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• Linux Tech Sustainability — The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts.
• Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730
• Unlocking the bootloader and disabling dm-verity on Android-X86 devices
• Here Comes WebGPU — After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU.
• Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default
• Muse on Twitter — Breaking news🚨 Chrome's Web GPU has launched after 6 years of development! 🚀
• A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
• Plasma 6 Early Builds — I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable.
• Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State
• Rust Support Is Being Worked On For V4L2 — Daniel Almeida of Collabora sent out initial Rust V4L2 support patches on Thursday. This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver.
• Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month.
• Btrfs Improvments — This week a number of patches from SUSE engineer Qu Wenruo were queued into kdave's linux.git for-next branch of the Btrfs file-system driver development code.

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• A new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel — The vulnerability consists of a stack buffer overflow due to an integer underflow vulnerability inside the nft_payload_copy_vlan function, which is invoked with nft_payload expressions as long as a VLAN tag is present in the current skb.
• netfilter: nft_payload: add C-VLAN support · torvalds/linux@f6ae9f1
• CVE-2023-0179
• CVE-2023-0179- Red Hat Customer Portal
• [net,3/3] netfilter: nft_payload: incorrect arithmetics when fetching VLAN header bits - Patchwork
• oss-sec: Re: CVE-2023-0179: Linux kernel stack buffer overflow in nftables: PoC and writeup
• libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API — Libvirt 9.0 adds support for external snapshot deletion with QEMU using its existing API, libvirt 9.0 with QEMU now supports PASST as "Plug A Simple Socket Transport" for connecting an emulated network device to the host's network, QEMU external back-end support for SWTPM as a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM), support for passing file descriptors rather than passing files for the QEMU disk, and other additions.
• JFS Filesystem’s Days are Numbered — IBM developed the JFS file-system originally in the 90's for AIX and the second-generation implementation then ported to Linux after it was made open-source.
• Firefox 109.0 Ships Manifest Version 3 — Manifest Version 3 (MV3) extension support is now enabled by default (MV2 remains enabled/supported). This major update also ushers an exciting user interface change in the form of the new extensions button.
• Here’s what’s going on in the world of extensions
• Manage your extensions using the extensions button in the toolbar
• Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly
• Google delays start of Manifest V2 Chrome extension deprecation — The original plan called for Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds to start experiments that turned off Manifest V2 extension support. Additionally, Manifest V3 would be required to get the “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store. 
• Firefox 109 Adds New Extensions Button, Manifest V3 Support — The biggest new feature is the new Unified Extensions button in the toolbar.
• Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed
• Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening — Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions

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• Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
• Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0
• Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Heading To Linux 6.2 — Sent in yesterday were the Arm CPUFreq updates to queue in the Linux power management tree ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window.
• [GIT PULL] cpufreq/arm updates for 6.2 - Viresh Kumar
• Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 — This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11
• Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
• Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust
• Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
• Ping bug potentially allows remote hack of FreeBSD systemsSecurity Affairs — A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
• D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
• Bug 1205938 – D-Installer - Slowness initialization on real hardware
• GitHub - yast/d-installer: A service-based Linux installer
• openSUSE’s D-Installer Adds LVM & Full Disk Encryption Configuration

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• Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
• Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
• Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
• Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
• Google Summer of Code
• Rust in the Kernel Update — This patch series is the first batch of changes to upstream the rest of the Rust support.
• Rust Developers Preparing To Upstream More Code Into The Linux Kernel
• WSL 1.0 Released — Microsoft announces it is removing the Preview label and making WSL in the Microsoft Store "generally available".
• Release Notes for WSL kernel

