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• The Coder Robe — Celebrate Coder 500! The Robe, the Tumbler, and the Sticker are available for a limited time.
• Git Vulnerabilities — Today, the Git project released new versions to address a pair of security vulnerabilities, (CVE-2023-22490 and CVE-2023-23946) that affect versions 2.39.1 and older.
• 10 Years of Steam — Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.
• Sabayon 9 Review | LAS | s22e08 - YouTube
• Opening the Valve | LAS | s22e09 - YouTube
• Ubuntu Gets Real — Canonical today announced the general availability of real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
• Canonical Promotes Ubuntu’s Real-Time “RT” Kernel To General Availability
• Here Comes GTK5 — Discussions around the GTK5 tool-kit also happened with some developers eager to begin work on that next major release in order to begin facilitating API breaks and removing deprecated code.
• Plasma 5.27 — Plasma 5.27 is out and brings massive improvements to the desktop and all its tools. Another work of love from the KDE devs and contributors.
• KDE Plasma 5.27 Released — Better Wayland Support, KWin Tiling, Multi-Monitor Overhaul
• Final Version of KDE Plasma 5 Released – This is What’s New — Notably, this is expected to be the final release in the KDE Plasma 5.x series, with the following stable release set to be KDE Plasma 6.0, due for release towards the end of the year.

Plus Edge is out for Linux, and PayPal gets bitcoin fever.

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• Ubuntu 20.10 Released, Now Available to Download — Ubuntu 20.10 rides atop the Linux 5.8 kernel, includes the GNOME 3.38 release, has new wallpapers, Active Directory integration (for enterprise users) in the installer, and carries a clutch of updated software, tools, and libraries.
• Ubuntu 20.10 Flavours Released
• Ubuntu 20.10 on Raspberry Pi delivers the full Linux desktop and micro clouds
• How to build a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster using MicroK8s
• Build a Raspberry Pi Desktop with an Ubuntu heart
• Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise — It is the world’s first software that runs Windows directly on enterprise Chromebooks―enabling full-featured Windows apps including Microsoft Office and proprietary apps―even when there is not an Internet connection.
• youtube-dl removed from GitHub by RIAA takedown notice — Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.
• How the youTube-dl devs found out about DMCA takedown
• Microsoft Edge arrives in preview form for Linux — The release officially supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Sadly, there is no love for Pi fans at present; the team are apparently "looking at Arm", but no release has been forthcoming.
• We Go Hands on With Microsoft Edge for Linux
• PayPal Launches New Service Enabling Users to Buy, Hold and Sell Cryptocurrency — Today announced the launch of a new service enabling its customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account, and signaled its plans to significantly increase cryptocurrency's utility by making it available as a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.
• PayPal and Venmo will offer and accept cryptocurrency for all online payments

Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.

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• Plasma 5.20: One absolutely massive release — A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
• KDE Plasma 5.20 is Here – And It's an Epic Update
• LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade — To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch
• Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
• Intel Blows the Coms Again
• Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
• CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up — The open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020.
• Has Apple abandoned CUPS?
• LPC 2020 - Open Printing MC - YouTube
• OpenPrinting News - September 2020
• Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
• AntennaPod
• AntennaPod - Apps on Google Play
• AntennaPod | F-Droid

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 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 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.

Plus, our reaction to Google's search ballot scheme launch.

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• Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license — Distributed app platform's proposed agreement 'isn't freedom respecting,' he says
• Debian Developers Decide On Init System Diversity: "Proposal B" Wins — In recent months there has been lots of differing views over how much Debian should care about systemd alternatives some five years after they decided to move to systemd in the first place.
• Bing loses out to DuckDuckGo in Google’s new Android search engine ballot — Google will start offering EU users a choice for their default search engine
• US Government-funded Android phones come preinstalled with unremovable malware — Phones were sold to low-income people under the FCC's Lifeline Assistance program.
• Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans
• Amazon’s AutoGluon helps developers deploy deep learning models with just a few lines of code — AutoGluon democratizes machine learning, and makes the power of deep learning available to all developers.
• AutoGluon: Deep Learning AutoML
• AutoGluon Documentation 0.0.1 documentation — Only Linux installation is supported for now (Mac OSX and Windows versions will be available soon). AutoGluon requires Python version 3.6 or 3.7.

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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, our concerns with Google's clever long-term Fuchsia strategy.

