Plus the PinePhone UBports edition goes up for pre-order, and our reaction to Huawei joining the Open Invention Network.

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• Linux kernel 5.6 release announcement — This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem worth delaying a release over.
• The Best Features Of The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• WireGuard Christened As A Modern Secure VPN Alternative
• WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0 — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
• WireGuard VPN review
• PinePhone UBports Community Edition Pre-orders — Today we're pleased to announce the first PinePhone 'Community Edition', which will ship with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed.
• PINEPHONE – “Community Edition: UBports” - PINE Store
• Ubuntu Touch Q&A 72 — We are very pleased to announce that we are now working together with German phone startup Volla. They are joining us as a sponsor and will have a place on our Advisory Board. We expect that UT will be available as a pre-installed option with the new Volla phone.
• Linux phones running postmarketOS can now run (some) Android apps — “Android in a Box” solution that basically installs Android in a container in a way that lets you run Android apps as if they were native apps.
• LineageOS 17.1 based on Android 10 is now officially available — The team has also decided to jump up on the subversion, going from 17.0 to 17.1
• Huawei signs non-aggression patent pact with membership of Open Invention Network — Chinese giant plays nice with open source
• Press Release Details - Open Invention Network
• Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt sues Atari for failing to pay him for design of VCS console — Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console.
• Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months
• Atari VCS: Managing the Unexpected — We believe it would be unfair to use the balance to fulfill only a small number of Indiegogo orders, so Atari’s plan is to ship to all backers at the same time when enough VCS units and peripherals are available.

Plus we try out Plasma Bigscreen, cover Telegram's really bad news, and much more.

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• Try our latest Test Pilot, Firefox for a Better Web, offering privacy and faster access to great content — Today we are launching a new Test Pilot initiative called Firefox Better Web with Scroll.
• Scroll partners with Firefox to build a better internet
• Scroll - a better internet
• Firefox Better Web with Scroll
• Firefox is launching a new test pilot with Scroll to pay web publishers
• Plasma Bigscreen — Plasma BigScreen is a platform intended to use on smart TVs with big remote-friendly UI controls, and Voice activation. What technology did we use for it? Plasma (of course!) and Mycroft.
• Plasma Bigscreen Homepage
• Google Play’s malicious app problem infects 1.7 million more devices — Apps went undetected by Google and antivirus scanners.
• Google Enlists Outside Help to Clean Up Android's Malware Mess — The newly formed App Defense Alliance will try to solve a malware problem that has bedeviled the Play Store since inception.
• Chrome and Chrome OS release updates resume — Today we’re sharing an update as we’re now resuming releases with an adjusted schedule
• Microsoft goes into Windows lockdown for builds from May — Microsoft on Tuesday said it has decided to halt Windows preview releases in May due to health concerns arising from the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.
• Federal court judge grants temporary injunction against Telegram — Judge sides with the SEC and says that Telegram's upcoming crypto is likely a security. It's barred from distributing Grams, the currency for its TON blockchain network, until trial.

Plus, why "Works with Chromebook" might be great for Linux, and using your GPU to fight the Coronavirus.

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• npm is joining GitHub — I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.
• The npm Blog — Next Phase Montage
• Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire
• GitHub for mobile is now available
• LMDE 4 “Debbie” released! — LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”.
• Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 — Jonathan Carter Sruthi Chandran Brian Gupta
• Platform for Jonathan Carter
• Platform for Sruthi Chandran
• Works With Chromebook — You’ll begin to see the Works With Chromebook badge on certified accessories in the U.S., Canada and Japan.
• Chromebooks Accessories & Chargers
• Chrome OS to get native app for printing and scanning
• Upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases — Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases.
• PAPPL Is A New Printer Application Framework Made By The Founder Of CUPS — Michael Sweet, the lead developer of CUPS who had been at Apple for more than a decade since they acquired it, is now developing PAPPL as a printer application framework in addition to his work on the new LPrint project.
• Crowdsourced supercomputing project sets sights on coronavirus — Folding@home targets COVID-19, number of volunteer ‘folders’ skyrockets
• Thousands of These Computers Were Mining Cryptocurrency. Now They're Working on Coronavirus Research
• Gamers... assemble. It's time to join forces with @NVIDIAGeForce and @OfficialPCMR
• NVIDIA GeForce on Twitter: PC Gamers, let’s put those GPUs to work.
• Firefox 74.0 Released — Firefox now provides better privacy for your web voice and video calls through support for mDNS ICE by cloaking your computer’s IP address with a random ID in certain WebRTC scenarios.