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• Plasma 5.26 Released — Plasma 5.26 comes with new and tweaked widgets, improves the desktop experience leaps and bounds, and Plasma Big Screen's app family grows
• These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26
• Google Reveals ‘First Laptops Built For Cloud Gaming’ — Google says the Acer Chromebook 516 GE, ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip and Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook all have refresh rates of at least 120Hz, displays with up to 1600p resolution, immersive audio and, critically for cloud gaming, WiFi 6 or 6E connectivity.
• Intel Arc Graphics - A750 and A770 GPUs Release — The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs officially launch today, October 12th in select markets. Everyone at Intel is beyond thrilled to get graphics cards with modern features and extremely competitive performance-per-dollar into your hands.
• Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver
• Canonical Launches Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions for Everyone — Ubuntu Pro is available for every supported Ubuntu LTS version, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and up to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
• Android leaks some traffic even when ‘Always-on VPN’ is enabled — The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic.
• Incorrect VPN lockdown documentation [249990229] - Visible to Public - Issue Tracker
• Android leaks connectivity check traffic — As a closing note, we would like to recommend Google to adopt the ability to disable the connectivity checks, like on GrapheneOS, into stock Android.
• iOS VPN apps have another flaw: excluding many Apple apps — We confirm that iOS 16 does communicate with Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel. Worse, it leaks DNS requests. Apple services that escape the VPN connection include Health, Maps, and Wallet.

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• Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
• CBL-Mariner GitHub
• GitHub Moves to Guard Open Source Against Supply Chain Attacks — The popular Microsoft-owned code repository plans to roll out code signing, which will help beef up the security of open source projects.
• GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash — GitHub over the past week has tested the trust of its users by enacting policies that call into question its commitment to free speech and privacy.
• ‘It Doesn’t Change Anything’ Says Tornado Cash After Code Disappears From GitHub
• Projects impacted by Tornando cash ban — TIL the creator address of the Eth2.0 Deposit contract was funded with Tornado cash, created the contract and donated the rest to Wikileaks
• Samuel JJ Gosling on Twitter — “@TornadoCash For those looking to host the frontend locally, I’ve uploaded the source code to @IPFS as I suspected this happening. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to tornado but you should still verify the source code.
• Lucas Garron on Twitter
• Privacy Statement Updates September 2022 by olholder
• IPFS Supported In FFmpeg 5.1, IPFS Devs Envision Support In More Open-Source Projects — July's release of FFmpeg 5.1 introduced native IPFS support for this distributed peer-to-peer protocol.
• IPFS.io
• Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed Due To An OEM Install Issue Leading To Broken Snaps — Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.
• Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0 — With Linus Torvalds' modern versioning after 19~20 point releases has been when he bumps to the next major version number... Linux 4.0 succeeded Linux 3.19 while Linux 5.0 came after Linux 4.20.
• An io_uring-based user-space block driver [LWN.net] — The ublk driver starts by creating a special device called /dev/ublk-control. The user-space server (or servers, there can be more than one) starts by opening that device and setting up an io_uring ring to communicate with it.
• Linus' kernel source tree

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• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved — Fedora 37 is working its way toward release before the end of October.
• The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
• Fedora CoreOS Hopes To Become An Official Edition With Fedora 37
• Fedora 37 Looks To Ship With Stratis Storage 3.1 Support
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
• Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
• Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
• Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
• Synapse Release v1.61.1
• Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
• Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
• Check Your Steam Deck Order Status
• Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
• Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
• Linode Security Digest — June 20-26, 2022
• Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
• M2 Asahi Linux bring-up YouTube Stream

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• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

Plus the new Firefox security features in beta, great news for F-Droid, and Apple transfers CUPS to a new home.

