• Linux drivers offer evidence of 10-core Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs

  Intel graphics driver patches for Linux have revealed a couple of previously unannounced product news titbits. A patch from last week contained references to 14nm Intel Comet Lake-S processors with up to 10 cores. Yesterday another patch was released, this time with references to the 10nm Ice Lake and Elkhart Lake processors with Gen11 graphics.

• Radeon/AMDGPU X.Org Drivers Add TILE Property Support For Tiled Monitors

  It's coming a bit late considering the X.Org Server bits were added back in 2015 along with the xf86-video-modesetting support, but within xf86-video-amdgpu Git and pending for xf86-video-ati is support for the TILE property in dealing with tiled displays. 

  The TILE property is used for dealing with monitor tiles in "tiled displays" as laid out by the DisplayID standard where the monitor(s) are backed by multiple physical display panels. Granted, not a common scenario for Linux desktop users with today's consumer hardware at least, but anyhow this TILE property support is coming about for the Radeon X.Org DDX drivers.

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Launches - Linux Benchmarks Coming

  NVIDIA has introduced its latest RTX-less, lower-tier Turing GPU... The GeForce GTX 1660 is now available starting at $219 USD. 

  The GeForce GTX 1660 comes several weeks after the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti debut as the first Turing GPU without any RTX/Tensor core functionality and commanding a price tag closer to $290~300 USD. The GeForce GTX 1660 non-Ti starts out at $219 USD and is a modified TU116 GPU with 1408 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR6 video memory, and 1530MHz base clock frequency with 1785MHz boost clock. 

  This $219+ 12nm FinFET graphics card has a 120 Watt TDP and requires a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

• Valve announces new networking APIs for developers and Steam Link Anywhere

  Firstly, Steam Link Anywhere actually sounds very interesting. It's now officially in beta and it allows you to essentially connect to your computer and play games from anywhere. Since it's just an extension of the Steam Link functionality, it's free for all Steam users. It works with both the Steam Link App and the Steam Link hardware.

  To access it, you do need to opt into the Steam Client beta version. Valve say it requires "A high upload speed from your computer and strong network connection to your Steam Link device are required to use Steam Link Anywhere". More on that here.

• Epic Games Wants Its Store Running On Linux And Is Taking Steps To Get There

  You may know Sergey Galyonkin as the creator of SteamSpy, but he's now Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games. He recently answered some questions via Twitter about how to get certain games like Phoenix Point from the Epic Games Store up and running via Steam's Proton. Not natively (yet), but using Steam's fork of Wine which allows Linux gamers to install and run Windows-exclusive games on the Linux Steam client.

• Intel maintains massive lead over AMD in Steam survey for processors in both Windows and Linux

  Intel has kept its huge lead over AMD in Steam’s survey for processor usage. The blue team has even managed to slightly increase its share in systems utilizing a Windows OS, but AMD has taken a nibble out of Intel’s share on machines operating on Linux. Steam users have also shown a preference for high-end chips.

• Activists and experts gather in Cambridge for ethical tech conference to celebrate software freedom on March 23-24

  Next weekend, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) presents the eleventh annual LibrePlanet free software conference in Cambridge, March 23-24, 2019, at the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. LibrePlanet is an annual conference for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and tackle challenges facing the free software movement, including 3D printing, cryptography, medical devices, privacy, security, and current issues in software licensing. LibrePlanet 2019 will focus on the exploration of software freedom and how to bring to life trailblazing, principled new technologies.

  LibrePlanet 2019 will include four keynotes. Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician, will talk about his work on making medical devices accessible through free designs that meet medical industry standards. Micky Metts, a member of the Agaric Design Collective, will talk about your collective and individual roles in maintaining your freedoms, with free software as the foundation. Bdale Garbee, longtime free software contributor and former Debian Project Leader, will tell us about the fun in free software, using personal anecdotes as examples. Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF and president of the board of directors, will discuss current issues facing user freedom, and announce the winners of the 2018 Free Software Foundation awards.