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 our concerns about Debian's future, and the unfixable Intel flaw announced this week.

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• Let’s Encrypt discovers CAA bug, must revoke customer certificates — On Leap Day, Let's Encrypt announced that it had discovered a bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code.
• Let’s Encrypt changes course on certificate revocation — Administrators are getting a little more time to replace affected certificates.
• Check code loop blunder strikes
• Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates
• 2020.02.29 CAA Rechecking Bug
• Revoking certain certificates on March 4
• 5 years of Intel CPUs and chipsets have a concerning flaw that’s unfixable — Converged Security and Management Engine flaw may jeopardize Intel's root of trust.
• New AMD Side Channel Attacks Discovered, Impacts Zen Architecture
• Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020 — I hope to be DPL again some year, but 2020 is the wrong year for me and for the project. So I will not nominate myself this year, but hope to do so some future year.
• DPL elections 2019, congratulations Sam Hartman! — The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Sam Hartman!
• Bits from the DPL For December 2019
• systemd v245 released, with homed stuff — A small new service systemd-homed.service has been added, that may be used to securely manage home directories with built-in encryption.
• FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying — With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name!
• Facebook is shifting its Libra cryptocurrency plans — The Libra project will now support existing currencies in addition to the proposed Libra token
• Jailbreak your iPhone using a rooted Android phone and checkra1n — Checkra1n gained support for Linux, making it possible to jailbreak iOS 13 devices using a Linux computer.
• Install Android 10 on your Apple iPhone 7 — Project Sandcastle, allowing you to run Android on your Apple iPhone 7.

Plus a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.

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• Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS — This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family.
• The Story of Collabora Office for Phones
• Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users — The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users.
• Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
• The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
• Securing Firefox with WebAssembly — RLBox, a new sandboxing technology.
• Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
• Building a World-Class Team at Inrupt
• Microsoft's Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller plus cloud service, hits general availability — Microsoft is making its Azure Sphere secure IoT service generally available after several years of testing and previews.
• A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35 — The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35.
• The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a RAM upgrade

Plus a new report about open source security, and more.

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• Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.
• Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise
• Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint now live under one App
• Microsoft Works - Wikipedia
• Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
• The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced
• IVPN applications are now open source
• Tom Scott video about VPNs
• Android 11 Developer Preview — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.
• npm struggling to fund FOSS devs — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources
• The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.
• Most-used libraries revealed
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are *far* more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.

Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

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• KDE Plasma 5.18 Released
• KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released, This is What's New
• MATE 1.24 released
• OpenShot 2.5.0 Released — Perhaps one of the most exciting changes in OpenShot 2.5.0 is our experimental support for hardware acceleration.
• OpenShot Video Editor Just Got a Massive Update
• Firefox 73.0 Released — Today’s Firefox release includes two features that help users view and read website content more easily, quickly.
• Firefox ESR 68.5.0 Released
• Tor Browser 9.0.5 Released — This release updates Firefox to 68.5.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.13, and on desktop, Tor to 0.4.2.6. We also added a new default bridge and backported a few improvements from the alpha series.
• Tails 4.3 is out
• An Update from Essential — We have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.
• Essential, Andy Rubin’s phone company, is shutting down
• Andy Rubin’s smartphone startup, Essential, is dead
• After just one phone, Essential Products ends
• NetBSD fundraiser — We are trying to raise $50,000 in 2020
• NetBSD 9.0 Released

Plus, a few community fundraisers.

