• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 58

  The System Settings Window Decorations page has been completely rewritten, bringing it into greater conformance with the modern visual style and fixing a huge number of bugs in the process (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)...

• KDE Continues Overhauling System Settings, More Discover Improvements

  Sunday mornings mean another weekly recap of the KDE improvements made, thanks to the great analysis by KDE developer Nathan Graham. While Plasma 5.15 was released this week, the KDE developers are already hard at work on KDE Plasma 5.16.

• ClassPass, Gfycat, StreetEasy hit in latest round of mass site hacks

• Behold, the Facebook phishing scam that could dupe even vigilant users

  Researchers with password manager service Myki recently found a site that purported to offer SSO from Facebook. As the video below shows, the login window looked almost identical to the real Facebook SSO. This one, however, didn’t run on the Facebook API and didn’t interface with the social network in any way. Instead, it phished the username and password.

• Cyber threats to utilities on the rise, firm warns

• WireGuard Released For macOS, WireGuard Windows Coming & Linux Kernel Bits Still Pending

  The initial version of the WireGuard open-source secure VPN tunnel is now available for macOS, following the WireGuard for iOS port a few months prior. But sadly on the Linux front, the kernel bits still have yet to be mainlined.

  WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld announced the release of WireGuard for macOS on Saturday along with the cooperation of other developers. This macOS port is built from the same sources as their iOS app and integrates into Apple's networking stack.

• Android Circuit: Galaxy S10 To Launch February 20th, On Sale Early March, Here Are The New Features

• Android Things is no longer for “Things,” focuses on smart speakers and displays

• Google is trying to stop a private sale of 5G spectrum

• Google to tone down Android Things production to focus on Internet of Things

• Google widely rolls out Material Theme redesign of Play Store ‘Ratings and reviews’ on Android

• Samsung Won't Give Up on Android Tablets, Announces the Galaxy Tab S5e

• 17 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last two weeks including Playground: Childish Gambino, MyScript Calculator 2, and Pokémon TCG Card Dex (2/2/19 - 2/16/19)

• Android: 5 new games you have to play this week

• These are the coolest games coming to Android this year

• Honor records the names of a dozen Android smartphones

• Huawei P30 and P30 Pro will feature FullHD displays and run on Android 9.0 Pie

• How to get the most from the navigation bar on Samsung Galaxy phones running One UI (Android Pie)

• NordVPN 3.11.2 for Android Came Out With Improvements

A release candidate for the upcoming 2.7.16 bug fix release is now available for download.

• SMLR Episode 301 Fresh Looks:Endless OS

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 796

FnalCrypt is a free and open source encryption tool that allows you to encrypt files with a key. It is available for Linux, Windows and macOS.

• Fedora 31 Planning To Use Cgroups V2 By Default

  While the Linux kernel has shipped Cgroups V2 as stable since early 2016, on Fedora and most other Linux distributions it hasn't been enabled by default over the original control groups "Cgroups" implementation. But come Fedora 31 later this year, they are now planning to make it the default.

  Enabling Cgroups V2 by default will allow systemd and the various Linux container technologies along with libvirt and friends to make use of the new features and improvements over the original Cgroups like offering a unified hierarchy. The new implementation also provides better consistency, purpose-driven flexibility, and other design improvements over the original control groups. It's taken a while for CGroups V2 to become the default due to interface changes compared to V1 and all of the important containers/tooling needing to be adapted to make use of it.

• Fedora Infrastructure Detective Work: Mirrorlist 503's

  The Fedora Project Mirrorlist system has evolved multiple times in the last 10 years. Originally written by Matt Domsch it underwent an update and rewrite by Adrian Reber, et al a couple of years ago. For many years Fedora used a server layout where the front end web servers would proxy the data over VPN to dedicated mirrorlist servers. While this made sense when systems were a bit slower compared to VPN latency, it had become more troublesome over the last couple of years.

• GNU FreeDink 109.6

  This is the first official announcement for the new 109.x line with updated technologies (SDL2, OpenGL), WebAssembly support and many fixes and improvements.

• GNU's RPG/Adventure Game Updated For SDL2, Defaults To OpenGL Rendering

  Of the many free software projects under the GNU umbrella, there aren't many games. One of the only titles is GNU FreeDink, which is out this weekend with its newest update after several active weeks of development.

• Windows 10 Will Let You Access Linux Files Using File Explorer [Ed: Misleading from Bogdan Popa, Microsoft News Editor writing in the "Linux" section of Softpedia. This isn't "Linux", it's Windows.]

• Windows 10 Will Soon Let You Access WSL Linux Files From Explorer, Other Improvements [Ed: Those are not "Linux files" but Windows]

• Updated WSL in Windows 10 version 1903 lets you access Linux files from Windows

• Windows 10 April 2019 Update Brings Linux File Access With Enhanced WSL [Ed: People are now supposed to think Windows is Linux and vice versa. This deliberate confusion serves Microsoft. It serves EEE.]