• Software Freedom Conservancy Becomes an Open Source Initiative Affiliate Member

• Conservancy Becomes an Open Source Initiative Affiliate Member

  Conservancy joins a long list of Open Source Initiative Affiliate Members. We believe that the non-profits serving free and open source software communities should seek out ways to support each other. There are certainly many different strategies that help us build and maintain a robust commons and a solid consistent understanding of the licenses that enable collaborative development is critical. The Open Source Initiative's role as steward of the Open Source Definition is extremely compatible with our own work to provide a fiscal home for community-driven free software projects and our ongoing work to enforce the General Public License (GPL).

  "We're excited to participate in the Open Source Initiative's ongoing work to educate users and decision-makers about how licensing and cooperation go hand in hand. By joining as an affiliate member, we affirm our support of collaboration to promote the ideals of software freedom." says Karen Sandler, Software Freedom Conservancy's Executive Director.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues being supported by more Android-powered mobile devices and with this uptick in user activity is resulting in more fixes and low-level improvements to the file-system.

With the previous Linux 5.0 cycle (nee 4.21) there were a number of fixes thanks to F2FS appearing on Google's Pixel. This flash-optimized Linux file-system is appearing on more Android devices and with that more device engineers testing it out as well as evaluating the code.

• Make your snap development faster

• Extract rpm package name, version and release using some fancy sed regex

• Dave Townsend: Bridging an internal LAN to a server’s Docker containers over a VPN

• Fair Resource Distribution Algorithm v1

  Imagine a finite resource that you want to distribute amongst peers in a fair manner. If you know the number of peers to be n, the problem becomes trivial and you can assign every peer 1/n-th of the total. This way every peer gets the same amount, while no part of the resource stays unused. But what if the number of peers is only known retrospectively? That is, how many resources do you grant a peer if you do not know whether there are more peers or not? How do you define “fairness”? And how do you make sure as little of the resource as possible stays unused?

• Fast, Bump-Allocated Virtual DOMs with Rust and Wasm

  Dodrio is a virtual DOM library written in Rust and WebAssembly. It takes advantage of both Wasm’s linear memory and Rust’s low-level control by designing virtual DOM rendering around bump allocation. Preliminary benchmark results suggest it has best-in-class performance.

• Step-by-step how-to guide to use uWSGI with Python 3.7 for Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.10.

• Using Pipfile in Binder

• DXVK 1.0.1 Released With Various Game Fixes For Direct3D On Vulkan

  DXVK lead developer Philip Rebohle has released version 1.0.1 of this popular project that enhances Wine-based Linux gaming by allowing Direct3D 10/11 to be re-routed atop Vulkan drivers.

  Less than one month ago marked the release of DXVK 1.0 while this new release primarily addresses various regressions.

• DXVK 1.0.1 is out for Vulkan-based D3D11 and D3D10 with Wine

  Today we have the first bug-fix update for DXVK since the big 1.0 last month. It's not a huge release but as always it's a good one.

Lakka 2.2.2 is now available.

• Kali Linux Forensics Tools

  Kali Linux is a powerful Operating system especially designed for Penetration Tester and Security Professionals. Most of its features and tools are made for security researchers and pentesters but it has a separate “Forensics” tab and a separate “Forensics” mode for Forensics Investigators.
  Forensics is becoming very important in Cyber Security to detect and backtrack Black Hat Criminals. It is essential to remove Hackers’ malicious backdoors/malwares and trace them back to avoid any possible future incidents. In Kali’s Forensics mode, Operating System doesn’t mount any partition from System’s hard drive and doesn’t leave any changes or fingerprints on host’s system.

  Kali Linux comes with pre-installed popular forensics applications and toolkits. Here we’ll review some famous open source tools present in Kali Linux.

• What is SSH (Secure shell protocol)?

  SSH stands for Secure Shell which is a security protocol based on the application layer. We use the SSH to securely access the remote servers and Desktops to execute various commands. In short, we can control the complete system remotely, if we have login information and SSH server access. Because The Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol designed to replace the Telnet and access the remote system even on the unsecured remote shell by encrypting data before sending.

• Security Researcher Discovers Flaws In Yelp-For-MAGAs App, Developer Threatens To Report Him To The Deep State

  Even a cursory look at past stories we've done about how companies treat security researchers who point out the trash-state of their products would reveal that entirely too many people and companies seem to think shooting the messenger is the best response. I have never understood the impulse to take people who are essentially stress-testing your software for free, ultimately pointing out how the product could be safer than it is, and then threatening those people with legal action or law enforcement. But, then, much of the world makes little sense to me.

