• Announcing Heritage: An Open Source, Public Blockchain Project

  Heritage is a project of A​3​ by Airbus, the advanced projects outpost of Airbus in Silicon Valley. Airbus Foundation is the first strategic partner within Airbus to utilize blockchain technology developed by Heritage.

  Heritage is a decentralized application for the Airbus Foundation to hold charity fundraising campaigns internal to Airbus. Through open sourcing Heritage, Airbus Foundation will help charities onboard cryptocurrency and smart contracts, opening them to a new class of donor. Heritage hopes to set a standard non-profits can replicate to continue to grow the ecosystem while aiding an underserved market.

• Versity announces next generation open source archiving filesystem

  Versity Software has announced that it has released ScoutFS under GPLv2. "ScoutFS is the first GPL archiving file system ever released, creating an inherently safer and more user friendly option for storing archival data where accessibility over very large time scales, and the removal of vendor specific risk is a key consideration."

 

• Chrome Beta 70 Brings 2-Factor Authentication Via Fingerprint Sensor To Android & Mac

  With the beta version of Chrome 70 on the roll, Google has added yet another useful feature to make signing into the websites easier. As announced in an official blog post, Chrome now supports 2-factor authentication in Android and Macbook with the device’s fingerprint sensor.

• Thunderbird 60 with title bar hidden

  Many users like hidden system titlebar as Firefox feature although it’s not finished yet. But we’re very close and I hope to have Firefox 64 in shape that the title bar can be disabled by default at least on Gnome and matches Firefox outfit at Windows and Mac.

  Thunderbird 60 was finally released for Fedora and comes with a basic version of the feature as it was introduced at Firefox 60 ESR. There’s a simple checkbox at “Customize” page at Firefox but Thunderbird is missing an easy switch.

• Washington State Electronic Notary Public endorsements

  [...] This all seemed to me to be something that GnuPG is designed to do and does
  quite well. So I sent an email on Friday night to the sender of the letter
  requesting specific issues that my provider did not comply with. This
  morning I received a call from the DoL, and was able to successfully argue
  for GnuPG's qualification as an electronic records notary public technology
  provider for the State of Washington.

  In short, GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts
  <http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=42.45.140> in the State of
  Washington!

• Surprise: Bill Introduced To Finally Make PACER Free To All

      

  This would be... amazing. We've spent years highlighting the massive problems with PACER, the federal court system that charges insane amounts for basically everything you do, just to access public records, and which functions very much like it was designed around 1995. There are a few court cases arguing that PACER fees are illegal and a recent ruling in one of those cases agreed. As we noted at the time, that was hardly the final word on the matter. A bill like the ones Collins introduced would be an amazing leap forward in giving public access to court documents.

• Collins introduces bill to increase transparency and access to federal court documents

  Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) today introduced a bill to reform both parts of the federal courts’ electronic records system.

  “Americans deserve a justice system that is transparent and accessible. I introduced the Electronic Court Records Reform Act to modernize the judicial records systems and remove fee-for-access barriers that technology has rendered unnecessary,” said Collins.

  “As an attorney and the son of a law enforcement officer, I understand how crucial it is that this legislation ensures access to a freer, fairer and more accountable judiciary.”

• Software Patch Claimed To Allow Aadhaar's Security To Be Bypassed, Calling Into Question Biometric Database's Integrity

  As the Huffington Post article explains, creating a patch that is able to circumvent the main security features in this way was possible thanks to design choices made early on in the project. The unprecedented scale of the Aadhaar enrollment process -- so far around 1.2 billion people have been given an Aadhaar number and added to the database -- meant that a large number of private agencies and village-level computer kiosks were used for registration. Since connectivity was often poor, the main software was installed on local computers, rather than being run in the cloud. The patch can be used by anyone with local access to the computer system, and simply involves replacing a folder of Java libraries with versions lacking the security checks.

  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the government body responsible for the Aadhaar project, has responded to the Huffington Post article, but in a rather odd way: as a Donald Trump-like stream of tweets. The Huffington Post points out: "[the UIDAI] has simply stated that its systems are completely secure without any supporting evidence."

• New CAS BACnet Wireshark Report Tool Helps User to Quickly Locate Intermittent Issues

• Hackers For Good, Working To Gather Stakeholders To Find Answers To Cyberspace Challenges

  For a number of people, the word hacker means bad news. However, if some hackers have malevolent intentions, there are also hackers for good, and their skills were put to the challenge last week as they tried to save a fictitious city fallen into the hands of a group of cyber terrorists. The challenge was part of a two-day event organised by a young Geneva-based non-governmental organisation seeking to raise awareness about digital trust and bring accountability to cyberspace.