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• Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux — Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats.
• Zulip 2.1: Open source team chat — Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software, used by thousands of teams as an alternative to Slack, HipChat, Mattermost and IRC. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading, and is 100% free and open source software.
• Why Zulip - The best group chat
• Updated images of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 — With the new images, USB ports are now fully functional out of the box on the 4GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4.
• Eben Upton on Twitter — Raspberry Pi numbers get stale fast. We sold our thirty-millionth unit some time last week (we think Tuesday).
• Eben Upton on Twitter — The average is much closer to $35. I believe we're at pretty much exactly one billion dollars.
• Google's Fuchsia to support Chrome OS tablet 'Flapjack' — Chrome OS won’t be the only operating system this device supports, as Google’s Fuchsia OS team is also looking to support the “Flapjack” tablet.
• Flutter gathers pace
• Twitter wants to decentralize, but decentralized social network creators don’t trust it — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a theoretically huge announcement: he wanted Twitter to stop being a self-contained platform and start delivering content from a decentralized system
• A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past
• Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms
• DXVK To Enter Maintenance Mode — Not because it's considered feature complete and bug-free, but because the main developer considers that DXVK has become a "fragile, unreliable and frustrating maintenance nightmare".
• Feral's Lead Vulkan Developer Leaves The Company For Sony
• NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020 — Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau

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 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 Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
• The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
• Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
• Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
• What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
• Chrome OS gets first Chromebook Enterprise devices, faster Admin Console, and managed Linux environments — Google today announced a slew of Chrome Enterprise updates, including a faster Google Admin console and managed Linux environments. The company also unveiled the first Chromebook Enterprise laptops: Dell’s Latitude 5300 for $819 and Latitude 5400 for $699.
• GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
• GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition. 
• Telegram will launch its Gram cryptocurrency by October 31 or bust — Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — may be going public after all. The encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months, according to a report at The New York Times.

Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.

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• Today, 28 years ago Linus Torvalds announced Linux on comp.os.minix. — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
• System76 announce new firmware updater — We’ve been working on the Firmware Manager project, which we will be shipping to all Pop!_OS users, and System76 hardware customers on other Debian-based distributions. It supports checking and updating firmware from LVFS and system76-firmware services, is Wayland-compatible, and provides both a GTK application and library.
• The Next Step in the OpenPOWER Foundation Journey — The OpenPOWER Foundation will now join projects and organizations like OpenBMC, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHPC and so many others within the Linux Foundation.
• IBM is moving OpenPower Foundation to The Linux Foundation
• Confidential Computing Consortium — Confidential computing focuses on  securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often  address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network)but encrypting data in use is  possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data.
• Confidential Computing Consortium Takes Shape
• The year-long rash of supply chain attacks against open source is getting worse — Backdoors snuck into 12 OSS packages were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
• Android to drop dessert names — So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change. 

Plus why you might actually want to use the new Dex, significant performance gains for a beloved project, and more.

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• NVIDIA Starts Publishing GPU Hardware Documentation To Help Open-Source Drivers — NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last.
• GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc
• Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10 — We are going to enhance ZFS on root support in the coming cycles. Ubuntu 19.10 is a first-round towards that goal. We want to support ZFS on root as an experimental installer option, initially for desktop, but keeping the layout extensible for server later on.
• Big performance improvements for LibreOffice — The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats:
• You might actually want to use the new DeX on the Galaxy Note 10 — Among the many new updates and features coming with the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10 Plus is a revamped take on DeX, Samsung’s desktop-like software that is powered by the phone.
• Huawei officially reveals Harmony OS — Harmony OS is microkernel-based, like Google’s in-development Fuchsia OS.
• Linux Journal Ceases Publication — On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity.
• Linux Format - Print or Digital

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 how Sailfish OS 3.1 is stepping things up, the first 16-core RISC-V chip is revealed, and more.