  Such as why a Yelp-for-MAGA people should ever be a thing. But it absolutely is a thing, with conservative news site 63red.com releasing a mobile app that is essentially a Yelp-clone, but with the twist that its chief purpose is to let other Trump supporters know how likely they are to be derided when visiting a restaurant. This is an understandable impulse, I suppose, given the nature of politics in 2019 America, though the need for an app seems like overkill. Regardless, the app was released and a security researcher found roughly all the security holes in it.

• “Yelp, but for MAGA” turns red over security disclosure, threatens researcher

  But the safe space for 63red founder Scott Wallace was violated quickly when French security researcher Elliot Alderson discovered some fundamental security flaws in Safe's architecture—making it not so safe.

  Because the application is build in React Native, a JavaScript- and JSX-based scripting language that basically turns Web apps into "native" Apple iOS and Android applications, the entire architecture of the application is available to anyone who downloads and unpacks it. And in that code, Alderson discovered a few things: [...]

• Android Q supports different accent colors!

• Android Q Beta 1: Wi-Fi gets ‘Easy Connect’ w/ QR code sharing and setup

• Android Q will let you share Wi-Fi password with a QR code

• The Morning After: Android Q arrives

• Android Q lets you easily switch audio output for playing media

• Android Q: A List of Some of the Other Little New Changes

• Here are our favorite features in Google’s first Android Q beta

• Sony fixes Android TV bug preventing Kodi installs

• New Range of Vu Android TVs Come With 4K HDR, Dolby Sound and More Features

• Most Android antivirus apps barely offer any protection at all

• Ten Xiaomi smartphones in line for Android Pie

Most of the time-tracking apps in this Linux roundup are abandoned or in need of updating. The growing convenience and accessibility of Web-based time-tracking services make standalone software less necessary and in lower demand. Thus, developers spend little or no time releasing newer versions.

The eight applications for Linux users included in this roundup are solid performers. Other than the outdated packages and lack of support for a wide variety of Linux distros, these apps deliver on productivity and reliability.

• Linux 5.0.2

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.0.2 kernel.

  All users of the 5.0 kernel series must upgrade.

  The updated 5.0.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.0.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...

• Linux 4.20.16

• Linux 4.19.29

• Linux 4.14.106

• Linux 4.9.163

• Opera 60 "Reborn" Browser Enters Beta with Crypto Wallet in Sidebar, Revamped UI

  Opera Software announced today the general availability of the first beta release of their upcoming Opera 60 (a.k.a. Reborn 3) web browser for all supported platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

  Opera 60 is the next major release of the Chromium-based web browser, featuring a refreshed user interface with light and dark themes that are inspired by high-key and low-key lighting photography, revamped tabs to make them stand out of the crowd, and more minimalist, yet fully functional design.

• LibreOffice Conference 2018 second room videos

  We’ve finished editing and uploading almost all the videos from the second room of the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana, Albania.

• New service mesh emerges from the creators of gRPC and Istio

  The creators of gRPC and Istio have created a new enterprise-grade service mesh that is launching today. Tetrate is built on top of Istio and Envoy, and adds enterprise-grade scalability, performance, and ecosystem adapters. Envoy is a network load balancer for microservices, while Istio is a service mesh that acts as a control plane layer over Istio.

• Tetrate Launched, Google Chrome 73 Released, Godot 3.1 Is Now Available, Enroll to Try Android Q Beta, and Pi Day Live Stream Event and Contest

  Tetrate, a new enterprise-grade service mesh from the creators of gRPC and Istio, launched yesterday. Varun Talwar, CEO of Tetrate and formerly co-creator of Istio at Google, says "Tetrate's mission is to create a secure and flexible application networking layer to help enterprises transition from their decades-old rigid networking stack. Our tools and technologies will help customers with availability and manageability of their applications as they undergo this transformation." In addition, "Tetrate is launching with $12.5 million in funding from Dell Technologies Capital, as well as from participating investors 8VC, Intel Capital, Rain Capital, and Samsung NEXT." It also plans to use the funding to "extend its open-source leadership and further contribute to the open-source community". See this ITOps Times article for more information.

