Nearly three years after OpenHMD 0.2, the OpenHMD 0.3 release is now available for the open-source SDK and support for various AR/VR headsets...

The networking subsystem updates were sent out on Wednesday for the Linux 5.3 kernel and include a bunch of improvements to many different drivers...

Today marks the immediate availability of KDE Frameworks 5.60...

Back in April I wrote about Coreboot seeing AMD Picasso APU enablement work as the first Zen/Ryzen processor target being handled by this open-source BIOS alternative. It now looks like that Picasso support is all squared away and ready for use by future AMD-powered Google Chromebooks...

While there is another nineteen years to go until the Year 2038 problem manifests, the GNU C Library "glibc" is one of the key software components still needing some fixes for this issue where this problem where storing the Unix time as a 32-bit signed integer will wrap around and become a negative number...

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 60
• Sweden’s digitalisation hub adopts open source policy [iophk: DIGG includes a bit of licensing FUD against GPL and copyleft]

                     
                       

  DIGG (Myndigheten för digital förvaltning, or agency for digital government) was founded in September 2018.
   

                       

  Its open source software development policy aims to standardise and regulate ownership and set the conditions for sharing.

• University of California Loses Access to New Content in Elsevier Journals

  In a statement released Wednesday, UC’s Academic Council encouraged those at the university who might require access to Elsevier’s content to use alternative access methods, such as online repositories where authors deposit free-to-read copies of their papers, and to “refrain from any new independent subscriptions to Elsevier journals.”

  Over the last few months, Elsevier has established nationwide licensing agreements in Norway and Poland, and is close to making such a deal in Hungary. However, it remains in a stalemate in negotiations with consortia of libraries and research institutions in Germany and Sweden. Those groups have also cancelled their subscriptions with the publisher.

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• Best Antivirus Apps for Android in 2019
• Some Android apps bypass permissions to access user data
• Android Q-based MIUI leaks for the Xiaomi Mi 9 - First Look
• EMUI 10 based on Android Q to be showcased by Huawei on August 9
• How to share Wi-Fi network configurations in Android Q
• EMUI 10 based on Android Q will be unveiled at an August 2019 Huawei event
• Agent Smith Android malware infiltrates 25 million devices, mostly in India
• AMD Link now lets you stream your PC games to Android TV and Apple TV
• Here's why Android Central is going all-in on Prime Day 2019!
• Xiaomi Mi A3: Alle Infos & offizielle Bilder zum Android One-Smartphone
• Forget Stadia, what would a pure-Android gaming console look like?
• AT&T to Showcase GeForce NOW Over 5G on an Android Phone This Weekend
• Huawei OS Shock: 'No HongMeng Android Alternative For Smartphones'
• Android Circuit: Surprising Galaxy Note 10 Problems, OnePlus 7 Review, Nokia 9 Secrets

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Simon Ser who has been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager has laid out a schedule for getting out the next major release of Wayland's reference compositor...

Strojna pamet si je podredila še poker

• Jurij Kristan :: 13. jul 2019 ob 08:23
• Znanost in tehnologija

Ars Technica - Strojni algoritem Pluribus, ki so ga razvili na Univerzi Carnegie Mellon v sodelovanju s Facebookom, je v verziji pokra Texas hold'em, ki je bila doslej za AI prevelik zalogaj, premagal petnajst profesionalnih igralcev, med njimi nekaj najboljših na svetu. Dogodek predstavlja pomemben mejnik za umetno inteligenco, Pluribus pa je tako učinkovit, da pomeni resno nevarnost za spletno igranje pokra, zaradi česar izvorne kode niso razkrili. Več na Slo-Techu.

• OpenShift Commons Briefing: Quay v3 Release Update and Road Map

  In this briefing, Dirk Herrmann, Red Hat’s Quay Product Manager walks through Quay v3.0’s features, and discusses the road map for future Quay releases, including a progress update on the open sourcing of Quay.

  Built for storing container images, Quay offers visibility over images themselves, and can be integrated into your CI/CD pipelines and existing workflows using its API and other automation features. Quay was first released in 2013, as the first enterprise hosted registry. Six years later, we’ve celebrated the first major release of the container registry since it joined the Red Hat portfolio of products through the acquisition of CoreOS in 2018.

• FPgM report: 2019-28

  Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. I am on PTO the week of 15 July, so there will be no FPgM report or FPgM office hours next week.

  I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

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While not too eventful on the end-user feature front, the XFS file-system has seen another round of clean-ups with the ongoing Linux 5.3 merge window...