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• Introducing Fedora CoreOS — A new Fedora edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale.
• VLC developer debunks reports of ‘critical security issue’ — Widespread reports of a ‘critical security issue’ that supposedly impacted users of VLC media player have been debunked as “completely bogus” by developers.
• Android Phones Open to ‘Spearphone’ Eavesdropping — A Spearphone attacker can use the accelerometer in LG and Samsung phones to remotely eavesdrop on any audio that’s played on speakerphone, including calls, music and voice assistant responses.
• Sailfish OS 3.1 released — Redesigns to core apps such as People, Phone, Messages and Clock. Other areas that have been improved include; Document viewers, Email, Calendar, Dual SIM Card viewer information and Gallery gestures which have been improved.
• Mozilla debuts implementation of open source router firmware — Experimental builds of WebThings Gateway 0.9 are available on GitHub for the Turris Omnia router, with expanded support for routers and developer boards to come down the line.
• Alibaba Reveals 16-core RISC-V Chip — Alibaba Group’s chip subsidiary, Pingtouge Semiconductor, this week announced what it claims is the most powerful RISC-V based processor

Plus why RetroArch coming to Steam is a bit controversial, ubuntu-wsl is a cold drink for Windows users, and gpodder needs a new maintainer.

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• EndeavourOS first stable release — We’re proud to present you our very first stable release of EndeavourOS.
• RetroArch coming to Steam — But will this "completely free" release run afoul of Steam Community Guidelines?
• Introducing ubuntu-wsl — “A collection of utilities for WSL” to let you create shortcuts on the Windows desktop with wslusc, start the default Windows browser with wslview, and do a few other things.
• WSL - Ubuntu Wiki
• EvilGnome: Rare Malware Spying on Desktop Users — We have named the implant EvilGnome, for its disguise as a Gnome extension. The malware is currently fully undetected across all major security solutions. EvilGnome is a rare type of malware due to its appetite for Linux desktop users.
• Macbook keyboard and trackpad support coming to Linux 5.3 — Linux up to now hasn't had mainline support for the keyboard and trackpad on recent years of MacBooks: from MacBook8,1 or later or MacBookPro13 and MacBookPro14 models. These IDs roughly correlate to the MacBook systems since the end of 2015.
• Maintainer for gpodder.net needed — Some effort is required to keep a website or web service running and up-to-date. I (the current maintainer) have enough time to keep the system up and running for now, but no time to do any improvements and other development.

Plus why Fucshia OS might be the most significant future threat to Linux.

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• Debian 10 Buster released — We're happy to announce the release of Debian 10, codenamed buster.
• Debian 10 buster release details
• Debian and code names
• GalliumOS 3.0 released — GalliumOS can be installed in place of ChromeOS, or in a dual-boot configuration alongside ChromeOS.
• You Can Finally Read/Write To The SSDs On Newer Macs — This out-of-tree patch is against the current Linux 5.1 kernel and the write support should be considered particularly experimental, so be aware before trying to use this on a drive with any sensitive data.
• Mozilla teases $5-per-month ad-free news subscription — Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites.
• Scroll
• ISPA calls Mozilla a villain — The Internet Services Providers’ Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2019 Internet Hero and Villain.
• ISPA doubles down
• How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox
• Mozilla response in the register
• No plans to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in the UK
• Fuchsia gets a website — A couple of days ago and without fanfare Google went live with Fuchsia.dev, a developer site for its new operating system, currently called the Fuchsia Project.
• Dr. Xu Zhongxing's speech: Fuchsia OS Introduction Complete Record and Slide Download — The world needs a new operating system. Linux only cares about the world of servers, like a boiler worker who specializes in working in a boiler room below the deck. In order to make up for the shortcomings of Linux, Android has a thick middle layer and is constantly making compromises.

Plus Mozilla's big plans Firefox on Android, and the future of Steam on Linux.

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• Raspberry Pi 4 Released — Raspberry Pi 4 is now on sale, starting at $35. This is a comprehensive upgrade, touching almost every element of the platform. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users, while retaining the interfacing capabilities and hackability of the classic Raspberry Pi line.
• New version of Raspbian — We are actually releasing it slightly in advance of the official Debian release date. The reason for this is that one of the important new features of Raspberry Pi 4
• Slightly faster than Stretch version
• No USB boot yet
• Reinventing Firefox for Android — Today we’re very happy to announce a pilot of our new browser for Android devices that is available to early adopters for testing as of now.
• Firefox to get a random password generator
• Microsoft applies to join linux-distros mailing list — Windows giant cheered on by Linux Foundation as it seeks membership of private security-focused message board.
• Register's Coverage
• Introducing people.kernel.org — Ever since the demise of Google+, many developers have expressed a desire to have a service that would provide a way to create and manage content in a format that would be more rich and easier to access than email messages sent to LKML.
• Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS — We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed.

Plus we react to Facebook's Libra confirmation and the end of Google tablets.