• Security updates for Thursday

• WordPress 5.1.1

  The Debian packages for WordPress version 5.1.1 are being updated as I write this. This is a security fix for WordPress that stops comments causing a cross-site scripting bug. It’s an important one to update.

• 25 Most Common IoT Security Threats in an Increasingly Connected World

  The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly. IoT is the connectivity of devices over the internet. It’s like a social network or an email service, but instead of connecting people, IoT actually connects smart devices which include, but not limited to your computers, smartphones, smart home appliances, automation tools, and more.

  However, similar to all types of technologies out there, IoT is a double-edged sword as well. It has its upsides, but there are serious threats that accompany this technology. As manufacturers are racing against each other to bring the latest device in the market, not many of them are thinking about the security issues associated with their IoT devices.

• Facebook Suffers Global Outage, Claims DDoS Not the Cause

  Facebook users around the world had a singular question for much of March 13: Is Facebook down?

  As it turns out, the global social media giant and its related Instagram and WhatsApp services were in fact unavailable and down for much of the day. Some service was restored by March 14, though full global availability across all Facebook services is still intermittent. With Facebook down, the company ironically had to resort to using rival social media service Twitter to keep many of its users informed.

  "We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps," Facebook wrote in a Twitter message. "We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible."

  Facebook also provided minimal updates via its platform status dashboard for developers, with the first indication of trouble reported at 10:32 a.m. PT on March 13.

  "We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly," the status page reports. "We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution."

• Tutorial: Why Functions Modify Lists and Dictionaries in Python

  Python’s functions (both the built-in ones and custom functions we write ourselves) are crucial tools for working with data. But what they do with our data can be a little confusing, and if we’re not aware of what’s going on, it could cause serious errors in our analysis.

  In this tutorial, we’re going to take a close look at how Python treats different data types when they’re being manipulated inside of functions, and learn how to ensure that our data is being changed only when we want it to be changed.

• Introduction to Python FTP

  In this tutorial, we will explore how to use FTP with Python to send and receive files from a server over TCP/IP connections.

  To make things easier and more abstract, we will be using Python's ftplib library which provides a range of functionalities that make it easier to work with FTP. We'll see the implementation for uploading and downloading files from the server, as well as some other cool things that "ftplib" allows us to do.

• Emmanuele Bassi: A little testing

  Years ago I started writing Graphene as a small library of 3D transformation-related math types to be used by GTK (and possibly Clutter, even if that didn’t pan out until Georges started working on the Clutter fork inside Mutter).

  Graphene’s only requirement is a C99 compiler and a decent toolchain capable of either taking SSE builtins or support vectorization on appropriately aligned types. This means that, unless you decide to enable the GObject types for each Graphene type, Graphene doesn’t really need GLib types or API—except that’s a bit of a lie.

  As I wanted to test what I was doing, Graphene has an optional build time dependency on GLib for its test suite; the library itself may not use anything from GLib, but if you want to build and run the test suite then you need to have GLib installed.

• How To Download/Install Android 10 Q Beta Right Now?

• get rid of lines with non ascii characters

• Self-Serviced End-to-end Encryption Approaches for Applications Deployed in OpenShift

• How to connect to servers on Linux with the KDE file manager

• How to Install WordPress with LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 18.04

• Tips and Tricks to Secure Your Nginx Web Server

• Building the Kolla Keystone Container

The US government has published its negotiating objectives for a trade deal with the UK, which include some worrying proposals on digital trade, including a ban on the disclosure of source code and algorithms, and potential restrictions on data protection.

[...]

The US wants to stop the UK government from “mandating the disclosure of computer source code or algorithms”. This is one of the most concerning aspects of the new digital trade agenda, already found in other recent trade agreements, and criticised by groups such as Third World Network. Restricting source code and algorithms is problematic for various reasons. In particular, the UK government has been pioneering open source software, despite some setbacks, and these clauses could be used to challenge any public procurement perceived to give preference to open source.

