Security: Patches, KeePass2 and Healthcare

• Security updates for Tuesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (openconnect), Fedora (e2fsprogs, glibc, kernel, and nss), openSUSE (Mesa, php7, and slurm), Oracle (.NET Core, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and thunderbird), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, openvswitch, and openvswitch2.11), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, libssh, libvpx, Mesa, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libbsd and samba).

• KeePass2 2.44 Released with True Key 4 CSV Import

  KeePass 2.44 was released a days ago as the latest stable mono password manager. Users of any previous 2.x version are recommended to upgrade. KeePass Password Safe was a Windows only password manager. Through the use of Mono, KeePass 2.x works on Linux and Mac OS.

• Convenience over security: Mobile healthcare apps open up fresh risks to patients’ data

  Healthcare is increasingly going mobile, as hospitals and medical practitioners look to reduce waiting room times by harnessing the benefits of treatment on the go. But patients are often placing too much trust in these apps, which can often expose them to fresh security and privacy risks. The rapid growth of mobile healthcare app market was borne more out of necessity than any medical advancement, in the view of Adam Piper, a software developer working in the UK. “If I want to get a doctor’s appointment, it has to be today, and by 8.01am all the appointments are gone,” Piper told The Daily Swig.

What Must be Considered Before Choosing a Container Platform?

An increasing number of IT groups are incorporating development tools, such as containers, in order to create cloud-native apps that operate in a constant manner across public, private, and hybrid clouds. However, the trickiest part is to find the best container platforms for the organization. It is hard to make the correct decisions regarding container orchestration for managing lifecycles of the containers in order to function at scale and accelerate innovation. Containers can be Linux It is vital for every application to run on Linux since the containers are always running on a Linux host. Containers that are used for managing their lifecycles, work best with Linux. However, these days, Kubernetes is the popular container orchestration platform that was built on Linux concepts and make use of Linux tooling and application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing the containers. The companies are advised to opt for a Linux distribution that they know and trust before taking any decision on the OS for their container platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), an OS platform, suits well for operating company’s containers as it provides stability and security features simultaneously, allowing developers to be agile.

KDE: Krita Weekly, LabPlot and More

• Krita Weekly #9

  With everyone getting back into work, we have managed to control the number of bugs. There are 2 fewer bugs than what I reported last time. I know it is still not a lot, but with Dmitry not available for most of the time and team having to divide its time between the resource rewrite & bug fixing, it is pretty good that the number is decreasing.

• Reference lines and image elements

  We continue working on the plotting capabilities of LabPlot. In the next release we will be adding two new worksheet objects to provide more flexibility and features to create attractive looking visualizations. In this short blog post we want to report on this recent development.

• Skipping functions from entire directories while debugging (e.g. skip all functions from system headers)

  So, today I got finally so tired of navigating (or explicitly stepping over) all the internal functions in gdb (you know, all the inline functions from STL containers, from Boost, from this pointer wrapper class, that string class) that I finally googled 'gdb skip system functions'. And guess what, it's been there since gdb 7.12, from 3 years ago, and it's almost trivial, just adding something like this to ~/.gdbinit:

Wine 5.0 Released

• Wine 5.0 Released

  The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 5.0 is now available. This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main highlights are: - Builtin modules in PE format. - Multi-monitor support. - XAudio2 reimplementation. - Vulkan 1.1 support. This release is dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, who passed away in August 2019 at the young age of 30. Józef was a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation, and the lead developer of the vkd3d project. His skills and his kindness are sorely missed by all of us.

• Wine release 5.0

  What's new in Wine 5.0
  ======================
  
  
  *** PE modules
  
  - Most modules are built in PE format (Portable Executable, the
    Windows binary format) instead of ELF when the MinGW compiler is
    available. This helps various copy protection schemes that check
    that the on-disk and in-memory contents of system modules are
    identical.
  
  - The actual PE binaries are copied into the Wine prefix instead of
    the fake DLL files. This makes the prefix look more like a real
    Windows installation, at the cost of some extra disk space.
  
  - Modules that have been converted to PE can use standard wide-char C
    functions, as well as wide-char character constants like L"abc".
    This makes the code easier to read.
  
  - Not all modules have been converted to PE yet; this is an ongoing
    process that will continue during the Wine 5.x development series.
  
  - The Wine C runtime is updated to support linking to MinGW-compiled
    binaries; it is used by default instead of the MinGW runtime when
    building DLLs.
  
  
  *** Graphics
  
  - Multiple display adapters and monitors are properly supported,
    including dynamic configuration changes.
  
  - The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec.
  
  - The WindowsCodecs library is able to convert more bitmap formats,
    including palette-indexed formats.
  
  
  *** Direct3D
  
  - Fullscreen Direct3D applications inhibit the screensaver.
  
  - DXGI swapchain presents inform the application when the
    corresponding window is minimized. This typically allows
    applications to reduce CPU usage while minimized, and is in some
    cases required to allow the application window to be restored again.
  
  - Switching between fullscreen and windowed modes using the standard
    Alt+Enter combination is implemented for DXGI applications.
  
  - The following features are implemented for Direct3D 12 applications:
    - Switching between fullscreen and windowed.
    - Changing display modes.
    - Scaled presents.
    - Swap intervals.
    These features were previously already implemented for earlier
    versions of the Direct3D API.
  
  - The handling of various edge cases is improved. Among others:
    - Out of range reference values for the alpha and stencil tests.
    - Sampling 2D resources with 3D samplers and vice versa.
    - Drawing with mapped textures and buffers.
    - Usage of invalid DirectDraw clipper objects.
    - Creating Direct3D devices on invalid Windows, like the desktop
      window.
    - Viewports with a minimum Z larger than or equal to the maximum Z.
    - Resources bound through both shader-resource views and
      render-target or depth-stencil views at the same time.
    - Blits between formats with and without alpha components.
    Since well-behaved applications don't rely on these edge cases, they
    typically only affect one or two applications each. There are
    nevertheless quite a number of them.
  
  - Dirty texture regions are tracked more accurately for Direct3D 8 and 9
    texture uploads.
  
  - Uploads of S3TC-compressed 3D textures require less address space.
    Since 3D textures can be potentially large, and address space
    exhaustion is a concern for 32-bit applications, S3TC-compressed 3D
    textures are uploaded per-slice, instead of in a single upload.
  
  - The ID3D11Multithread interface is implemented.
  
  - Various lighting calculation fixes and improvements for older
    DirectDraw applications have been made.
  
  - Limited support for blits across swapchains is implemented.
  
  - More shader reflection APIs are implemented.
  
  - The wined3d CPU blitter can handle compressed source resources.
    Support for compressed destination resources was already implemented
    in a previous release.
  

• Wine 5.0 Released With Big Improvements For Gaming, Countless Application Fixes

  Wine 5.0 has been released as stable as the annual timed release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms. Wine 5.0 is another big step forward in allowing modern Windows applications to run well particularly on Linux and macOS. Thanks to CodeWeavers and funding by Valve for their work on the Wine-based Proton downstream, there are many game fixes that have been incorporated over the past year especially. So Windows games are in better shape plus there is Vulkan 1.1 support, FAudio integration, and countless other improvements.

• The bottle for Wine 5.0 has officially been popped open as it's out now

  The day has arrived, the official stable release of Wine 5.0 has arrived bringing thousands of improvements and a bunch of new features. [...] Wine 5.0 as a release is also being dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation and he lead developer of the vkd3d project who sadly passed away in August 2019.