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• Chrome OS’s Linux app support is leaving beta — Google announced at I/O that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91.
• Android 12 will finally let alternative app stores update apps on their own — In Google's official blog post announcing Android 12 the company confirmed that it’s "delivering on [its] promise to make third-party app stores easier to use on Android 12."
• Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
• Senior Software Engineer - GPU Hardware Enablement
• Software Engineer - GPU, Input and Multimedia
• Principal Engineer - Hardware Enablement for Infotainment/Automotive
• New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team — Christian F.K. Schaller — We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us.
• OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out — Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.
• Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
• Linux 5.13 Reverts + Fixes The Problematic University of Minnesota Patches — Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
• Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner "seizes" control of network — Founded 26 years ago and home to some 80,000 users over 40,000 channels, the freenode is reportedly the largest IRC network and has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster history.
• Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
• Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
• Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
• [HN comments] Welcome to Libera Chat
• CentOS IRC channels moving to irc.libera.chat
• Freenode IRC and Gentoo
• Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
• [FOSDEM 202] Building massive virtual communities in Matrix — In this talk, we'll explain all the features we've been adding to let Matrix scale to support massive virtual communities such as FOSDEM itself, Mozilla, KDE and others.
• JB Matrix Server

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

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• Canonical: Flutter Is The Default Choice For Future Ubuntu Apps — Along with the new installer, Ken Vandine, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical revealed that the out-of-the-box experience for devices preloaded with Ubuntu will also be powered by Flutter.
• Ubuntu on Twitter — Flutter is the default choice for future Ubuntu apps. @kenvandine, Engineering Manager, is here to tell you about some of Canonical’s contributions to Flutter at #FlutterEngage.
• Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu
• Version 2 of Google’s Flutter toolkit adds support for desktop and web apps
• The Linode network model — As we worked on expanding our global network, three things were non-negotiable: maintaining vendor diversity, balancing flexibility and control, and incorporating Linux starting at the network level as much as possible.
• Chrome (Chromium) release cycle shortened to 4 weeks, Chrome(ium) gets “Extended Stable” release every 8 weeks — We are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.
• Chrome Moving To A 4-Week Release Cycle
• (2019) Mozilla Shifting Firefox To A Four-Week Release Cycle
• Linux Mint may start pushing high-priority patches to users — Besides looking for available updates, the Manager will also track cases where updates are overlooked. This will include metrics on when updates were last applied; when were packages last upgraded; and how many days have passed since a particular update was made available.
• Linux Mint Finds Many Of Its Users Are Running Behind On Security Updates
• Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon
• Update your computer! – The Linux Mint Blog
• A warning about 5.12-rc1 — This merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.
• That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File
• Watch Out For Possible Data Loss On Early Linux 5.12 Kernels
• Save the Date! | Container Plumbing Days — The Container Plumbing Days will be a 2-day event to investigate, discuss, hack, learn, and celebrate the “lower-level” open source container technologies, everything from the container runtime on down to the Linux kernel.

Plus an important Let's Encrypt update, and the next billion-dollar tech coming to Linux.

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• Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC — The Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit is the “Christmas morning” product, with the best possible out-of-box experience: a complete PC which plugs into your TV or monitor.
• Raspberry Pi 400 - First Impressions
• Raspberry Pi 400 review—the under-$100 desktop PC you didn’t know you needed
• Dell is Adding Webcam and Microphone Kill Switches — Dell is adding new code in Linux kernel that will enable you to disable newer Dell system’s webcam and microphone with keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because privacy.
• Dell Adding Hardware Privacy Driver For Linux
• Let's Encrypt warns about a third of Android devices will from next year stumble over sites that use its certs — Expiration of cross-signed root certificates spells trouble
• Standing on Our Own Two Feet - Let's Encrypt
• Chrome will soon have its own dedicated certificate root store — Currently, Chrome uses the certificate root store part of each operating system. Google plans to manage its own list of "approved" certificates from now on, similar to Firefox.
• BPF binaries: BTF, CO-RE, and the future of BPF perf tools — Two new technologies, BTF and CO-RE, are paving the way for BPF to become a billion-dollar industry.
• What is eBPF?
• eBPF: Put the Kubernetes Data Plane in the Kernel
• LINUX Unplugged 293: Netflix's Gift to Linux

Plus Nvidia's Jetson Nano release and the freaky future of low-level AI, and our thoughts on Coinbase's recent news.

