If you have been less than satisfied with the user-interface of the Pitivi non-linear open-source video editor for Linux, you may want to try out their next release...

• Samsung's Galaxy Note 9 and the triumph of the phablet
• How to enable/disable Gmail conversation threads on desktop, Android & iOS
• Millions of Android Devices Are Vulnerable Right Out of the Box
• Android powered devices are susceptible to major vulnerabilities out-of-the-box: Report
• How to set up a satellite Wi-Fi hotspot for your iPhone, iPad or Android device
• How Android Pie could change the way you use your phone
• Everything that's new with notifications in Android 9.0 Pie
• Google's Android Pie could change the way you use your smartphone
• 15 best new (and 1 WTF) Android games released this week including FNGenius: Live Game Show, Heroes Inc. 2, and ...

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Hardware support improvements coming for Linux 4.19 aren't limited to the x86 space but a lot of new ARM hardware support is also being introduced in this imminent kernel cycle...

• Linux Apps Are Now Available on More Chromebooks Powered by Intel Braswell CPUs

  It looks like Google is taking support for Linux apps very serious lately by recently enabling its integrated virtualization machine for running Linux apps on Chrome OS to support Chromebooks powered by Intel Braswell CPUs.

• The Academy launches open-source foundation for media developers

  The idea is to enable them to share resources and collaborate on technologies for image creation, visual effects, animation and sound.

  “We are thrilled to partner with The Linux Foundation for this vital initiative that fosters more innovation, more collaboration, more creativity among artists and engineers in our community,” said Academy CEO Dawn Hudson. “The Academy Software Foundation is core to the mission of our Academy: promoting the arts and sciences of motion pictures.”

• GSoC’18 Phase-3

  For this phase, I started with implementing Stamps feature in the Drawing activity. This feature allows users to use different stamps images in their beautiful arts. For now, I have added images from solar activity to use as stamps.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 31

  This week we’re all at Akademy–KDE’s yearly gathering of developers, designers, system administrators, and users. I’m giving a presentation later today about how we can make KDE Software irresistible!

  As such, it as a bit of a lighter week for the Usability & Productivity initiative, what with all the preparation and conference-going, but we still managed to get quite a bit done. And all the in-person interactions are setting the stage for many more good things to come.

• Something Happened to My OpenMandriva Lx OS

  Yesterday I booted my laptop with OpenMandriva Lx and went to look for a book. When I returned to the machine, a kernel panic was waiting for me on the screen.

  Apparently, something went very wrong with the updates that I performed last week, but I did not notice.

  This has happened before, though. As the laptop boots seven OSs (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Pisi, Elive, Fedora, and PicarOS), when I install a system that changes the OMV-controlled GRUB2, OpenMandriva gets a panic.

  I do not have the expertise to rectify things other than by performing a re-install. So, I reinstalled OpenMandriva, updated it (the process did not last more than an hour or so) and, sure enough, the OS was bootable again.

  [...]

  Maybe it is time for me to start experimenting with BSD, Haiku, or something.

• Google Pixel 3 XL Leak Reveals 6.7-inch Screen With Triple Camera Setup
• Intel has no chance in servers and they know it

  Intel is flying press to an Analyst day to discuss their impending server meltdown. SemiAccurate has been detailing this impending catastrophe for over a year now, it is now time for the details.

• Journeys

  This would be a long blog post as I would be sharing a lot of journeys, so have your favorite beverage in your hand and prepare for an evening of musing.

  Before starting the blog post, I have been surprised as the last week and the week before, lot of people have been liking my Debconf 2016 blog post on diaspora which is almost two years old. Almost all the names mean nothing to me but was left unsure as to reason of the spike. Were they debconf newcomers who saw my blog post and their experience was similar to mine or something, don’t know.

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• Stylistic analysis can de-anonymize code, even compiled code

   

  A presentation today at Defcon from Drexel computer science prof Rachel Greenstadt and GWU computer sicence prof Aylin Caliskan builds on the pair's earlier work in identifying the authors of software and shows that they can, with a high degree of accuracy, identify the anonymous author of software, whether in source-code or binary form.  

• Even Anonymous Coders Leave Fingerprints

   

  Rachel Greenstadt, an associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, Greenstadt's former PhD student and now an assistant professor at George Washington University, have found that code, like other forms of stylistic expression, are not anonymous. At the DefCon hacking conference Friday, the pair will present a number of studies they've conducted using machine learning techniques to de-anonymize the authors of code samples. Their work could be useful in a plagiarism dispute, for instance, but it also has privacy implications, especially for the thousands of developers who contribute open source code to the world.