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• End-of-life announcement for CoreOS Container Linux — We know this timeline is aggressive. We've tried to provide the longest possible migration period consistent with our ability to maintain the OS
• Glass Enterprise Edition 2 now available for developers
• Mycroft's Position on Patent Trolls — We are going to litigate every single patent suit to the fullest extent possible including appealing any adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.
• GNU-FSF cooperation update — Our mutual aim is to work together as peers, while minimizing change in the practical aspects of this cooperation, so we can advance in our common free software mission.
• GNU-FSF cooperation update — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
• The draft GNU Social Contract — I have been working with several other GNU Maintainers and volunteers to draft a GNU Social Contract which explains the key commitments we want from the GNU Project.
• GNU Social Contract DRAFT
• Jean Louis - Re: A GNU “social contract”?
• Proposals for the new GNU/FSF relationship
• Memorial Fund for Mark Greaves, PeppermintOS CEO — This is a tribute to Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec), Husband, Father, Peppermint CEO and distributor.
• AppCenter for Everyone — This campaign will fund a one-week in-person development sprint to develop and deliver on these key areas.

Plus our thoughts on IBM's CEO stepping down, and Google's new open-source security key project.

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• Qt offering changes 2020 — Moving forward, Qt Long-Term Support (LTS) releases will be restricted to commercial customers.
• Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt.
• Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers
• About “Qt offering changes 2020” – Fading Memories
• Nikolai Marchenko's message about TheQtCompany's presumed business model
• Linux 5.5 Released — So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter module loading fixes, David didn't think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it's really been very quiet indeed - there's a panfrost driver update too, but again it didn't really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week.
• 10 Best Features in Linux 5.5
• Some 5.5 kernel development statistics
• WireGuard + Multi-Path TCP Were Merged Tonight Into Linux 5.6
• Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6
• Linus Torvalds pulled WireGuard VPN into the 5.6 kernel source tree
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Adds WireGuard Support
• The Time Namespace Support Has Been Added To The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
• USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
• Thunderbird’s New Home — As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.
• Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest
• Ginni Rometty is out as IBM CEO — Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat — which IBM acquired last year in a $34 billion megadeal — will become IBM's president on the same day.
• IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down — Under her tenure, IBM experienced 22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018. In the company’s latest quarter, sales dropped 3.9% year-over-year to $18 billion.
• IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO, Replacing Ginni Rometty
• OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation — OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.

Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.

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• Rocket League will drop support for Mac, Linux versions in March | Ars Technica — Change comes eight months after Epic Games acquired the game's creators.
• Update on Refunds for macOS and Linux Players
• Support for macOS and Linux (SteamOS) – Psyonix Support
• Psyonix are ending support for Rocket League on both Linux and macOS (updated)
• Thanks to Psyonix dropping Linux support, we're getting anti-Linux statements like this from game devs again
• Wine 5.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes.
• Wine Is Approaching Six Million Lines
• Canonical introduces Anbox Cloud — The service is designed to offload workloads from x86 or Arm-based devices to containers in the cloud.
• The latest Chrome OS education devices will get updates for eight years — Previously, most Chrome OS devices recieved six years of software support.
• Chromebooks will now get up to eight years of Chrome OS updates
• Improving 40 million Chromebooks for education
• Upcycle Windows 7 — We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve.
• Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions

Plus, the sad loss of a community member, and more.