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• Ubuntu to drop i386 architecture — he Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure.
• Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 9th 2018
• Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 14th 2018
• Wine devs worried — "I think not building packages for Ubuntu 19.10 would be the only practical option. It would probably be good to have a small explanation on the download page though. As I understand it, it would still be possible to run 32-bit executables on the Ubuntu 19.10 kernel, but we'd have to build and ship all our dependencies ourselves. I don't think we want to go there just yet."
• At least some games not working without 32-bit — Further to the recent announcement and subsequent discussion, I did a little testing over lunch on eoan 19.10 with all i386 packages removed and the i386 part of the repo disabled.
• Ubuntu NOT “dropping support for i386 applications” — What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions. But there is every intention to ensure that there is a clear story for how i386 applications (including games) can be run on versions of Ubuntu later than 19.10.
• Petition · Dont remove 32 bit support in the next version of Ubuntu
• Test and run multiple instances of snaps
• OpenMandriva also dropping 32-bit
• New vulnerabilities may let hackers remotely SACK Linux and FreeBSD systems — Netflix researchers discovered 4 flaws that could wreak havoc in data centers.
• Linux devices vulnerable to ping of death attack
• Red Hat's take on TCP SACK PANIC
• Mattermost raises $50M — The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total raised to roughly $70 million.
• Google says it’s done making tablets — The Pixel Slate won’t get a sequel, but the Pixelbook will
• Facebook's Libra confirmed — Facebook is planning to launch a cryptocurrency it hopes will “transform the global economy.”

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 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.

As well as the new GParted release, the Unity Editor for Linux and the Browser vendors struggle with the W3C's latest twist.

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• HiddenWasp Linux malware — Fully developed HiddenWasp gives attackers full control of infected machines.
• Docker Bug Allows Root Access to Host File System — The weakness is the result of a race condition in the Docker software and while there’s a fix in the works, it has not yet been integrated.
• Contain yourself, Docker: Race-condition bug puts host machines at risk... sometimes
• GParted 1.0 Released — This release of GParted includes a significant undertaking to migrate the code base from gtkmm2 to gtkmm3 (our GTK3 port).
• GParted 1.0 Milestone After Almost 15 Years
• Announcing the Unity Editor for Linux — A growing number of developers using the experimental version, combined with the increasing demand of Unity users in the Film and Automotive, Transportation, and Manufacturing (ATM) industries means that we now plan to officially support the Unity Editor for Linux.
• Don't Be Famous: Securing a Kubernetes Cluster Study Group - YouTube

Plus the ghost of Firefox OS lives on in the well-financed KaiOS, GitHub launches sponsors, and obvious uses for the new Google Glass 2.

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• Latest Firefox Release is Faster than Ever — We applied many of the same principles of time management just like you might prioritize your own urgent needs.
• Firefox 67 - Dark Mode CSS, WebRender, and more
• Smooth video playback with AV1 decoder
• It's not all beer and skittles for Firefox 67
• openSUSE Leap 15.1 released — The release of Leap 15.1 improves YaST functionality and the installer.
• openSUSE considers governance options — The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community is currently under discussion as the community considers different options for how it wants to be organized and governed in the future.
• Antergos Linux Project Ends — We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.
• Endeavour, Antergos community's next stage — We are proud to announce our project, code name Endeavour! This is going to be a distro with you, the community in mind.
• Manjaro claim >1M downloads so far this year
• Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 — Google is today ready to officially unveil Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, a followup with a faster processor, improved camera, and new Smith Optics frames.
• KaiOS raises $50M, hits 100M handsets — The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million.
• Announcing GitHub Sponsors — We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day.

Plus the impact of Google suspending business with Huawei, the recent ChromeOS feature silently dropped, and more.