• Adjusting the Scope of our Security Vulnerability Disclosure Program

  At EFF we put security and privacy first. That's why over three years ago we launched EFF's Security Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Disclosure Program is a set of guidelines on how security researchers can tell EFF about bugs in the software we develop, like HTTPS Everywhere or Certbot. When we launched the program, it was a bit of an experiment. After all, as a lean, member-driven nonprofit, we can't give out the tremendous cash rewards that large corporations can provide for zero days. Instead, all we can offer security researchers in return for their hard work is recognition on our EFF Security Hall of Fame page and other non-cash rewards like EFF gear or complimentary EFF memberships.

  Despite the limited rewards, the program has been a tremendous success. As of June 1, 2019, we've had over seventy different security researchers report valid security vulnerabilities to us, as you can see on our Security Hall of Fame page.

• Court: Computer Experts May Examine Georgia Voting Systems

  A federal court in Georgia has ruled that Georgia election officials must allow the Coalition for Good Governance to review the state's election management databases. The Coalition argued that the databases "provide the roadmap that needs to be analyzed to identify flaws" in the state election system.

• Hackers breach Canonical GitHub account [Ed: They breached a Microsoft GitHub account, but never blame Microsoft for anything...]

  Hackers compromised credentials to break into a Canonical Ltd. GitHub account...

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• GNU Rush Version 2,1

  Version 2.1 is available for download from GNU and Puszcza archives.
  This version fixes several minor bugs that appeared in previous release 2.0.

• Customizable Weather Widget ‘Gis Weather’ 0.8.4 Released

  Gis Weather is an open-source desktop weather widget and indicator applet with highly customizable user interface.

• A Brighter Future is Forecast for GNOME’s Weather App

  A wave of usability improvements are on the horizon for the humble GNOME Weather app.

  The current version of the meteorological must-have might have made my list of the best weather apps for Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but I quipped “aspects of its layout bug me”.

  And it seems I’m not alone.

  [...]

  Horizontal pagination seems like a logical introduction, as does separating hourly forecasts from the 10 day forecast.

  Relaying “current conditions” remains prominent in the redesign, but not at the expense of the overall layout.

  And while I like that the proposed redesign mentions the yr.no weather service that’s used as the backend, I especially like that the client as a whole makes better use of the data that this free service provides.

• Fork Awesome Sprites for Beast

  The Font Awesome 5 package has some other nice features though, since it’s now based on an SVG icon set, it ships 3 large sprite files that can be used to address individual icons via anchors. For Beast, I decided to stick with the Font Awesome 4 look for now, but since there are good reasons not to use icon fonts and I had the infrastructure for using sprite icons already in place, I looked into ways to generate an SVG sprite file for Font Awesome 4.

  Around February 2018, Julien Deswaef and a few others decided to fork the Font Awesome 4 project as Fork-Awesome. Since then, Fork-Awesome has incorporated new icons and also generated an SVG icon set. Since it is forked from Font Awesome, it has all the Font Awesome 4 icons and can be used as a drop in replacement.

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• F2FS Gains Native SWAP File Support, Other Improvements

  F2FS remains a very interesting file-system and has seen particularly good adoption on newer Android devices while it continues to shine as well for laptop and desktop SSD storage. With Linux 5.3 there is finally native SWAP file support for F2FS that can make use of direct I/O for better swapping performance. F2FS is also getting the ability to pre-allocate physical blocks in a pinned file to avoid fragmentation in append-only workloads, more sanity checks, and a variety of bug fixes.

• Linux 5.3 Picks Up Support For Compressed Firmware Files - Measurable Storage Savings

  SUSE's Takashi Iwai has been working on support for loading compressed firmware files and with the Linux 5.3 driver core patches there is this support. On his own system, he started out with /lib/firmware occupying over 400MB of the disk. When making use of XZ compression, this dropped to around 130MB in total. Thus easily being able to shave off several hundred megabytes from the disk due to all these firmware blobs is an easy win.

  The firmware files remain compressed on disk while at firmware loading time into the kernel the decompression is done. Only XZ compression is currently supported. When the CONFIG_FW_LOADER_COMPRESS option is enabled, the kernel will first try to load a firmware file of the original name but otherwise falls back trying to load any file with the same name appended by the .xz extension.

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Oracle security researchers have been working on security feature for Linux kernels that could protect Linux-based systems against attacks that affect Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature. Multiple side-channel threats the feature's vulnerable against, including L1TF/Foreshadow and the MDS attacks, have been revealed over the past few months.

The Oracle developers didn't specify whether or not the recent MDS attacks against Intel’s HT would also be mitigated through its Kernel Address Space Isolation (KASI), only that it will protect against L1TF/Foreshadow. Other side-channel attacks seem to be up for debate, as any extra isolation being introduced into the kernel could potentially impact the performance of Linux systems.