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• Nextcloud 20 Released — Nextcloud Hub 20 debuts Dashboard, unifies search and notifications, integrates with other technologies
• Nextcloud bridging chat services in Talk — This allows users to connect a Talk conversion to one or more external services, like IRC, Slack, MS Teams or more. The administrator has to have enabled this feature and users can then simply configure it from the right-hand sidebar in Talk.
• IBM to split into two companies by end of 2021 — As-yet unnamed “NewCo” will handle IBM’s “managed infrastructure services.”
• IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud
• As IBM spins out legacy infrastructure management biz, CEO goes all in on the cloud
• IBM’s “Cloud” Business (or Lack Thereof)
• Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini — The Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit, announced this week, is a single-board computer – like the Raspberry Pi
• Firefox may soon display Sponsored Top Sites on the New Tab Page — A recently added bug to Mozilla's bug tracking site Bugzilla indicates that Firefox may soon display sponsored top sites on the New Tab page. The bug requests that a preference is added to Firefox to disable sponsored top sites.
• 1668473 - Add pref UI for disabling sponsored top sites
• A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
• Sixty Coinbase employees take buyout offer over “no politics” rule

Plus Firefox's new DoH partner, and signs of life from the Atari VCS.

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• Firefox adds 2nd DoH partner — Program Committing to Data Retention and Transparency Requirements that Respect User Privacy
• Apple, Google, and Amazon are teaming up to develop an open-source smart home standard
• Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard
• Ikea previews its improved 2020 smart home experience
• Z-Wave is making a huge change so it doesn’t get left behind in the smart home wars - The Verge — It’s turning into a fully open standard, according to Silicon Labs.
• Canonical Releases Multipass 1.0 As "A Mini-Cloud On Your Workstation" — "a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux), it will give you an Ubuntu command line in just a click ("Open shell") or a simple multipass shell command, or even a keyboard shortcut."
• Krita Receives Epic MegaGrant — Epic, the makers of the Unreal game engine, have supported Krita with a $25,000 MegaGrant
• A Kubuntu-Powered Laptop Is Launching In 2020 For High-End KDE Computing — A Kubuntu laptop is launching soon that is aiming for a high-end Linux laptop experience atop the KDE flavor of Ubuntu.
• KDE Launch Video & Wallpaper Competitions with Linux PCs as Prizes
• Guidance for Atari VCS Content Developers — Initial procedures announced for more independent game and app developers to start creating and planning now for earning a place in the Atari VCS storefront.

Plus Google argues that keeping Huawei on their Android is better for all, and Chris gets sucked into Stadia.

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• Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default — At Firefox, we’re doing more than that. We believe that in order to truly protect people, we need to establish a new standard that puts people’s privacy first.
• Relicensing CockroachDB — But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.   
• Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds — Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
• Google is fighting to keep doing business with Huawei — Three sources told the Financial Times that Google's argument is that cutting ties with Huawei could pose a national security risk.
• Stadia details announced — Stadia games run on custom Linux-based server hardware maintained by Google, promising "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance." Game audio and video is streamed from those servers to a user's device, and inputs are streamed from the user to the server over a network of what Google says are "7,500 edge nodes" around the world.

Also WebThings is launched and we think it might have a shot.

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• Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released — Improved performance is what defines the ‘Disco Dingo’
• Open infrastructure, developers and IoT are 19.04's focus — Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.
• Ubuntu 19.04 Flavours Available to Download
• Introducing Mozilla WebThings — Project Things is graduating from its early experimental phase and from now on will be known as Mozilla WebThings.
• WebThings Documentation
• Pyodide — Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser.
• OpenSSH 8.0 released — This release contains mitigation for a weakness in the scp(1) tool and protocol (CVE-2019-6111).
• Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe — Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission's ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.  

Plus HP Joins LVFS, why you shouldn't expect a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019, and more.