I am pleased to announce that Qt 5.12 Alpha is released today. There are prebuild binaries as well in addition to source code packages with Alpha release.

Please check Qt 5.12 New Features wiki to see what new is coming with Qt 5.12 release. Please note that the feature list is still in progress and not to be considered final before the first Beta release.

Also: Qt 5.12 Alpha Released With OpenGL ES 3.1 Renderer, Several Wayland Improvements

• RADV's Iffy 16-bit Integer Support Merged Into Mesa

  Just days after the patches were published for enabling 16-bit integers within shaders for the RADV driver, this Radeon Vulkan driver code has been merged.

  The code came out last week by Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset for enabling shaderInt16, the capability allowing 16-bit signed/unsigned integers within the shader code.

• Mesa Eyeing The Removal Of Autotools Build Support In Favor Of Meson

  For those currently relying upon Autotools for building Mesa3D, the days are numbered and soon will likely need to shift over to their modern Meson build system support.

  For the past year now, Mesa developers have been working on bringing up their Meson build system support for its faster build speeds with Ninja, better cross-platform compatibility, and other benefits. Meson has co-existed with the Autotools (and SCons and Android build systems) support over the past year of Mesa releases, but moving forward they are likely very soon to drop the Autotools support.

• OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve

  When I was writing a blog post about the process title, I needed a couple of virtual machines with OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Ubuntu. Before that day I mainly used FreeBSD and Windows with bhyve. I spent some time trying to set up an OpenBSD using bhyve and UEFI as described here. I had numerous problems trying to use it, and this was the day I discovered the grub2-bhyve tool, and I love it!

  The grub2-bhyve allows you to load a kernel using GRUB bootloader. GRUB supports most of the operating systems with a standard configuration, so exactly the same method can be used to install NetBSD or Ubuntu. [...]

• OpenZFS Developer Summit 2018

  The sixth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place September 10th and 11th in San Francisco, California with an expanded focus on non-technical topics like community development and cross-project coordination. It also marked the “light at the end of the tunnel” status of several long-term OpenZFS features, notably dRAID, the distributed spare technology originally developed by Intel. [...]

• Monster taming RPG 'Siralim 3' now has a Linux version on Steam

  Siralim 3, the deep monster taming RPG from Thylacine Studios now has a Linux version available for those who gotta catch 'em all.

  While it's not exactly graphically impressive, the Siralim titles usually make it for it and then some with the amount of features they have. Seems to be a hit with users too, with a nice positive rating.

• Humble has a pretty good Game Development book bundle

  For those thinking about or already creating games, you might want to take a look over at Humble with their game development book bundle.

• Naval strategy game Victory At Sea Pacific is now available with Linux support

  Set during World War II, Victory At Sea Pacific from Evil Twin Artworks is an interesting naval strategy game that released recently with Linux support.

The PostgreSQL community has, after an extended discussion, announced the adoption of a code of conduct "which is intended to ensure that PostgreSQL remains an open and enjoyable project for anyone to join and participate in".

• Renault-Nissan Teams With Google and Lets Android Into the Dash

• Google 'sorry' for remotely enabling Battery Saver on Android Pie handsets

• Google partners with the world's biggest auto group to bring Android to cars

• AnyTrans Offers iPhone and Android Users a Seamless Transition to iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR

• Cyber Sleuths Find Traces of Infamous iPhone and Android Spyware 'Pegasus' in 45 Countries

• Linux on Windows 10: Running Ubuntu VMs just got a lot easier, says Microsoft

• Microsoft Announce Enhanced Version of Ubuntu 18.04 for Hyper-V

  Well, it just got easier to run Ubuntu on Windows 10 as a virtual machine — and it’s all thanks to Microsoft.

  Windows 10 Pro users are now able to spin up an enhanced Ubuntu virtual machine directly from the Hyper-V Quick Create tool.

• Microsoft Announces Azure Pipelines With Unlimited CI/CD Minutes for Open Source [Ed: Microsoft is openwashing its proprietary-with-surveillance stuff. Anything to misuse the "Open Source" brand while pushing malware with back doors.]