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• Peppermint project lead Mark Greaves has passed away. — His contributions to both Peppermint and to the desktop Linux world as a whole are incalculable and he will be sorely missed.
• Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue — Mozilla has a strong line of sight to future revenue generation, but we are taking a more conservative approach to our finances.
• Readying for the Future at Mozilla
• DigitalOcean is laying off staff, sources say 30-50 affected
• Nextcloud Hub Announced — New generation of leading content collaboration platform integrates office document editing and collaboration apps, introduces workflows, rich work spaces, file locking and more
• Nextcloud 18 Changelog
• Huawei pitches its alternative to Google Play Store — Huawei Mobile Services wants to make a big splash in Europe, with thousands of apps already signed up
• Huawei Quick Apps is Huawei's alternative to Google Instant Apps
• Exclusive: Google is working to bring official Steam support to Chrome OS — The Chrome team is working—very possibly in cooperation with Valve—to bring Steam to Chromebooks.

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• Amazon takes aim at MongoDB with launch of Mongo-compatible DocumentDB
• MongoDB "open-source" Server Side Public License rejected
• Redis Labs raises $60 million for its NoSQL database
• Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again
• Keeping Open Source Open – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Chef goes 100% open source
• Google jumps into gaming with Google Stadia streaming service
• Google Stadia will be missing many features for Monday’s launch
• Supporting choice and competition in Europe
• Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe
• Android Developers Blog: Welcoming Android 10!
• Project Mainline is Google’s new way to speed up security updates in Android Q
• Adiantum: encryption for the low end
• All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward
• Google gives most Chromebooks an extra year of software support
• Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
• Phoenix joins the LVFS
• Please welcome HP to the LVFS
• LVFS Project Announcement
• Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator
• Introducing Windows Terminal
• Microsoft Will Release Their Edge Web Browser For Linux
• Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux
• Announcing WSL 2
• Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released with New Features
• Intel 32bit packages on Ubuntu from 19.10 onwards
• Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS
• Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10
• Ubuntu 19.10 Released
• Will Cooke, the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu desktop, has left Canonical
• Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro for Amazon Web Services
• Red Hat Opens the Linux Experience to Every Enterprise, Every Cloud and Every Workload with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
• Red Hat crosses US$3b annual revenue for first time
• Announcing the release of Fedora 30
• IBM Closes Landmark Acquisition of Red Hat for $34 Billion; Defines Open, Hybrid Cloud Future
• Introducing Fedora CoreOS
• Presenting CentOS Stream
• Fedora 31 is officially here!

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 why Ubuntu is taking the Windows Subsystem for Linux so seriously.

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• Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro for Amazon Web Services — New premium Ubuntu images with extended security, kernel live patching and more
• Introducing the Ubuntu AWS Rolling Kernel
• Canonical Announces "Ubuntu Pro" For AWS
• Canonical makes Ubuntu for Windows SubSystem for Linux a priority
• Amazon Announces Graviton2 SoC Along With New 64-Core Arm Instances — The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon’s own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64.
• Graviton pulse - Memory Alpha
• AWS Goes All In On Arm-Based Graviton2 Processors
• Firefox 71 Released — Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Firefox 71 Linux Performance Isn't Looking All That Great
• Firefox Private Network Beta
• Firefox VPN Sign Up
• Mozilla launches the next phase of its Firefox Private Network VPN beta
• Avast Online Security and Avast Secure Browser are spying on you
• Mozilla updates DeepSpeech with an English language model that runs 'faster than real time'

Also, our thoughts on the new Alexa Voice service coming to low-end IoT devices, and much more.

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• Contract for the Web officially launched — Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity
• Tim Berners-Lee launches Google and Facebook-backed plan to fix the web
• Mozilla and the Contract for the Web
• State of Mozilla 2018: Annual Report — This report details how Mozilla operates and includes details from our financial reports for 2018.
• Mozilla: Be Smart. Shop Safe. — How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products.
• Minimum Security Guidelines Explained — These three organizations proposed five minimum guidelines that companies making connected devices should reasonably be expected to satisfy.
• Introducing Alexa Voice Service Integration for AWS IoT Core, a cost-effective Alexa Voice on any type of connected device — VS for AWS IoT enables Alexa Built-in functionality on MCUs like ARM Cortex ‘M’ class with <1MB embedded RAM by offloading memory and compute tasks to a virtual Alexa Built-in device in the cloud
• Kali Linux 2019.4 released with Xfce by default — We are incredibly excited to announce our fourth and final release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.4, which is available immediately for download.

Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.

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• Updates to the Mozilla Web Security Bounty Program — To celebrate the 15 years of the 1.0 release of Firefox, we are making significant enhancements to the web bug bounty program.
• GitLab: We are increasing bounties in our bug bounty program — Since we opened our bug bounty program to the public in December 2018, our community of external security researchers submitted 1,282 reports and we paid out $515,899 in bounties.
• Expanding the Android Security Rewards Program
• Google will pay $1.5 million for the most severe Android exploits
• Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
• Google To Require "Designed For Chromebook" Devices Support Fwupd Firmware Updates
• Debian init systems - what, another GR ? — Sam Hartman, the Debian Project Leader, has proposed a General Resolution (a plebiscite of the whole project) about init systems. In this posting I am going to try to summarise the situation. This will necessarily be a personal view but I will try to be fair. Also, sorry that it's so long but there is a lot of ground to cover.
• General Resolution: Init systems and systemd
• Open Invention Network Teams with IBM, Linux Foundation and Microsoft to Further Protect Open Source from Patent Trolls — Open Invention Network announced today it is partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
• IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme
• Official Monero website is hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware — GetMonero.org delivers Linux and Windows binaries that steal users' funds.

Plus, our thoughts on the PinePhone BraveHeart limited edition, and Stadia's potentially rocky launch.

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• Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise — Mirantis, a prominent OpenStack and Kubernetes cloud company, has acquired Docker Enterprise product line, developers, and business. 
• What We Announced Today and Why it Matters
• Docker’s Next Chapter: Advancing Developer Workflows for Modern Apps
• Docker Restructures and Secures $35 Million
• Container upstart's enterprise wing sold to Mirantis, CEO out, Swarm support faces ax
• IPAS: NOVEMBER 2019 INTEL PLATFORM UPDATE (IPU) — “67 of the 77 vulnerabilities we are addressing were internally found by Intel”
• MDS Attacks: Microarchitectural Data Sampling
• Intel Fixes a Security Flaw It Said Was Repaired 6 Months Ago
• Intel Failed to Fix a Hackable Chip Flaw Despite a Year of Warnings
• PINEPHONE – “BraveHeart” Limited Edition Linux SmartPhone For Early Adaptor — The “BraveHeart” Limited Edition PinePhones are aimed solely for developer and early adopter. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience and an interest in Linux-on-phone.
• Brave browser comes out of beta — The Brave open source browser fundamentally shifts how users, publishers, and advertisers interact online by giving users a private, safer, and 3-6x faster browsing experience, while funding the Web through a new attention-based platform of privacy-preserving advertisements and rewards.
• Installing Brave on Linux
• Google Stadia will be missing many features for Monday’s launch — Among the missing: 4K on PC, Achievement UI, Google Assistant, Family Sharing
• The world is waiting for Google Stadia to flop
• Microsoft’s xCloud preview now has 50 new games
• Choose Linux 22: Finding Your Community — We talk about the best ways to get involved in open source communities, finding like-minded people, conference strategies, community hubs, and what happened to all the LUGs.

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, Google's new dashboard for WordPress and ProtonMail's apps go open source.