• Mozilla releases Iodide, an open source browser tool for publishing dynamic data science

  Mozilla wants to make it easier to create, view, and replicate data visualizations on the web, and toward that end, it today unveiled Iodide, an “experimental tool” meant to help scientists and engineers write and share interactive documents using an iterative workflow. It’s currently in alpha, and available from GitHub in open source.

  “In the last ten years, there has been an explosion of interest in ‘scientific computing’ and ‘data science’: that is, the application of computation to answer questions and analyze data in the natural and social sciences,” Brendan Colloran, staff data scientist at Mozilla, wrote in a blog post. “To address these needs, we’ve seen a renaissance in programming languages, tools, and techniques that help scientists and researchers explore and understand data and scientific concepts, and to communicate their findings. But to date, very few tools have focused on helping scientists gain unfiltered access to the full communication potential of modern web browsers.”

• Rep of the Month – February 2019

  Please join us in congratulating Edoardo Viola, our Rep of the Month for February 2019!

  Edoardo is a long-time Mozillian from Italy and has been a Rep for almost two years. He’s a Resource Rep and has been on the Reps Council until January. When he’s not busy with Reps work, Edoardo is a Mentor in the Open Leadership Training Program. In the past he has contributed to Campus Clubs as well as MozFest, where he was a Space Wrangler for the Web Literacy Track.

I certainly recommend that everyone uses full-disk encryption for their production systems, especially for laptops you may be bringing with you. In over a decade of using Linux full-disk encryption on my main systems, the overhead cost to doing so has fortunately improved with time thanks to new CPU instruction set extensions, optimizations within the Linux kernel, and faster SSD storage making the performance penalty even less noticeable. As it's been a while since my last look at the Linux storage encryption overhead, here are some fresh results using a Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu with/without LUKS full-disk encryption.

A security issue affects the Linux 3.13 kernel of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series and its derivatives, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, and others, allowing attackers to run programs as an administrator.

The vulnerability is a race condition (CVE-2019-6133) discovered by Jann Horn of Google Project Zero in Linux kernel's fork() system call, which could allow a local attacker to gain access to services storing cache authorizations and run programs with administrative privileges.

• The Universim continues to evolve the Modern Age in the latest build

  The Universim is a very impressive Early Access god sim and this latest update expands it that little bit further.

  For those who haven't played it before, it's a "new breed of God Game" from Crytivo that was originally funded on Kickstarter. Progress in the last year has really been impressive, with tons of new stuff coming in. This update,Global Warning Patch v0.0.31, adds in a lot more visual tweaks and additions for when you reach the Modern Age as well as more additions to the Medieval Age.

• You Died but a Necromancer revived you looks fun, coming to Linux later this year

  You Died but a Necromancer revived you looks like one of those titles that will be equal parts fun and enraging as you avoid traps across multiple small levels.

  A casual game from developer BolHut, it has you and up to three friends try to navigate narrow pathways full of chainsaws, spikes, cannons, flamethrowers and so on to reach the end.

• The Savior's Gang you lead a group of worshippers to the promised land, hopefully without killing them

  The Savior's Gang from Catness Game Studios takes some tales from the Bible, tears out some pages and spreads in a bunch of Monty Python styled humour.

  I was sent a key by the developer and since I do love ridiculous games I gave it a shot. I will be honest right away though, I didn't really like it. The basic idea is good, the humour isn't bad but the actual gameplay mechanics are really tedious.

Plasma 5.15 is a very good release. It's not the fireworks release like 5.12, or perhaps the cannonade that we saw in the previous version, but there's still a heapload of great stuff to write home about, or tell your friends whom you like and cherish. A combination of steady improvements in the existing stuff, new and thoughtful design that shamelessly stabs at the professional world, continuous polish and fix of bugs and problems, and a strong current of enthusiasm imbuing it all.

On top of all that, the desktop environment purrs like a tiger, with lithe, smooth performance, great and consistent looks, and there's always something new and fun to find and discover. Things are coming together in a good way. Some issues too, because you can't have Linux without regressions. A couple of scars to add character, right. But the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff by a hefty margin. So if you're feeling somewhat dejected by the slump in creativity gripping the open-source world, cast your eyes Plasmawards, and you should find lots of fresh energy yonder. I'm liking, and I'm liking where this is headed. Most recommended.