• How To Try Linux Without Making Any Changes To Your PC [Ed: Microsoft wants GNU/Linux to just be a "Windows feature" or something you can "play" with]

• Kong Inc. Launches Kong 1.0, the Only Open Source API Platform Purpose Built for Microservices, Cloud-Native and Serverless Architectures

  Kong Inc., the leading API platform for modern architectures, today launched Kong 1.0, the latest version of Kong's core open source technology that incorporates learnings from three years of production experience for a fully featured offering. Developers, DevOps engineers and solutions architects at organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises use Kong to effectively secure, connect and orchestrate APIs within modern architectures to help meet evolving demands for scalability, performance and flexibility.

• QUALCOMM DIRBS Software Platform to Solve Counterfeit Issue

• Qualcomm Open-Sources Mobile ID Platform

  “Counterfeit devices are a significant problem worldwide and result in an estimated 45.3 billion EUR in lost sales to genuine manufacturers each year”

  Qualcomm has decided to share its Device Identification Registration and Blocking System (DIRBS) for mobile devices as open-source software on GitHub.

  DIRBS is a sever-based platform developed by Qualcomm to help government authorities tackle trade in stolen mobile phones and identify counterfeiting activities.

• Hindawi Limited Launches Open-Source Peer Review System Built on the PubSweet Framework

  Hindawi Limited is pleased to announce the launch of a new peer review platform built using the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation's (Coko) open source PubSweet framework.

  This is the first complete open-source peer review system to come out of the Coko community, a group of like-minded organizations, including eLife, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and the University of California Press, keen on working collaboratively towards the advancement of openness in scholarly communications software.

• Tidelift Reaches Milestone of One Million Dollars Committed to Pay Open Source Software Maintainers

  Select maintainers in the JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby ecosystems to receive at least $10,000 each

• Today’s European Patent Office (EPO) Works for Large, Foreign Pharmaceutical Companies in Pursuit of Patents on Nature, Life, and Essential/Basic Drugs
• The EPO Has Quit Pretending That It Cares About Patent Quality, All It Cares About is Quantity of Lawsuits
• Qualcomm’s Escalating Patent Wars Have Already Caused Massive Buybacks (Loss of Reserves) and Loss of Massive Clients
• Links 17/9/2018: Torvalds Takes a Break, SQLite 3.25.0 Released

• A $1, Linux-Capable, Hand-Solderable Processor

  Over on the EEVblog, someone noticed an interesting chip that’s been apparently flying under our radar for a while. This is an ARM processor capable of running Linux. It’s hand-solderable in a TQFP package, has a built-in Mali GPU, support for a touch panel, and has support for 512MB of DDR3. If you do it right, this will get you into the territory of a BeagleBone or a Raspberry Pi Zero, on a board that’s whatever form factor you can imagine. Here’s the best part: you can get this part for $1 USD in large-ish quantities. A cursory glance at the usual online retailers tells me you can get this part in quantity one for under $3. This is interesting, to say the least.

• Open Source Paramotor Using Quadcopter Tech

  But not always. The OpenPPG project aims to create a low-cost paramotor with electronics and motors intended for heavyweight multicopters. It provides thrust comparable to gas paramotors for 20 to 40 minutes of flight time, all while being cheaper and easier to maintain. The whole project is open source, so if you don’t want to buy one of their kits or assembled versions, you’re free to use and remix the design into a personal aircraft of your own creation.

  It’s still going to cost for a few thousand USD to get a complete paraglider going, but at least you won’t need to pay hangar fees. Thanks to the design which utilizes carbon fiber plates and some clever hinges, the whole thing folds up into a easier to transport and store shape than traditional paramotors with one large propeller. Plus it doesn’t hurt that it looks a lot cooler.

• SD Times news digest: Rust 1.29, Firebase Android SDKs, and Linus Torvald's apology

• Privilege Escalation Vulnerability Found in Honeywell Android Computers

• Google apologizes for accidentally changing settings on some people's smartphones without their knowledge or consent

• In Major Auto Partnership, Google's Android System to Power Dashboard Media Display

• Google partners with Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi to put Android into millions of vehicles

• How to use the Android Pie lockdown mode

• 10 best customization apps for Android!

• BlackBerry Key2 LE: A Competitive Android Offering

• Nagra's OTT solution support for Android TV

A firewall is a set of rules. When a data packet moves into or out of a protected network space, its contents (in particular, information about its origin, target, and the protocol it plans to use) are tested against the firewall rules to see if it should be allowed through. Here’s a simple example...