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• How to Install RubyMine on Manjaro 18
• Hardening Linux for Production Use
• Create Bootable Debian 10 USB Stick on Linux
• Automatically Disable Touchpad When External Mouse Is Connected In Ubuntu
• extract column from csv file
• Linux Fu: Named Pipe Dreams
• PyBites: Code Challenge 62 - Women @ Pycon ES

  Coming thursday, the 18th of July 2019, we will organize a special challenge in collaboration with Python Alicante.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Coding period: week #7
• PSF GSoC students blogs: Check in: Week 7
• Interfaces are forever

  When we have write a function, we can sometimes change it in backwards-compatible ways. For example, we can loosen the type of a variable. We can restrict the type of the return value. We can add an optional argument.

  We can even have a backwards compatible path to make an argument required. We add an optional argument, and encourage people to change it. Then, in the next version, we make the default value be one that causes a warning. In a version after that, we make the value required. At each point, someone could write a library that worked with at least two consecutive versions.

  In a similar way, we can have a path to remove an argument. First make it optional. Then warn when it is passed in. Finally, remove it and make it an error to pass it in.

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• AMD Releases BIOS Fix To Motherboard Partners For Booting Newer Linux Distributions

  AMD has just alerted us that they have released a BIOS fix to their motherboard partners that takes care of the issue around booting newer Linux distributions on the new Zen 2 processors.

  Earlier this week I mentioned AMD would be working on a BIOS fix to address the fundamental problem with booting newer systemd-using Linux distributions on their new Ryzen 3000 series processors. However, I hadn't expected the fix to make it to motherboard vendors in less than one week!

• AMD: Patch On The Way For Ryzen 3000 Customers Affected By 'Destiny 2' And Linux Boot Problems

  AMD says it was able to root cause and resolve both issues fairly quickly in its BIOS code with a patch, and the company expects motherboard vendors to distribute the patch (potentially in beta BIOS form) by next week.

  Earlier this week a growing number of complaints amassed from Windows gamers concerning the inability to launch Activision's Destiny 2 with various Ryzen 3000 CPUs. On the Linux side of the fence, a fairly critical bug emerged that straight up prevented a system from booting with 5.0 or newer Linux kernels.

  It's nice to have these both addressed and resolved within the first week of launch, and hopefully the motherboard vendors will act quickly to seed this patch to their users. Keep an eye on those BIOS updates!

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• Google Summer of Code with Pitivi

  This summer I am working under the mentorship of Alexandru Băluț to improve the user experience of the Effects feature in Pitivi.

  In the first phase of my project, I worked on redesigning Pitivi’s “Effect Library” to allow users to easily find, organise and utilize their desired effects.

• g_test_summary and g_get_console_charset in GLib 2.61.2

  Another short post about new APIs, this time from the upcoming 2.61.2 release. This time it’s two unrelated new APIs, which I’m covering together because they’re fairly short.

  g_test_summary() is a new API along the same lines as the existing g_test_bug() function. It’s to be called from within a unit test to provide a summary of the test to the test harness. In contrast, g_test_bug() provides a bug reference for the unit test. In this fashion, the two can be used to provide documentation within the test code of what the test is testing, how it goes about testing it, and which bug it’s checking for regressions in. The summary passed to g_test_summary() might be printed out as a comment in the test logs.

• GNOME's Mutter Picks Up Another Optimization For Helping DisplayLink-Type Hardware

  Collabora's Pekka Paalanen landed another optimization this week into GNOME's Mutter for further enhancing the performance of using DisplayLink hardware and similar secondary GPUs under this Linux desktop.

  Over the past few cycles we've seen a lot of improvements made for bettering the performance of DisplayLink USB graphics connected displays under the GNOME desktop environment. While the experience has already improved a lot, for GNOME 3.34 due out in September will be more optimizations.

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Linux is the leading operating system for Internet of Things (IoT) systems. IoT Developer Survey Results published in April 2018 by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, AGILE IoT, IEEE, and the Open Mobile Alliance, found more than 71 percent of developers use Linux operating systems for their IoT systems. Additionally, Linux leads as the most popular OS for constrained devices (38.7 percent) and edge/gateway devices (64.1 percent).

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NXP’s 28nm, FD-SOI fabbed i.MX7 ULP SoC has arrived along with a Linux-powered eval board. The power-sipping SoC is also being showcased in F&S’ PicoCore MX7ULP and SoMLabs’ ActionSOM-7ULP modules.

In June, NXP began volume shipments of its super power-efficient i.MX7 ULP, which it announced in 2017. The SoC is billed as the most power-efficient processor on the market that also includes a 3D GPU.

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