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• Firefox 65 released — We’re happy to announce a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking
• Next version of Firefox might warn users of software that performs MitM attacks — The Firefox browser will soon come with a new security feature that will detect and then warn users when a third-party app is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack by hijacking the user's HTTPS traffic.
• Mozilla halts Firefox 65 distribution on Windows — The organization released Firefox 65.0 for all supported operating systems a few days ago on January 29, 2019.
• CFR annoying some users
• HP joins LVFS — If you’ve got a Z2, Z6, Z8, Z440, Z640 or Z840 system then you might want to check for an update in the GNOME Software updates panel or using fwupdmgr update in the terminal.
• Pine64 to Launch $79 Linux Tablet, $199 PineBook Pro Laptop — Pine64, the company that gave us the $89 Pinebook Linux laptop, is branching out and is set to launch a Linux tablet this year for just $79. That's as well as a new Linux laptop, smartphone, camera, single board computers, and retro gaming kit.
• Pine64 forum announcement
• We won't see a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019 — "I don’t have a route to do something this year," he told us. "I think we kind of understand what featureset we want [and] what would be involved in getting that featureset. I don’t think we have a  defined plan for turning that into a product yet."
• Kodi 18.0 Released — One of the big features of this release: support for gaming emulators, ROMs and controls.

Plus our thoughts on the new Project Trident release, and Mozilla ending their Test Pilot program.

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• MongoDB removed from major distros — Red Hat won't use MongoDB in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora thanks to MongoDB's new Server Side Public License.
• ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — There's no word yet on how this would affect ZFS Linux performance for end-users.
• First release of Project Trident — This version is based off the 18.12-stable branch of TrueOS (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT), using the new TrueOS distribution framework with several add-ons by Project Trident itself.
• Android-x86 8.1-r1 (Oreo-x86) released — Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
• 600 days of postmarketOS — postmarketOS is aiming for a ten year life-cycle for smartphones
• Mozilla kills Test Pilot Program — So today, we are announcing that we will be moving to a new structure that will demonstrate our ability to innovate in exciting ways and as a result we are closing the Test Pilot program as we’ve known it.
• Mozilla Kills Default Support for Adobe Flash in Firefox 69

Plus the Kernel team's clever Spectre slowdown fix, Emby goes proprietary, Steam Link lives on, and more.

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• Microsoft Edge to move to a Chromium base — Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
• Mozilla not exactly thrilled about it — Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet.
• Chrome and Firefox to have native Arm builds on Win10 — Mozilla announced today it is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm.
• WordPress 5 Released — The new block-based editor won’t change the way any of your content looks to your visitors. What it will do is let you insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange to your heart’s content.
• Emby becomes proprietary — we are modularizing and open sourcing as many standalone components as we possibly can.
• Spectre slowdown fix — Linux 4.20-rc5 addresses the performance issue by making the security defense optional.
• NVIDIA open sources PhysX — We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.
• Steam Link lives on via the Raspberry Pi — The Steam Link app is now available in beta on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ running Raspbian Stretch

Plus mixed news for Google, and a surprising blockchain fact.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 4 Released — After eight months of work, the UBports Foundation is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-4. This release features Ubuntu 16.04 as its base (previously 15.04), bringing security fixes and greater stability to unseen corners of the operating system.
• LMDE 3 released — The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 3 “Cindy” Cinnamon Edition.
• Mozilla publishes Firefox user data — As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.
• Firefox to block tracking — In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.
• Google hands off Kubernetes to the community with $9M donation — As a testament to Kubernetes’ maturity, we’re excited to take the next step, and are opening the Kubernetes project's cloud resources up to contributors. We’re funding this move with a $9 million grant of GCP credits
• Blow for Google in Oracle Android case — Google will have to go to the US Supreme Court if it wants to contest the reversal of a verdict — in a long-running case with Oracle — that had found its use of 37 Java APIs in the Android mobile operating system was covered by fair use.
• Blockchain is a lot older than you might think — the world’s oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it’s been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world’s most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