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• Tesla may Open Source Vehicle security Software to Other Car Manufacturers

  The best explanation to Tesla’s decision to give away its patents in good faith was written by  Bin Hu, Ming Hu, and Yi Yang on Informs.Org. They wrote, “We believe that Tesla opened up its patents to tip the scale between the two competing technologies in its favor. This is the logic: if Tesla’s patents are more likely to be adopted by other auto makers because they are free, the electric vehicle technology is more likely to become mainstream, and holding on to this belief, component suppliers (including energy companies by extension) are more likely to make investments into the electric vehicle technology rather than the competing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle technology.”

• Openbook is the latest dream of a digital life beyond Facebook

  As tech’s social giants wrestle with antisocial demons that appear to be both an emergent property of their platform power, and a consequence of specific leadership and values failures (evident as they publicly fail to enforce even the standards they claim to have), there are still people dreaming of a better way. Of social networking beyond outrage-fuelled adtech giants like Facebook and Twitter.

  There have been many such attempts to build a ‘better’ social network of course. Most have ended in the deadpool. A few are still around with varying degrees of success/usage (Snapchat, Ello and Mastodon are three that spring to mine). None has usurped Zuckerberg’s throne of course.

  [...]

  The team behind Openbook includes crypto(graphy) royalty, Phil Zimmermann — aka the father of PGP — who is on board as an advisor initially but billed as its “chief cryptographer”, as that’s what he’d be building for the platform if/when the time came. 

• Classic Shell Rebrands Itself as Open Shell and Transitions into Open Source [Ed: If it only runs in Windows, then how "Open" can it really be? It's just a companion for spyware.]
• Badgy is an open source E Ink badge

  Squaro Engineering has just developed their first e Ink product called Badgey. It features a 2.9 inch e-paper display with a resolution of 296×128 E and a five-way tactical switch for user input. The default firmware includes support for WiFiManager and OTA updates. This device retails for $29.99 and they offer volume pricing options, but it does not come with a battery, it has to be purchased separately.

• Unifont 11.0.02 Released

  Unifont 11.0.02 is now available. This is an interim release, with another released planned in the autumn of 2018. The main addition in this release is David Corbett's contribution of the over 600 glyphs in the Sutton SignWriting Unicode block.

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• Call for testing: OpenSSH 7.8
• mandoc-1.14.4 released
• nbdkit FreeBSD support

  With this patch series, nbdkit, the pluggable Network Block Device server, supports FreeBSD ≥ 11.2.

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Hello folks. Today I'll highlight some of the features and differences between the two popular Linux distros; Ubuntu 18.04 and Fedora 28. Each has their own package management; Ubuntu uses DEB while Fedora uses RPM, but both of them features the same Desktop Environment (GNOME) and aims to provide quality desktop experience for the Linux users.

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Brasero is a very simple disk burning GNOME app available for all Linux distributions. However, for sometime it has been removed from the standard Ubuntu OS images. The main reason behind is the low usage of DVD, CD storage mediums in recent times. However, if you still wants to burn some disks, erase or re-write some disks, you can still install Brasero in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions.

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Just over one month away is XDC2018 as the annual X.Org Developers' Conference where a variety of X.Org, Wayland, Mesa, Vulkan, and OpenGL talks will take place. This year's schedule is particularly packed and full of interesting information...

The Linux 4.19 kernel updates for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) should bring much faster performance for multi-threaded sequential reads -- as much as multiple times faster...

With KDE Plasma 5 right now it turns out that if you have relied upon CPU-based software rendering, when hitting Plasma's lock-screen it would actually go CPU-wild -- as far as maxing out the CPU to 100% utilization, thereby consuming a lot of power and generating excess heat. That will be fixed for KDE Plasma 5.14.0...

For those weekend Linux gamers, DXVK 0.65 is available today as the newest feature update to this library for running Direct3D 11 games under Wine via Vulkan...

Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V. opens this year's Akademy.

Akademy 2018 got off to a wet start with rains accompanying all attendees pouring into Vienna for KDE's largest annual community conference. Although the Pre-Registration event was held on Day Zero (Friday the 10th) and it was a fun-filled affair, Akademy kicked off in earnest on Saturday, with talks, panels and demonstrations. Read on to find out about Day 1 of Akademy and all that transpired:

Keynote: Mapping Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea with FOSS

Dan Bielefeld, the Technical Director of the Transitional Justice Working Group, explained the work they do to map North Korean locations of mass burial and execution sites using mapping technologies. He also delivered insight into how North Korea and the Kim regime operates, and how his organization gleans information both from interviews with refugees and from studying satellite imagery.

Dan Bielefeld talks about how the Transitional Justice Working Group tries to shed light on North Korea's crimes against humanity.

Although the topic of the suffering of North Koreans is grim, there is a silver lining, says Dan: One day there will be a transition, there will come a day when the Kim regime will end and North Koreans will regain the freedom that they have been denied for over 70 years. The work of the Transitional Justice Working Group will also help with that. Finding out what happened to loved ones and bringing those responsible for the atrocities to justice will be a crucial part of helping the nation heal.

