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• Android 13 is in AOSP — Today we’re pushing the Android 13 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android.
• Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
• Glibc 2.36 Dropping DT_HASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games — The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH.
• Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DT_HASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.
• Carlos O’Donell on Twitter — How far should Linux ELF follow the generic ELF standard (gABI)? We recently let distributions drop DT_HASH from glibc builds (mandatory under the gABI). This broke EPIC's Easy Anti-Cheat. We *should* ask the gABI for DT_HASH to be optional.
• GLIBC update broke EAC for most games that use it — Issue #6051 · ValveSoftware/Proton
• Should we make DT_HASH dynamic section for glibc?
• gapi discussion: Making DT_HASH optional?
• Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits — Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.
• Linux 6.0 arrives with performance improvements and more Rust coming
• Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations
• Real-Time “PREEMPT_RT” Not in 6.0-rc1 — Of the 50 patches, it's not too bad either as there are five patches for example that are rather trivial for just enabling real-time (RT) support in the Kconfig files for ARM / ARM64 / POWER / x86 / x86_64. There are also a handful of patches each specific to POWER and the i915 graphics driver code.
• Debian turns 29! — Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
• LocalGroups - Debian Wiki
• A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave — An exploit that provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.
• mu on Twitter — Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
• How a version of Doom running on a John Deere tractor champions the right-to-repair movement — Sick Codes achieved this by working with different tractor control touchscreen consoles, narrowing it down to a select few models, and finding a way to exploit these devices.
• Right to repair movement goes Deere hunting
• The debate over right to repair in 2022 | Successful Farming
• Deere Hit with Class Action Lawsuit Over Right to Repair
• Late Night Linux – Episode 190

Plus our take on DuckDuckGo's new fight.

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• Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest — Rewarding pointless patches with free swag leads to 'DDoS' against projects
• One solution — @derekapp will close them for you automatically and mark them as invalid.
• Require PRs be in a repo with hacktoberfest topic and be accepted by MattIPv4
• Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean — We’re making Hacktoberfest opt-in only for projects – which maintainers can do simply by adding the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to a repository.
• What is Google TV and how is it different from Android TV? — Google TV is a new interface for Android TV that is powered by Google's machine learning, Google Assistant and the Google Knowledge Graph. It also reorganizes your content to help make it easier for you to find what you want to work.
• The new Chromecast with Google TV won’t officially support Stadia at launch
• WireGuard announces a big Android update with Android TV support — WireGuard now has a slew of announcements, with support for Android TV through their app, pre-built kernel modules for popular phones, a Kotlin rewrite of the UI, and much more.
• Unofficial LineageOS 17.1 brings Android 10 to NVIDIA SHIELD TVs — The unofficial LineageOS 17.1 build for NVIDIA Shield TVs allows users to run a heavily customizable, near-stock Android 10 experience on their Android TV boxes. I
• Listening to Developer Feedback to Improve Google Play — Our policies apply equally to all apps distributed on Google Play, including Google’s own apps. We use the same standards to decide which apps to promote on Google Play, whether they're third-party apps or our own apps.
• Android 12 will make it easier to install app stores — Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year.
• Apple v. Epic hearing: Judge hints at July 2021 trial
• Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo — The Q4 2020 results of Google’s search preference menu auction have been released and, as we predicted, DuckDuckGo has been eliminated in most countries.
• Atari VCS Backer Units are On the Way! — This shipment includes the one-time-only, Indiegogo-exclusive Atari VCS 800 Collector’s Edition model. Inspired by and designed as an homage to the original Atari 2600, there will only be 6,000 numbered and authenticated versions of this model.
• Atari VCS backers on IndieGoGo might actually get their units soon

Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.