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• ChromeOS now on tablets — The new Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is a 9.7 inch tablet that runs Google’s Chrome operating system, supports Android apps, and has no keyboard
• The final nail in the Firefox OS coffin — the Firefox Marketplace is shutting down on March 30th, 2018, which means the handful of folks who actually have devices running Firefox OS won’t be able to download apps from the official app store after that.
• Google removes Kodi from autocomplete — C: 30NEWS Google has banned the term "Kodi" from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won't appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against "pirate" related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it's "closely associated with copyright infringement."
• Facebook Container for Firefox — Prevent Facebook from tracking you around the web. The Facebook Container extension for Firefox helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Facebook.
• Firefox Multi-Account Containers
• Oracle vs Google case not dead — The Federal Circuit has ruled for a second time in Oracle v. Google, the software copyright lawsuit over Google’s Android platform. The new decision reverses the district court yet again and sends the case back for a third trial to determine damages for Oracle. In the last trial, Oracle sought almost $9 billion in damages.
• Microsoft facilitating yet more distros on WSL — This sample allows distro maintainers to build WSL distro packages for the Microsoft Store and developers to create custom Linux distro packages for sideloading.  You can find the distro launcher repo on GitHub.

Plus an update on the Conservancy's fight with the Software Freedom Law Center and more.

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• Introducing Amazon Linux 2 — Amazon Linux 2 provides a modern execution environment with LTS Kernel (4.9) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), systemd support, and newer tooling (gcc 7.2.1, glibc 2.25, binutils 2.27).
• Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks — With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.
• OpenSSH coming to Windows 10 — The software giant is now adding a native OpenSSH client to Windows 10. It’s available immediately as a beta option in the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10, and it’s easy to enable.
• Not just the client — we also shipped OpenSSH's sshd server, but it's a little tricky to configure right now. Expect a blog post this week. * This is not production-ready in the current version of Windows 10 (hence the "(Beta)" in the label), but we hope to be soon.
• Mozilla faces blowback after slipping Mr Robot plugin into Firefox — Firefox users noticed a strange new plug-in popping up in their browsers. A new plug-in called Looking Glass found its way into each instance of the new Firefox Quantum browser. It was disabled by default, but users were still alarmed to see a plugin they hadn’t installed.
• Steve Klabnik on Twitter — I am pretty upset with my employer, @mozilla, today
• Carol Nichols, Rus Dev on Twitter — "Mozilla wasn't paid for the Mr. Robot tie-in"
• Intel to slap hardware lock on Management Engine code to thwart downgrade attacks — From version 12 onward, ME-equipped chips will defend against patch rollbacks.
• Conservancy update on fight with Law Center — Today, Conservancy filed for summary judgment in SFLC's trademark cancellation action. As I understand from our lawyers, summary judgment is a mechanism to ask a Court to expediently handle a matter where the facts are straightforward and, as a matter of law, there is no plausible way that the party filing for summary judgment won't prevail.
• TechSNAP reboot — Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast. Every week TechSNAP covers the stories that impact those of us in the tech industry, and all of us that follow it. Every episode we dedicate a portion of the show to answer audience questions, discuss best practices, and solving your problems.

Plus a big moment for the Kernel, Red Hat goes ARM, and OpenPlus has a backdoor with a twist.

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• Fedora 27 released — The Workstation edition of Fedora 27 features GNOME 3.26. In the new release, both the Display and Network configuration panels have been updated, along with the overall Settings panel appearance improvement.
• Firefox 57 arrives — It’s by far the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004
• There's an option for people who don't like change — a fork of the Mozilla code-base pre-Servo/Rust... Basically for those not liking the direction of Firefox with v57 rolling out the Quantum changes, etc.
• Ubuntu Unity 7 flavour might be on the horizon — A proposal to create a new community Ubuntu flavor which uses the Unity 7 desktop by default is gathering support within the Ubuntu community.
• LTS kernel 4.14 released — Anyway, go out and test the new 4.14 release, that is slated to be the next LTS kernel - and start sending me pull request for the 4.15 merge window.
• RISC-V support may be coming to 4.15 — RISC-V is hoping to see mainline with Linux 4.15. We've known for a while now about their mainline ambitions for 4.15 and a pull request was sent today, but it remains to be seen yet if Linus Torvalds will pull it for this merge window.
• Red Hat announces ARM version of RHEL — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM, the first commercial release for this architecture.
• Oneplus backdoor — OnePlus accidentally left in place a diagnostic testing application made by Qualcomm. After decompiling this application, he discovered that it can be exploited to grant root access—effectively acting as a backdoor.