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• Fedora 31 is officially here! — This release features GNOME 3.34, which brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora Server brings the latest in cutting-edge open source server software to systems administrators in an easy-to-deploy fashion.
• Fedora 31 Performance Is Still Sliding In The Wrong Direction
• Distributed Linux Testing Platform KernelCI Secures Funding and Long-Term Sustainability — "Testing is traditionally done only on the most common hardware. But because Linux runs on more hardware than any other operating system, it's important to also test it on all that hardware. The Linux Foundation's support is enabling us to expand the great work we started five years ago and sets us up for a bright future with a growing community,"
• Hackers can steal the contents of Horde webmail inboxes with one click — Horde is one of the most popular free and open-source web email systems available. It’s built and maintained by a core team of developers, with contributions from the wider open-source community. It’s used by universities, libraries and many web hosting providers as the default email client.
• Horde Webmail - XSS + CSRF to SQLi, RCE, Stealing Emails <= v5.2.22 — Horde Webmail - XSS + CSRF to SQLi, RCE, Stealing Emails <= v5.2.22
• ProtonMail iOS app is open source - ProtonMail Blog — As part of our commitment to security, we are putting all of our software through rigorous, independent third-party audits.
• Android App Soon
• Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites — Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin

Plus, the latest Firefox has a new dashboard, and it looks like Disney+ won't work on Linux.

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• GNOME files defense against patent troll — Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects.
• Will Cooke, the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu desktop, has left Canonical — That's all folks! Eoan was my last #Ubuntu release and I am handing over the reigns to the ever awesome @m_wimpress. Expect 20.04 LTS to be amazingly amazing! Excited for my new gig @InfluxDB
• Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center Letting You Track the Trackers — Today we’re introducing a new feature that offers you a free report outlining the number of third-party and social media trackers blocked automatically by the Firefox browser with Enhanced Tracking Protection.
• GitLab telemetry debacle — To make GitLab better faster, we need more data on how users are using GitLab.
• Announcing $268 million in Series E funding
• Google shows just how much Project Treble has improved OS Android adoption — Project Treble modularizes Android to make it easier for OEMs to update devices.
• It looks like Disney Plus won’t work on Linux — Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM, avoid  

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 OpenLibra aims to save us from Facebook but already has a miss, lousy news for Telegram, and enormous changes for AMP.

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• FSF and GNU — GNU decision-making has largely been in the hands of GNU leadership. Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU ("Chief GNUisance"), the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future.
• Joint statement on the GNU Project — Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.
• No radical changes in GNU Project — As Chief GNUisance, I'd like to reassure the community that there won't be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies.
• SUSE is dropping OpenStack and embracing Kubernetes — As we make these bold customer-driven investments and in order to maximize these opportunities, SUSE has carefully reviewed its business and has decided to cease production of new versions of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and to discontinue sales of SUSE OpenStack Cloud.
• AMP is joining the OpenJS Foundation incubation program — After considering many options for a foundation that meets all of AMP’s needs, the OpenJS Foundation stood out as an ideal home for AMP.
• Google Stadia will be “faster and more responsive” than local gaming hardware — Thanks to some precog trickery, Google believes its streaming system will be faster than the gaming systems of the near-future, no matter how powerful they may become.
• Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months — Retro console a mess, may never launch, sources allege
• Atari disputes reports that its retro-inspired console is doomed
• Open Libra — An open platform for financial inclusion. Not run by Facebook.
• 'Members' of OpenLibra Disavow Project Days After Its Devcon Unveiling
• Facebook’s Libra Association crumbling

Plus, Google finds an Android zero-day in the wild, and the Document Collective's new approach to earn revenue for LibreOffice.

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• Nextcloud 17 brings remote wipe, collaborative text editor — This release brings major new improvements, especially around security and team collaboration.
• Starting The Document Collective — In particular, selling branded versions of LibreOffice in the macOS and Windows app stores has not been something that TDF could tackle. The TDF board of directors is looking to change that with the creation of a new entity, The Document Collective (TDC)
• The Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones — Just make a Chinese website your device's remote administrator. It'll be fine!
• Google finds serious Android zero-day — Vulnerability was patched in older Android OS versions, but resurfaced in newer releases.
• Affecting devices from Samsung, Huawei, and Google itself
• Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore — “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” was the message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday.
• Microsoft Graph
• Jupiter Extras: Reverse Proxy Basics

Plus the best bit of Android 10 Go, Microsoft gives serious thought to bringing Edge to Linux, and Stallman's role at GNU comes into question.