And it makes sense, says Dan, for the Transitional Justice Working Group to work with both Free Software and Free Software communities. The software offers the group a degree of security and control they cannot find in closed source applications; and Free Software communities uphold the same values Dan's group is fighting for, that is, the right to privacy and personal freedom.

Privacy Panel

Quite appropriately, after Dan's keynote, Adriaan de Groot ran a panel where members discussed the matter of privacy. Developing privacy-respecting software is one of KDE's main goals and the panelists explained how developing free and open Personal Digital Assistants like Mycroft was crucial to protecting users from snooping corporations.

Another thing we rarely think about but is a source of concern with regard to personal information is trip planners. In actual fact, the amount of sensitive information that we unwittingly share by letting opaque apps tell us when and where to catch our flight is staggering. Since the 2017 Randa sprint, there are KDE developers actively working on a truly open and private solution that will help solve this problem.

The other thing the panel discussed was the state of GnuPG in Kmail. GnuPG is the framework that allows users to encrypt and decrypt email messages that, otherwise, would be sent in clear text -- a big privacy concern. At this stage of play, GnuPG is tightly integrated into Kmail and, is not only convenient for end users, but has also proved to be immune to recent vulnerabilities that have affected other email clients.

Combined with the underlying policy of all KDE apps of never collecting data subvertly or otherwise, KDE is sticking strictly to its goal of preserving user privacy.

Streamlined onboarding goal

Neofytos Kolokotronis talked about the progress of another of KDE's main goals, namely the onboarding of new users. Neofytos explained to attendees the progress the working group had made so far and where they wanted to go to. He had some advice on how to help new users join KDE, such as having good and clear documentation, mentoring new contributors, and building connections outside your immediate niche.

More Highlights from Day 1

Wrishiraj Kaushik in his talk titled Winds of Change - FOSS in India spoke about the current scenario of FOSS in India and his experience leading SuperX and integrating KDE with it.

The Indian union government has a nation-wide recommendation in place for the use, promotion and development of Free and Open Source software. Despite this, FOSS adoption has remained low in the country. The decision taken by some state governments to not adopt these recommendations in conjunction with the aggressive marketing carried out by proprietary software vendors in India has seriously hindered the use of Free Software. SuperX, however, has managed to find a place within the government and a few Indian universities thanks to its user-centric approach. SuperX has deployed 30,000 KDE shipments -- one of the largest deployments in the world, and there are 20,000 more in the works.

This was followed by a panel discussion by Lydia, Valorie and Bhushan in which they told the community about our KDE student programs and how to contribute to their running and up-keep. It was a talk of high relevance, given our KDE Community goal to streamline the onboarding process for new contributors and the fact that a large part of our new contributor base comes through our organized mentoring programs, namely Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in and Season of KDE.

Mirko Boehm presented a talk on the genesis of Quartermaster, a toolchain driven by Endocode and supported by Siemens and Google. Quartermaster implements industry best practises of license compliance management. It generates compliance reports by analysing data from the CI environment and building graphs for analysis, primarily performing a combination of build time analysis and static code analysis.

Lays Rodrigues showed off Atelier, the graphical interface for 3D printers..

Lays Rodrigues talked about Atelier, a cross-platform program designed to help you control your 3D printer. It supports most printers with open source firmware and Lays demoed the various features of Atelier during her talk, including video monitoring of the printer, 3D preview of the print design, temperature graphs and more.

Zoltan Padrah gave a talk on KTechLab and explained how he discovered it as a student of electronics engineering in 2008. KTechLab is a program that helps simulate electronic circuits and programs running on microcontrollers. It was migrated to the KDE infrastructure and joined KDE in 2017. The developers' upcoming plans are to release KTechLab for Qt4 and Qt5 and to port it to KDE Frameworks 5, as well as add new features like support to simulate automation systems for mechanics and have KiCad import/export.

Wrapping up

Day one was so full of content, it is hard to summarize everything that went on here. This has just been a summary of a few of the talks and demonstrations we enjoyed. There were many more talks on all topics, ranging from containerizing KDE's graphical apps, to an end users' perspective of using Kontact in a professional environment.

As we write this, already on day 2, it looks like today is shaping up to be equally exciting.

Dot Categories:

• Community and Events

• 5 Legitimately Hidden Features in Android Pie
• Android 9.0 Pie to hit six Sony smartphones starting September
• Android 9 Pie upgrades confirmed for Sony Xperia XZ1, XZ2, HTC U12+, HTC U11 series
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 gets Android Pie (Android 9) port with everything working
• Millions of Android devices prone to bugs, says report
• Android devices are stunningly vulnerable if you're a careless power-user
• An Android Spy App Left 1.7 Million Passwords And Nude Photos Exposed To Hackers
• BeyondPod has been removed from Android Auto, but a fix is in the works
• How to manage multiple Google accounts on your Android device

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Back in Linux 4.16 the SoundWire subsystem was added to the staging area as the MIPI standard for a low-power, two-wire sound bus that can support multiple audio streams and primarily utilized by small audio peripherals like IoT and mobile devices. With the next Linux kernel cycle, the SoundWire support is being improved upon...