• Fedora Firefox – GCC/CLANG dilemma

  After reading Mike’s blog post about official Mozilla Firefox switch to LLVM Clang, I was wondering if we should also use that setup for official Fedora Firefox binaries.

  The numbers look strong but as Honza Hubicka mentioned, Mozilla uses pretty ancient GCC6 to create binaries and it’s not very fair to compare it with up-to date LLVM Clang 6.

  Also if I’m reading the mozilla bug correctly the PGO/LTO is not yet enabled for Linux, only plain optimized builds are used for now…which means the transition at Mozilla is not so far than I expected.

• September 2018 CA Communication

  Mozilla has sent a CA Communication to inform Certification Authorities (CAs) who have root certificates included in Mozilla’s program about current events relevant to their membership in our program and to remind them of upcoming deadlines. This CA Communication has been emailed to the Primary Point of Contact (POC) and an email alias for each CA in Mozilla’s program, and they have been asked to respond to the following 7 action items:

• Emily Dunham: CFP tricks 1

  Some strategies I’ve recommended in the past for dealing with this include looking at the conference’s marketing materials to imagine who they would interest, and examining the abstracts of past years’ talks.

• Windows 7 to Linux: Preparations

  This is the first part of a series of articles that describes how to migrate from a Windows 7 device to a device running Linux. The main motivation behind the series of tutorials is to provide Windows 7 users with instructions to migrate to a Linux distribution and not to Windows 10.

  Support for Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system ends in January 2020. While Enterprise customers may extend the support phase by three years by paying Microsoft for extended support, that is not an option for regular users.

• Kubernetes: Naming Things

• [Older] Look Up Website Information With Whois in Linux

• Getting started with openmediavault: A home NAS solution

• Globbing and Regex: So Similar, So Different

• Linux tricks that can save you time and trouble

• Quantum Computing and Cryptography

  Quantum computing is a new way of computing -- one that could allow humankind to perform computations that are simply impossible using today's computing technologies. It allows for very fast searching, something that would break some of the encryption algorithms we use today. And it allows us to easily factor large numbers, something that would break the RSA cryptosystem for any key length.

  This is why cryptographers are hard at work designing and analyzing "quantum-resistant" public-key algorithms. Currently, quantum computing is too nascent for cryptographers to be sure of what is secure and what isn't. But even assuming aliens have developed the technology to its full potential, quantum computing doesn't spell the end of the world for cryptography. Symmetric cryptography is easy to make quantum-resistant, and we're working on quantum-resistant public-key algorithms. If public-key cryptography ends up being a temporary anomaly based on our mathematical knowledge and computational ability, we'll still survive. And if some inconceivable alien technology can break all of cryptography, we still can have secrecy based on information theory -- albeit with significant loss of capability.

  At its core, cryptography relies on the mathematical quirk that some things are easier to do than to undo. Just as it's easier to smash a plate than to glue all the pieces back together, it's much easier to multiply two prime numbers together to obtain one large number than it is to factor that large number back into two prime numbers. Asymmetries of this kind -- one-way functions and trap-door one-way functions -- underlie all of cryptography.

• This New CSS Attack Restarts iPhones & Freezes Macs

• Time to Rebuild Alpine Linux Docker Containers After Package Manager Patch

• GrrCon 2018 Augusta15 Automation and Open Source Turning the Tide on Attackers John Grigg

• Juniper Brings Contrail to the Edge, Works Closely With Red Hat

  Juniper Networks’ new Contrail Edge Cloud packs functionality into a small footprint to bring cloud capabilities and virtualization to the edge network. “Edge” according to Juniper includes base stations, hub sites, and switching sites.

  Service providers want to bring cost-effective compute to edge locations. But these locations have space limitations and power constraints. Juniper’s answer is its new Contrail Edge Cloud with capabilities packed into a software-defined data plane. While data plane functions are pushed to the edge, the technology keeps management functions centralized.

• Juniper Networks Gives Service Providers a Powerful Edge with New Contrail Solution

• Some heroes are born - others are compiled

  Almost a year ago today, my team set out on an adventure to listen, learn, and build. We had a sense that people’s relationship with the operating system (OS) was changing, and we wanted to learn more.

  We met a lot of heroes as we traveled the globe. No, I’m not talking about men or women in capes swooping in at the last moment to save kittens or to avert mankind’s total annihilation. I’m talking about real people who work real jobs where they solve real problems. I’m talking about developers, system administrators, and architects—people who live on the command line and dream in 1s and 0s.