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• CentOS 8 Released — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Presenting CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.`
• Transforming the development experience within CentOS
• Fedora and CentOS Stream — There’s not really been a consistent flow between the projects and product at all.
• Docker is struggling financially — Docker CEO Rob Bearden sent an email to employees this week acknowledging challenges as the company tries to raise money.
• GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit — The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent.
• Donate to GNOME
• QR Code Patent Troll Sues Dickey’s Barbecue
• Google announces Android 10 (Go edition) — Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption, built by Google for entry-level smartphones, called Adiantum.
• Gallery Go by Google Photos - Apps on Google Play
• Android: Try OTA updates without committing — That’s why they unveiled Dynamic System Updates (DSU) in Android 10 to let developers try a barebones version of a new OS update without unlocking the bootloader or wiping data.
• Sean Larkin on Twitter — "🚨🔥We on the @MSEdgeDev team are fleshing out requirements to bring Edge to Linux, and we need your help w/ some assumptions!🚨🔥 If you're a dev who depends on Linux for dev, testing, personal browsing, _please_take a second to fill out this survey! 📝 https://t.co/PCerGONmCG" / Twitter
• Stallman intends to keep leading GNU — I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such.
• Stallman changes his mind and quits GNU leadership role? — I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately.
• Richard Stallman Reportedly Steps Down As Head Of The GNU Project

Plus what systemd-homed is, why Debian is reconsidering init diversity, and some good news for CentOS.

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• Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
• Richard Stallman resigns from MIT — I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
• A reflection on the departure of RMS - Thomas Bushnell — By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
• LINUX Unplugged 319: Positive in the Freedom Dimension
• Debian reconsiders init diversity — In some ways dropping Elogind is a bigger decision. If we ever want to try something different than Systemd, we'll need something like Elogind.
• Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In "Init System Diversity"
• systemd-homed: systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling — Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts.
• Lennart's Video: Reinventing Home Directories
• Huawei confirms the new Mate 30 Pro won’t come with Google’s Android apps — Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer products division, revealed onstage at a press event in Germany this morning that the company has been forced to drop Google’s Mobile Services (GMS) license on the Mate 30 series of devices.
• Huawei clarifies it has "no plans" to unlock the bootloader — Huawei has “no plans” to unlock the bootloader on Mate 30 series devices.
• Oracle announces Oracle Autonomous Linux — Oracle Autonomous Linux provisions itself, scales itself, tunes itself and patches itself while running.
• CentOS Linux 7 (1908) released — This release supersedes all previously released content for CentOS Linux 7

Plus our thoughts on the PineTime, and more.

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• GNOME 3.34 Released — Version 3.34 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
• GNOME 3.34 Released with "Drastically Improved" Responsiveness
• GNOME Firmware 3.34.0 Release — With the new fwupd 1.3.1 you can now build just the libfwupd library, which makes it easy to build GNOME Firmware (old name: gnome-firmware-updater) in Flathub
• Please welcome Acer to the LVFS — Acer has now officialy joined the LVFS, promoting the Aspire A315 firmware to stable.
• Firefox’s Test Pilot Program Returns with Firefox Private Network Beta — It originally started as an Add-on before we relaunched it three years ago. Then in January, we announced that we were evolving our culture of experimentation, and as a result we closed the Test Pilot program to give us time to further explore what was next.
• Mozilla to gradually enable DNS-over-HTTPS later this month — Mozilla plans to enable support for the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol by default inside the Firefox browser for a small number of US users starting later this month.
• Google Unveils DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Plan
• Wherefore Art Thou CentOS 8? — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was released on May 7th, 2019.
• PineTime on Twitter — "This is the #PineTime (actual photo) - a #Linux smartphone companion and a side-project of ours. Are you a @real_FreeRTOS or @ArmMbed developer with an interest in smartwatches? - let us know. https://t.co/j7ygDWNqbD" / Twitter

Plus Red Hat's new desktop strategy, and what we think Mozilla is getting right.