• Patches Revised For AMD Zen Based Hygon Dhyana Server CPUs

  Patches have been revised for the Linux kernel to support the initial Hygon Dhyana server CPUs that are the licensed AMD Family 17h "Zen" technology, basically the EPYC server CPUs for the Chinese market.

  Back in June the initial Hygon Dhyana Linux patches were posted and today they were revised for the third time. V3 of the Hygon Dhyana patches are re-based against the latest Linux 4.18 development code and rework some of the vendor checking codes for improved consistency.

• Qualcomm Adreno 600 Series Support Proposed For Linux 4.19 Kernel

  While a bit late, Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark is hoping to see the Qualcomm Adreno 600 series bring-up happen for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle.

  The MSM Direct Rendering Manager has long been prepping for Adreno 600 series support as the latest-generation Qualcomm graphics found on their Snapdragon SoCs. The initial code for A6xx was posted earlier this year including work by Qualcomm / Code Aurora on that hardware bring-up. With Linux 4.19 queued in DRM-Next is already the "DPU1" display code needed for newer SoCs and Rob Clark is hoping to get the working A6xx support in place for this cycle.

• Linux Plumbers Conference: Early Registration Ending Soon!

  The early registration deadline is August 18, 2018, after which the regular-registration period will begin. So to save $150, register for the Linux Plumbers Conference before August 18th!

• Mesa 18.1.6 Release Notice

  Due to a busy week and a slip of my mind I didn't get out the announcement for 18.1.6 on Wednesday. Therefore, I'm planning to make the release Monday August 13th, at or around 10AM PDT.

• Mesa 18.1.6 On The Way With Over Three Dozen Fixes

  While Mesa 18.2 is baking for release later this month, Mesa 18.1 remains the currently supported stable series. Final release preparations are underway for Mesa 18.1.6 as the latest bi-weekly point release.

  Mesa 18.1.6 is expected to be released this coming Monday, 13 August, and so far has staged more than three dozen fixes as confirmed via Friday's release notice.

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• Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.0

  Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

• The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2018

  They’re a month overdue, and from the volume of inbound questions about when the language rankings would drop, it’s been noticed. As always, these are a continuation of the work originally performed by Drew Conway and John Myles White late in 2010. While the means of collection has changed, the basic process remains the same: we extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.

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• [ANNOUNCE] wayland-1.15.93

  The RC1 release candidate for wayland 1.16 is now available.

• Wayland 1.16 & Weston 5.0 Release Candidates For Testing

  Derek Foreman of Samsung's Open-Source Group put out the release candidates on Friday for the upcoming Wayland 1.16 release as well as the Weston 5.0 reference compositor.

  The Wayland 1.16 release candidate hasn't seen any changes over the earlier development release besides updating the contributor documentation to reflect that Gitlab is now used for handling merge requests. The Wayland 1.16 cycle overall was quite light but earlier in the cycle it did see build system updates, dropping of the wl_buffer definition, and the protocol now allows a zero physical size output.

• XDG Shell Stable Supported by Mir

  Support for the stable XDG Shell protocol has just landed in Mir, and it will ship with the next release. It will eventually replace XDG Shell unstable v6 as the primary way in which Wayland applications create traditional style windows. You can get it now in our development PPA: ppa:mir-team/dev.

• Mir Now Supports XDG Shell Stable

  Canonical developers continue working on advancing the Mir display server's support for Wayland.

  The latest Wayland enhancement to Mir is on supporting the stable version of the XDG Shell protocol. XDG-Shell is the protocol for improved management of Wayland surfaces including for minimization of windows, dragging, resizing, and other desktop-aligned tasks. XDG Shell also defines protocol around transient windows like pop-up menus.

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• Flatpak Gets New FreeDesktop SDK 18.08 Runtime

  Flatpak now has access to an updated FreeDesktop SDK runtime that is built on their new BuildStream build system rather than Yocto and has other improvements.

  Flatpak lead developer and Red Hat employee Alexander Larsson has outlined this new runtime option for Flatpak, the FreeDesktop SDK 18.08 release. The FreeDesktop Runtime ends up being used by most Flatpak packaged applications out there.

• James M. Whitehurst Sells 44,472 Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT) Stock
• Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares Bought by Los Angeles Capital Management & Equity Research Inc.
• Migdal Insurance & Financial Holdings Ltd. Purchases 981 Shares of Red Hat Inc (RHT)

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