Git source-code management system is widely known for its flexibility and for the distributed development model that it supports. Its reputation for ease of use is ... less well established. There should, thus, be an opening for front-end systems that can make Git easier to use. One of the most comprehensive Git front ends, Magit, works within the Emacs editor and has a wide following. But Magit has run into some turbulence within the Emacs development community that is blocking its wider distribution.

 
 

• KeePassXC: A Great Way to Manage Passwords In Linux

  Do you always forget your password or want to have strongest password which can be hard to remember? If yes, then here is an application for you which will keep your passwords safe, strongest and encrypted. KeePassXC is an open-source forked from KeePassX by community released under GNU GPL license, it is cross-platform and all features works perfectly on every platform (Linux, Mac and Windows), as it is mentioned on KeePassXC website they have thoroughly tested features on multiple systems to provide user with the same look and feel on every supported operating system. This includes the beloved Auto-Type feature. KeePassXC, on the other hand, is developed in C++ and runs natively on all platforms giving you the best-possible platform integration.

• Making Weblate more secure and robust

  Having publicly running web application always brings challenges in terms of security and in generally in handling untrusted data. Security wise Weblate has been always quite good (mostly thanks to using Django which comes with built in protection against many vulnerabilities), but there were always things to improve in input validation or possible information leaks.

• Cockpit 146

  The Available Updates and Restart recommended pages now show the packages from the previous update run. This makes it easier to see which services to check or to decide whether a restart is really necessary...

• Kate is now translated also on Windows!

• AtCore officially moved to KDE Extragear

  It’s with all the joy in my heart that I share with you this amazing notice: AtCore was officially moved today to KDE Extragear by my favorite sysadmin Ben Cooksley after more than a month on KDE Review.

  This is the first huge milestone that we achieve on this 11 months of team work made by me, Patrick, Chris and sometimes Tomaz.

  Particularly I thanks, Luigui Toscano and Albert Cid for all the attention and review on AtCore code, that allowed us to make this move to Extragear. =D

• Builder 3.25.5

  Like every year, GUADEC has snuck up on me. I’ll be heading out to Manchester in a handful of days which means things are going to get hectic any moment now.

  We just reached another milestone in our development phase towards 3.26. I’ve landed two important components which will have important roles in Builder’s future. The new visual layout, and the new shortcut engine. Neither are complete yet, but they are good enough to land on master and allow us to iterate without giant branches.

• What I do at Undo

  In October, I started working for Undo and, now that I understand our technology better, it’s time to explain what I do.

  Undo produces a (closed source) technology which allows to record, rewind and replay Linux programs (on x86 and ARM).
  One of our products using this technology is UndoDB, a debugger built on top of gdb which allows you to do everything you do with gdb, but also to go back in time.

• WPS Office Is An Alternative To Microsoft Office for Linux

  WPS Office is a slang for Writer, Presentation ad Spreadsheets, formerly known as Kingsoft Office. It is free (basic version) Office suite available for all platforms Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. A fully featured professional-grade version is also available for a subscription fee.

• Sky Rogue, the stylish rogue-lite action flight simulator is getting a price increase and full release soon

• Albion Online hasn’t exactly been the smoothest of launches so far, but I'm hopeful for the future of it [Ed: Mono inside]

• Abandon Ship, an exploration and combat game with an oil painting like art style will come to Linux

  It turns out the rather great looking exploration and combat game 'Abandon Ship' [Steam, Official Site] will come to Linux. The art style of the game is actually inspired by classic navy oil paintings.

  The funny thing is, I got an email from one of our followers notifying me that last year the developer said they would do a Linux version. I posted in the forum to ask for an update, without realizing the very next email in my inbox was the actual developer telling me it's coming! Fun when little things like that happen.