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• Firefox 74 arrives with stricter add-on rules, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled — Starting with Firefox 74, users will need to take explicit action to install the extensions they want, and will be able to remove previously sideloaded extensions when they want to.
• Introducing GNOME 3.36: “Gresik” — GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, such as new login and unlock experience, and a dedicated app for managing extensions.
• GNOME 3.36 Released with New Lock Screen, Better Performance — Six months of development later and the official GNOME 3.36 release is finally here, with source code available to download from the usual places.
• Announcing Bottlerocket — Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost.
• Docker: Helping You and Your Development Team Build and Ship Faster — How are we going to do this? By focusing on developer experience through Docker Desktop, partnering with the ecosystem, and making Docker Hub the nexus for all the integrations, configuration, and management of the application components which constitute your apps and microservices.
• VMware Announces Expanded Portfolio of Products and Services to Help Customers Modernize Applications and Infrastructure — Tanzu, first introduced at the VMworld event in August 2019, is a portfolio of products centered on K8s. Also announced was vSphere 7, newly rearchitected using Kubernetes, and optimized to run both modern container-based and traditional virtual machine-based workloads.
• KaiOS Technologies and Mozilla partner to enable a healthy mobile internet for everyone — This partnership bolsters the security and performance of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, as well as the platform’s developer tools, security, and available functions, including better Progressive Web App and WebAssembly support.
• Magisk may no longer be able to hide bootloader unlocking from apps — Users have noticed that their bootloader-unlocked devices are failing SafetyNet’s Basic Integrity check even though they used Magisk to patch the boot image. According to Magisk creator John Wu, this is because Google may have implemented hardware-level key attestation to verify that the boot image has not been tampered with.
• Kernels for WSL2 will come from Windows Update — WSL2 will soon be officially available as part of Windows 10, version 2004! As we get ready for general availability, we want to share one additional change: updating how the Linux kernel inside of WSL2 is installed and serviced on your machine.

Plus Google Cardboard goes open source, and a neat machine-learning tool to pull songs apart.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Google gives most Chromebooks an extra year of software support — Seven Chromebooks from Lenovo recently had their support lifespan extended, and now Google has updated the EOL date for 135 more models from several manufacturers. Most models received another year of support, others only got another six months, and some now have two more years.
• What’s new in Chrome OS: Virtual Desks, simpler printing and more — Think of Virtual Desks as separate workspaces within your Chromebook. Use this feature to create helpful boundaries between projects or activities. If you’re working on multiple projects, you can dedicate a desk to each one. Open Overview and tap New Desk in the top right-hand corner of your screen to try out Virtual Desks.
• Google Enlists Outside Help to Clean Up Android's Malware Mess — Today Google is announcing a partnership with three antivirus firms—ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium—to create an App Defense Alliance.
• Open sourcing Google Cardboard — Today, we’re releasing the Cardboard open source project to let the developer community continue to build Cardboard experiences and add support to their apps for an ever increasing diversity of smartphone screen resolutions and configurations.
• Access ESM, now free to the community, via the updated Ubuntu Advantage client — Canonical is happy to announce that all community users are entitled to a free Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure account for access to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch* for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) for up to three machines, and up to 50 machines for all official Ubuntu Members.
• Releasing Spleeter: Deezer Research source separation engine — We are releasing Spleeter to help the research community in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) leverage the power of a state-of-the-art source separation algorithm. It comes in the form of a Python Library based on Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation.
• Microsoft Will Release Their Edge Web Browser For Linux — Microsoft announced at their Ignite conference in Seattle that their Edge web-browser will see a Linux release

Plus a big boost for ARM on Linux, and our thoughts on recent Red Hat news.

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• Ubuntu 19.10 Released — Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” boasts an upgraded Linux kernel along with faster boot times, updated themes, and experimental ZFS file system support. Whether or not you upgrade, Ermine shows what to expect from Ubuntu’s next LTS release, due April 2020.
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Codenamed The Focal Fossa, Arriving On 23 April
• Canonical Pulled In $99M While Still Operating At A Loss
• Ubuntu 19.10 Flavours Released
• Ubuntu 19.10's Kernel Ships With A DoS / Arbitrary Code Execution Bug In The IPv6 Code
• TechSNAP 414: Rooting for ZFS
• IBM Misses Estimates as Red Hat Fails to Offset Declines — Red Hat included in results for first time since 2018 purchase.
• Samsung ends Linux on DeX beta with Android 10 — Samsung will no longer provide support on future OS and device releases. The company also notes that users will not be able to perform a version rollback to Android 9 Pie once they have upgraded to Android 10.
• Bare Metal Arm-Based EC2 Instances — Just like for existing bare metal instances (M5, M5d, R5, R5d, z1d, and so forth), your operating system runs directly on the underlying hardware with direct access to the processor.
• Graboid: First-Ever Cryptojacking Worm Found in Images on Docker Hub — Unit 42 researchers identified a new cryptojacking worm we’ve named Graboid that’s spread to more than 2,000 unsecured Docker hosts.
• Docker Containers Riddled with Graboid Crypto-Worm
• andOTP removed from Google Play Store — andOTP was recently removed from the Google Play Store for violating their payment terms. This is most likely due to the fact that we offer in-app donation links that DO NOT use Googles In-App billing, which is against their terms.
• andOTP - Android OTP Authenticator
• WireGuard removed from Google Play Store — They said it was because we're in violation of their "Payments Policy", presumably because we have a link inside the app that opens the user's web browser to wireguard.com/donations/.
• WireGuard commit reversed dev comments interesting
• WireGuard - Apps on Google Play
• WireGuard Restored In Android's Google Play Store

Plus good news for KDE Connect users, Intel begins work on next-generation open source video drivers, and much more.