• Windows 10's File Explorer Will Soon Let You Access Your Linux Subsystem Files [Ed: Longtime (decades-long) Microsoft boosters are boosting this perception too]

• MalwareTech loses bid to suppress damning statements made after days of partying

  Hutchins was then taken to jail, where he made two phone calls. Despite being informed the calls were subject to monitoring and recording, Hutchins allegedly "made incriminating statements," court records showed, without elaborating.

  In a motion filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, attorneys for Hutchins moved to suppress the statements and any evidence that may have been obtained as a result of them. Hutchins's grounds are that he didn't waive his Miranda rights against self-incrimination and that his intoxication and limited understanding of the US criminal procedural system made it impossible for him to voluntarily waive those rights.

• Secure Coding in Java

  A comprehensive guide to coding safely and preventing security holes in your applications.

• Understand how to access the Dark Web with Tor Browser [Tutorial]

• Guyana: GPL computers hacked, ransom demanded
  

  The Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) says its computerised systems were hacked last week and a ransom of digital currency was demanded.

  The cyber-attack resulted in the disruption of some of its services but the Utility Company has assured that the situation is now under control.

  [...]

  GPL said the attackers demanded a ransom of bitcoins to remove all encryptions from within the network, however the Company said it will not heed to such request.

• Cyber Security Today: Feb. 15, 2019 — Another huge file of stolen credentials for sale, how bad was 2018 and phony U.S. military web site spotted

  Another huge file of stolen credentials for sale on the dark web, new stats show how bad breaches were in 2018 and a phony U.S. military web site spotted.

• Apple’s macOS Targeted By Windows Malware [Ed: When Microsoft Windows spreads elsewhere, outside Windows (e.g. Mono), trouble is afoot]

• RADV Driver Gets Big Patch Series For 8-bit & 16-bit Arithmetic, 8-bit Storage

  A set of 38 patches have been sent out that wire in support for the VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_half_float, VK_AMD_gpu_shader_int16, and VK_KHR_8bit_storage extensions to the RADV driver within Mesa.

  Rhys Perry who started contributing to the Nouveau driver stack has been working on this 8-bit and 16-bit arithmetic support for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver. These 8-bit / 16-bit extensions work for AMD Volcanic Islands GPUs and newer. However, the half-floats support needs LLVM 8.0 or newer due to bugs on LLVM 7.

• BACO Power Savings Support Comes To AMD's Vega 12

  The latest addition to AMD's open-source Linux kernel driver is supporting BACO on Vega 12.

  With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle, BACO is enabled for Vega 10 and Vega 20. BACO is short for Bus Active, Chip Off as a low-power mode whereby most of the GPU is shut-off during idle periods in order to drastically cut the power consumption of the graphics card. BACO is also known as AMD ZeroCore Power mode.

• Improved ETC2 Texture Compression Lands For Older Haswell/Ivybridge GPUs On Linux

  The previously mentioned work on improving ETC2 support for older generations of Intel graphics has now been mainlined for Mesa 19.1.

  This work for the ETC2 texture compression is improving the "fake" support for Intel Gen 7 class graphics, the Ivybridge and Haswell era graphics. This work was done by Igalia to address the lack of native ETC2 coverage on these several year old chips. Following this improved implementation for the fake ETC2 support is also wiring up OES_copy_image support for this extension. ETC2 is the lossy texture compression mandated since OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 4.3.

Queued for mainlining with the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle is initial support for Bitmain SoCs. Bitmain is the Chinese company that started out designing ASICs for Bitcoin mining with the Antminer and other products. The company has also been venturing into designs for artificial intelligence and deep learning.

With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel will be initial support for Bitmain's BM1880 System-on-a-Chip as well as the "Sophon Edge" developer board.

• Steve Kemp: Updated myy compiler, and bought a watch.

• David Moreno: Dell XPS 13 9380

  Got myself a XPS 13” 9380 that Dell just released as “Developer Edition” with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed. They just released it on January 2019.

  Ubuntu didn’t last long though. I prefer OS X Mojave than any of the Ubuntu installations. It’s okay though, it’s just not for me.

• Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2019

  I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 hours from December. I worked 24 hours and so will carry over 1 hour.

  I prepared another stable update for Linux 3.16 (3.16.63), but did not upload a new release yet.

• Detect the player’s boundary

  In this article, we will start to create the boundary detection mechanism which can be used to help the boy moving around the canvas. We will go slowly where this topic will take a few chapters to complete. In this chapter, we will focus on below issues.