Plus more good news for Firefox users, and why Google's "streaming OS updates" could be great for the Android ROM community.

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• Snaps in Solus — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole "Solus adopting snaps" thing.
• Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
• Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
• 50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
• Nextcloud push into education — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
• Firefox 55 — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
• Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
• Epiphany gets Firefox Sync — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
• Photon UI — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
• Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.

Plus a quick look at Phoenix OS & the Ubuntu 18.04 survey!

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• Android-Based Remix OS To Be Discontinued — Remix OS, the Android-x86 derived operating system for x86/ARM to run Android applications on PCs, is now being discontinued in its current form.
• Phoenix OS Lives on — Phoenix OS 2.1 includes a number of bug fixes and improvements including better hardware compatibility, an updated keyboard mapping feature, and the ability to remember window resizing settings after you reboot.
• Google Glass gets a second chance in factories, where it’s likely to remain — The major upgrades between the original Glass and the enterprise version are a better camera (with resolution upgraded from 5 megapixels to 8), extended battery life, faster Wi-Fi and processor, and a new red light that turns on when recording video. The electronics of Glass have also been made modular in the shape of a so-called Glass Pod, which can be detached and reattached to Glass-compatible frames, which can include things like safety goggles and prescription glasses.
• Firefox marketshare revisited — Based on this data, 22% fewer Firefox Desktop installations are active today than a year ago. This is a loss of 16 million Firefox installs in a year.
• Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown — Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate.
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop Default Application Survey — Along with the switch from Unity to GNOME, we’re also reviewing some of the desktop applications we package and ship in Ubuntu. We’re looking to crowdsource input on your favorite Linux applications across a broad set of classic desktop functionality.

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• Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12 — Achieve several orders of magnitude greater scaling. It is hard to scale the standard architecture to instances over hundred thousand users.
• Devuan finally reaches 1.0.0 — There have been no significant bug reports since Devuan Jessie RC2 was announced only three weeks ago and the list of release critical bugs is now empty. So finally Devuan Jessie Stable is ready for release!
• Debian Stretch is just weeks away. — We plan to release on 2017-06-17.
• SteamVR Home Now Works Under Linux — SteamVR Home is a beta feature from Valve for making a social, interactive launcher experience in virtual reality. Those unfamiliar with SteamVR Home can learn about it via this earlier announcement.
• SteamOS Brewmaster_beta gets huge update — SteamOS 2.115 also implements AMD Vulkan support. Please note that this will only work if you’re using Steam Beta Client.
• Solus adds experimental KDE Plasma support — For the sake of clarity, please note that the Plasma Desktop from KDE is not officially supported at this moment in time. It is however a project that Peter is working on, and slowly building up to be something useful. This in itself was enabled by the vast amount of KF5 (KDE Frameworks) software required in the repositories already for the “Big Items” (Kdenlive, etc).
• Firefox is Trying... — It’s because of our newfound internal confidence with Firefox that Mozilla has started to be more aggressive externally again. Firefox’s campaign launching today, called “browse against the machine”, is a perfect example.
• Chrome has won — From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere. That means that the esteemed Fox will be around for many many years, albeit with an ever diminishing market share. It also, unfortunately, means that a turnaround is all but impossible.
• More Coreboot progress for Purism — We are now pretty confident that we should be able to have coreboot firmware ready in time for factory preloading of the new inventory we’ll be shipping from in June.