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• Google launches game streaming service called Stadia — Google CEO: "We're building a game platform for everyone."
• Killed by Google - The Google Graveyard & Cemetery
• How OpenXR could glue virtual reality’s fragmenting market together — “OpenXR since the beginning has had a lot of positive energy and urgency," Trevett continued. “I think people kind of realize everyone can benefit. Obviously it's not going to be magic, but I think it can make a difference, because everyone wins."
• Intel Xe Graphics Being Part Of The First US Exascale Supercomputer Is Great For Linux — With Aurora expected to run Linux, this means the Linux driver support for Xe Graphics will have to be up to par by 2021.
• Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "KDE Connect has been removed from @GooglePlay for violating their new policy on apps that access SMS [1]. The policy has an explicit exception for companion apps (like KDE Connect), but it was removed anyway and *there's no way to talk to Google*."
• Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "To close this thread, I want to say that KDE Connect finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid! Thanks everyone who spread the voice (this thread got half a million impressions on Twitter!) and helped make it happen :D… https://t.co/OTLY5KJdI6"
• Android Developers Blog: Providing a safe and secure experience for our users
• Google forced into Android browser choice — Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use.
• Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion — Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion for abusive practices in online advertising
• EC fines Google €1.49bn for abusing ad market dominance
• Google now pays more in EU fines than it does in taxes

Plus Microsoft open sources Windows Calculator, and a quick recap of SCaLE 17x.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Released — OTA-8 is primarily a stability improvement release as we continue to work on using upstream technologies in Ubuntu Touch, increasing our project output.
• PureOS convergence — Purism’s PureOS showcasing adaptive convergent design
• Announcing Maru 0.6 Okinawa — In Maru 0.6 Okinawa, the game completely changes, laying the foundation to run Maru on nearly any Android device.
• Android app devs to get new monetisation method — Google Play is excited to announce rewarded products, a new product type now available in open beta in the Play Console.
• Google Glass’ second-gen enterprise model leaks — Google’s not-quite-there vision of the future is getting a second enterprise model
• Microsoft open-sources Windows Calculator — Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open sourcing Windows Calculator on GitHub under the MIT License.
• calc.exe is now open source

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.

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• Mint to add Flatpak support — The project says the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18.3 will come with “full support” for Flatpak out of the box. This will include integration with the Linux Mint Software Manager.
• Drop KDE edition — The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month's Linux Mint 18.3 release.
• Oracle Could Still Make ZFS A First-Class Upstream Linux File-System — Mark wants to see ZFS become a core part of Linux. He wants it to become "the file-system of Linux" and "that could happen" for "core Linux." He later said, "it's a possibility... but I can't say how strong of a possibility," that includes talking with Oracle lawyers about the code license of both ZFS and Solaris.
• Open ZFS File-System Running On Windows
• Google Play Protect isn't very good at spotting malware — When exposed to recent Android malware samples, six of the 20 software suites sampled correctly flagged every single one as evil and prevented them from running. Eight more managed a 99 per cent or higher hit rate. Google's own system, Play Protect, only detected 65.8 per cent of threats.
• Mozilla helps out TOR and so can you — Today we’re launching our end-of-year crowdfunding campaign, “Powering Digital Resistance,” highlighting Tor’s work protecting essential human rights around the world. As part of this end-of-year campaign, Mozilla is matching donations up to a total of $500,000 -- so your donation to the Tor Project will go twice as far!
• Solus looking for help with aesthetics for Solus 4 — If you wanna help us improve the default experience for the next ISO, or you've some mad creative skills, let us know!
• Steam VR Marketshare Already Larger Than Steam Linux Marketshare — Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais‏ who is heavily involved in their Linux efforts as well as those around virtual reality has commented the VR market-share is already larger than the entire Steam Linux market-share.
• Putin Will Require Cryptocurrency Miners to Register With the Government — After months of conflicting statements, Russia has finally outlined its plan for cryptocurrencies.