• Threadless mode in Mitogen 0.3

• Getting Started with Pathlib

• Colorization in GIMP

  As part of the Image team at GREYC lab (CRNS, ENSICAEN, University of Caen), I implemented the “fill by line art” algorithm in GIMP, also known as “Smart Colorization“. You may know this algorithm in G’Mic (developed by the same team), so when they proposed me to work with them, I wanted to implement this algorithm in GIMP core. Thus it became my first assignment.

• Latte and a Colors tale...

  A few months ago while I was scratching Latte Dock limits an idea came and haunted my thoughts. How Latte could give the colors freedom for panels and windows that an Android phone already provides? Questions like this arose and solutions appeared suddenly in many different places, but an important and concrete dream prevail in the end.

• Basic Linux Virtualization with KVM

• embedding Haskell in AsciiDoc

• Note to Self: Growing the Root File System on First Boot

• How to Install LTS Enablement Stack in Ubuntu 18.04.2

• How to Extract (Unzip) Tar Gz File

• Fancy numbering of records

• Inserting Data Into Tables - MySQL Series Part 4

• How to Add Show Desktop in Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10 in Dock

• How To Grant And Remove Sudo Privileges To Users On Ubuntu

The desktop environment with its bundle of programs sharing a common graphical user interface (GUI) remains a firm favorite with users. Not surprising really given that a good desktop environment makes computing fun and simple. The graphical desktop environment has become so ingrained in almost everyone’s computer activities that it might seem the command line will wither away. Yet, there is still an important role to play for the powerful command-line interface (CLI).

Also: FinalCrypt – An Open Source File Encryption Application

• Ravenfield, the single-player FPS with large-scale battles has a new release out

  More FPS news for you this weekend, with the single-player Ravenfield having another great update out with lots of new toys.

  Early Access build 13 is up and with it comes two huge new maps with River Delta and Citadel, so it now has a total of nine large battles to engage in.

• The unique FPS 'Shotgun Farmers' is leaving Early Access next month

  Shotgun Farmers, by far one of the most unique FPS games I've played in a long time is due to leave Early Access soon.

  While the developer, Megastorm Games, isn't giving an exact date just yet they have made it clear it will be next month. To go along with the news, a small update was released adding in some adjustments to the maps along with support for character emotes.

• The first Steam Play update for this year is out with Proton 3.16-7 beta

  Valve have pushed out a Steam Play beta update with Proton 3.16-7 now available for testing. Lots of fixes!

  Not quite the huge upgrade many were expecting, most people thought Valve would be pushing ahead with a major update of Wine but this release still seems like a very nice update overall

  Firstly, they've updated DXVK to 0.96 and FAudio to 19.02. This should hopefully mean quite a number of games will see improvements and begin working. Additionally, there has been some controller improvements, with Unity specifically mentioned for games like Subnautica and INSIDE.

Last year, I decided to do a thorough analysis of the KDE and Gnome application stacks, separately, to figure out how complete these two desktop environments really are. I looked at the different application categories, weighed the major advantages and flaws in the popular software, examined some unique entries, and then also talked about what’s missing, the obstacles that keep these environments from being fully independent and 100% user ready, so to speak.

I’d like to examine Xfce next. After all, this is the third most popular Linux desktop environment, barring forks of the other two, and so it merits its own moment of spotlight. But at the same time, Xfce has never really deliberately prided itself at what it can do and offer. It’s always hung to the back, sort of shying away from publicity, being modest and frugal in all aspects. So when you think about Xfce, you don’t normally think about the application stack. You could say it’s a lightweight, simple desktop, but can you name five pure Xfce programs? Aha. Let’s see.

Compiz 0.9.14.0 has been officially released today.

Major changes in this release include:

- Development has switched from Bazaar (back) to Git [1].
- CCSM has been ported to PyGObject, GTK 3 and Python 3.
- compizconfig-python has been ported from Pyrex to Cython.
- Restored the Color Filter plugin by porting it to the new plugin API.
- Added support for loading configuration from multiple files.
- Docks and splashscreens now appear focused.
- Fixed build errors with GCC 8.
- Removed KDE (4.x) support code.
- Compiz now needs cmake ≥ 3.10.0 and pkg-config ≥ 0.29.1 to build.
- gtk-window-decorator now needs libmetacity ≥ 3.22.0 to build.

Also, some bugs have been fixed. See NEWS [2] for a list of them.

The tarball for the new release can be downloaded at [3].
Please report any bugs you have found to our bug tracker [4].

I would like to thank Alberts Muktupāvels, Marco Trevisan, Auboyneau Vincent,
Samuel Thibault, Colomban Wendling, Eleni Maria Stea and other people who have
contributed to this release.

Also: Compiz 0.9.14 Released As First Update In Over Two Years

The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename "stretch"). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "stretch" media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.

Also: Debian 9.8 Released With Latest Security Fixes