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• Welcoming Android 10! — Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide.
• Google Releases Android 10 With "Vulkan Everywhere", Privacy Improvements
• The Verge Android 10 Review
• Android 10 adds warnings for USB port contamination and overheating
• The PinePhone is real & shipping soon — I am hereby happy to announce that the first PinePhones have now entered production and will start shipping to developers this month.
• Firefox 69 released — As of today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be turned on by default
• Tor Blog: Browser Fingerprinting - An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead
• Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers — CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift 4.1 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes.

Plus Gnome and KDE come together at the Linux App Summit, Mozilla's update on DNS-over-HTTPS, and the case for the VR desktop.

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• Manjaro to ship FreeOffice by default — We will ship FreeOffice by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker. Enjoy the best compatibility to MS Office.
• Manjaro backtracks — Manjaro will not be installing FreeOffice by default.
• GNOME and KDE to co-host the Linux App Summit in November — The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are proud to announce Linux App Summit 2019. The Linux App Summit will be held in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th, 2019.
• An update on Android for search providers in Europe — Next year, we'll introduce a new way for Android users to select a search provider to power a search box on their home screen and as the default in Chrome (if installed).
• Google will use a first-price sealed-bid auction
• DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Update — We want to understand how often users of Firefox are subject to these network configurations.
• Contract for the Web is becoming a reality — Berners-Lee has called it many things since he announced it at the 2018 Web Summit: a contract, a “magna carta” and a Bill of Rights.
• Browser vendors win war with W3C over HTML and DOM standards
• Solid
• Moving the Linux desktop to another reality — Today, we are very excited to announce a new open source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR.

Plus Facebook wants you to use their cryptocurrency, and CERN launches "The Microsoft Alternatives project".

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• Mozilla says paid subscription service is coming to Firefox — The goal for Mozilla is to develop “diverse sources of revenue” so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser.
• New Firefox branding — The “Firefox” you’ve always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first.
• Apple joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining as a top-level Platinum End User Member.
• MAlt project — The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases.
• Huawei's struggle in the US has led to it cancel a new MateBook — Huawei CEO Richard Yu has confirmed an indefinite hold on the release of a new MateBook laptop.
• Huawei may use Sailfish OS-based Aurora — Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile operating system based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.
• Huawei's operating system in pipeline on 1 million phones? — In a smartphone supply chain report that Huawei has allegedly shipped 1 million smartphones with its self-developed "HongMeng" operating system onboard for testing.
• Facebook’s cryptocurrency to debut next week backed by Visa, Mastercard, and others — Each will invest around $10 million to fund the development of the currency and will become part of the Libra Association, an independent consortium that will govern the digital coin independently of Facebook.

Plus new releases from nano and Nextcloud, huge news for Jupiter Broadcasting, and more.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Give Fedora Silverblue a test drive — Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.
• nano 3.0 released — GNU nano 3.0 "Water Flowing Underground" speeds up the reading of a file by seventy percent, roughly doubles the speed of handling ASCII text, changes the way words at line boundaries are deleted, makes wipe the next word and the preceding word...
• Nextcloud 14 released — The upcoming Nextcloud 14 introduces a series of improvements to make Nextcloud even easier to use and also more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
• Firefox Focus to switch to Gecko — In the next weeks, we’ll release a new version of Focus for Android, and for the first time, Focus will come bundled with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox Quantum.
• Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default
• Microsoft planned to try and stop users installing alternative browsers in Win10 but then backtracked
• Jupiter Broadcasting Joins Linux Academy — As part of Linux Academy, we’re going to do more than create better content. We’re going to contribute back.
• User Error is back! — User Error is back with a new set of hosts! We answer some #AskError questions and talk about whether the Linux desktop will ever make money. Plus we wonder if dockless bike sharing is a good idea and whether travel really is as great as everyone seems to think.