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• New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
• Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
• Canonical Continues Snap’ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu — Canonical has been indicating they want to improve the Linux gaming experience on Ubuntu (and hiring for it) and ensure its a dominant platform for Linux gaming.
• Pine’ Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer
• Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
• NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
• Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
• Debian Proposes Better Discovery of non-free Firmware Images
• General Resolution: non-free firmware
• Office Hours 11 — We launch our new site LIVE!

Plus new research shows Android OEMs are lying about their patch levels, Lineage goes hard on "Play certification" and we have thoughts on all of it.

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• GameMode is a new tool to optimize CPU performance — GameMode is an open-source tool intended to deliver the best performance out of their Linux games. GameMode does handy things like tells the CPU to automatically run in the performance governor mode rather than ondemand/powersave modes. GameMode consists of a daemon (gamemoded) and a library (libgamemode) so that games can tell the daemon when they would like to be put into performance mode, etc.GameMode currently relies upon systemd.
• ZFS data loss bug patched — ZFS On Linux 0.7.8 is now available as an emergency release to deal with a possible data loss issue. The past few days there has been a busy bug report about unlistable and disappearing files.
• Mozilla thinks the Internet isn't in a great shape — the Mozilla Foundation released a report that highlights the dangers posed to the entirety of the Internet ecosystem by the increasing concentration of control over how people experience the online world in the hands of companies like his.
• Some Android OEMs lying about patch level — The problem, Nohl points out, is worse than vendors merely neglecting to patch older devices, a common phenomenon. Instead, it's that they tell users they install patches that they in fact don't, creating a false sense of security.
• Lineage on Google Play Certification — Google Play Certification is Google’s way of ensuring that devices running with Google Play Services are in a known-good state. This is implemented via checking of SafetyNet, which you can read more about in our SafetyNet blogpost.