• Buy The Dip? I Would Not, But.. Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Ventas, Inc. (VTR)

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Dips 3.02% for September 17

• Forget What Wall Street Says: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Ventas, Inc. (VTR)

• Short-Term Picks To Give You An Edge: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Valley National Bancorp (VLY)

• Eye-Catching Hot Stocks – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)

• Aceinna launches open-source GNSS+IMU development kit for drones, robots

  MEMS-based sensing solutions company Acienna announces OpenIMU, a professionally supported, open-source GPS/GNSS-aided inertial navigation software stack for low-cost precise navigation applications.

  Integrating an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based sensor network will greatly improve its navigation and self-location capabilities, Acienna said.

  It is aimed at developing autonomously guided vehicles for industrial applications, autonomous cars, factory or industrial robots, drones, remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) or any kind of smart machine that needs to move fast or slow, on land, in the air or in water.

• Sensything Multi-Sensor Open Source Development Board

  Engineers, developers and hobbyists may be interested in the new multi sensor development board called Sensything. Offering an open source, high-resolution (24-bit), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled sensor interface platform that supports multiple sensor readings. “In most cases, it offers a single-board, single-platform solution for acquiring and logging multiple sensor readings that can be seen/sent through an Android app, an IoT or analytics platform, or over an ordinary USB connection.”

• Compute module to debut faster i.MX8M Mini SoC

  Variscite unveiled a “DART-MX8M-Mini” module that runs on NXP’s new i.MX8M Mini SoC, a 14nm variant of the i.MX8M with one to four 2GHz Cortex-A53 cores and a 400MHz Cortex-M4, plus scaled down 1080p video via MIPI-DSI.

  [...] it will almost certainly run Linux, if not Android.

If recent research is any indication, artificial intelligence (AI) has a bright future in medicine. Nvidia developed an AI system that can generate synthetic scans of brain cancer. Google subsidiary DeepMind has demonstrated a machine learning algorithm that can recommend treatment for more than 50 eye diseases with 94 percent accuracy. And in newly published research, New York University (NYU) showed how AI might aid in lung cancer diagnosis.

A paper today published in the journal Nature Medicine (“Classification and mutation prediction from non-small cell lung cancer histopathology images using deep learning”) describes how a team of NYU researchers retrained Google’s Inception v3, an open source convolutional neural network architected for object identification, to detect certain forms of lung cancers with 97 percent accuracy.

Also: Google AI Tool Identifies a Tumor's Mutations From an Image

• An update on what's happening with Crazy Justice, the Battle Royale game from Black Riddles Studio

  It's been a rather turbulent time for Black Riddles Studio, with Crazy Justice [Official Site, Steam] originally being scheduled to release in Early Access in July. I contacted Fig to see if they knew what was going on, who got an answer from Black Riddles for me. First, let's sum up the situation for those not up to speed.

• What Subset Games (FTL, Into the Breach) think of Valve's Steam Play

  Subset Games [Official Site] are a developer I was especially keen to speak to about Valve's Steam Play system, since Into the Breach is included as a white-listed game by Valve even though they're working on a Linux version.

  Into the Breach is an interesting turn-based strategy game about the remnants of human civilization being threatened by gigantic creatures breeding beneath the earth. They confirmed back in early August that Into the Breach's Linux version was in "active development", so I thought their viewpoint might be quite interesting given the situation.

  They first made it clear they are doing a Linux version, then their programmer Mathew expanded on it a bit.

• Overwatch Players Using Linux Get Accidentally Banned

  Overwatch is definitely one of the best FPS games around. Even despite the fact that is has been out for over 2 years now, it remains highly popular due to its varied roster of characters and the team-based mechanics. While everything hasn’t been smooth sailing, the game has also largely avoided any major issues as it develops further.

  In a report via PCGamesN though, Linux users of the game had a nasty surprise after they found their Overwatch accounts had been permanently banned.

• Blizzard Throws Permanent Bans For Overwatch Players Using Linux

  Well, this is quite an interesting situation the players of Overwatch have found themselves.

  It seems like Overwatch players who have been using the Linux operating system to play Blizzard’s hero shooter game have now been banned, like permanently.

  Just recently when bans took place, players found out that their choice of OS was the reason for such bans. There is a lot of unrest among the community as fans are not too happy with this situation, they have been pushed into.

  As you may know that Overwatch has been playable on Linux for quite some time now and fans have been using this opportunity to play using, Linux operating system.