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• ZombieLoad Attack — After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them.
• Understanding the MDS vulnerability: What it is, why it works and how to mitigate it
• Understanding Microarchitectural Data Sampling (aka MDS, ZombieLoad, RIDL & Fallout) from Red Hat - YouTube
• AMD Immune to Crippling MDS Vulnerabilities
• AMP to start hiding google from the URL — Signed-Exchange is something which can help you show your own domain in AMP page URLs, with all the AMP-Cache capabilities intact.
• A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting
• Dual booting Windows on Chromebooks dead — Project Campfire turned up in the Chromium world this past August.
• Microsoft open-sources a crucial algorithm behind its Bing Search services — Microsoft today announced that it has open-sourced a key piece of what makes its Bing search services able to quickly return search results to its users
• Microsoft AI lab experiments
• South Korean government planning Linux migration as Windows 7 support ends — The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux. The report doesn't mention a specific distro, instead "hopes to avoid building reliance on a single operating system."
• Windows dual booting no longer looking likely on Pixelbooks
• Google suspends business with Huawei — “Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android and will not be able to get access to proprietary apps and services from Google,” the source said.
• Command Line Threat Hunting Video

Plus Alpine Linux Docker images shipped for 3 years with root accounts unlocked, and Google's new attempt to send updates directly to your phone.

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• RHEL 8 released — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds.
• Considerations in adopting RHEL 8
• IBM's Red Hat acquisition moves forward — The Department of Justice has approved IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.
• WSL 2 using LTS source from Kernel.org
• Canonical announces support for Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
• WSL 2 deep dive - YouTube
• All new Chromebooks will run Linux apps — Google has announced that all new Chromebook devices will be Linux ready.
• Project Mainline is Google’s new attempt to send security updates directly to your phone — Google will start delivering some Android security updates through the Play Store
• Alpine Linux Docker Images Shipped for 3 Years with Root Accounts Unlocked — This vulnerability appears to be the result of a regression introduced in December of 2015.
• Alpine Linux's response to CVE-2019-5021
• Gartner says 90% of blockchain supply chain initiatives will go nowhere — Research firm Gartner is unimpressed.
• The Friday Stream

Plus the massive Firefox blunder, Canonical's new service, and a report from DockerCon.

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• Fedora 30 Released — Fedora Workstation features GNOME 3.32 — the latest release of this popular desktop environment.
• Purism launches Librem One — Librem One is a subscription service, using open standards and free software, and it is available for $7.99/mo, or $71.91/yr for the four services.
• Librem One Affected By Nasty Security Bug On Launch Day
• Todd attempts to save face — By putting services under a centralized brand, we make these decentralized services just as convenient to use as the big tech alternatives.
• Firefox addon cert blunder — Late on Friday May 3rd, we became aware of an issue with Firefox that prevented existing and new add-ons from running or being installed.
• Canonical consolidates open infrastructure support — Canonical today announced Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, a consolidated enterprise security, compliance and support offering that covers the full range of open source infrastructure capabilities for up to 10 years.
• Plans and pricing - Ubuntu Advantage Infrastructure
• Ubuntu and Dell launch developer survey — Give us your feedback and help shape the Ubuntu desktop.
• Docker introduces Docker Enterprise 3.0 with desktop integration, launches Docker Applications — 451 Research anticipates the app container industry will be worth more than $4.3 billion by 2022, and the competition is fierce.
• Amazon Managed Blockchain hits general availability — Amazon told businesses that they “can quickly set up a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,” doing away with what it describes as the typical cost and difficulty of creating a company network.
• Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service
• Facebook working on cryptocurrency-based payments platform

Plus who is spending $30m a month on AWS? Docker on ARM, and some LinuxFest Northwest thoughts.

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• Docker Hub hack exposed data of 190,000 users — Docker Hub usernames, hashed passwords, GitHub and Bitbucket access tokens exposed in the hack.
• Docker developers can now build Arm containers on their desktops — The main idea here is to make it easy for Docker developers to build their applications for the Arm platform right from their x86 desktops and then deploy them to the cloud (including the Arm-based AWS EC2 A1 instances), edge and IoT devices.
• Neoverse N1 – Arm
• Rancher looks to rope in Kubernetes users with new OS distro — It hasn’t been that long since Rancher announced k3s, a Kubernetes distribution for resource constrained environments. Just two months on, the project now gets its own operating system – k3OS.
• Rancher Labs combined Linux with Kubernetes in new OS platform
• Apple spends upwards of $30m a month on AWS — According to US media reports, Apple is spending upwards of $30m a month on procuring cloud services from Amazon Web Services
• Nextcloud 16 introduces machine learning based security and usability features — Suspicious Login Detection uses a locally trained neural network to detect attempts to login by malicious actors.
• France's 'Secure' Telegram Replacement Hacked in an Hour — The French government said that it still plans to require its use in lieu of WhatsApp and Telegram, for any informal communications between government employees, agencies and some handpicked non-governmental organizations.

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 more good work by Mozilla, and the Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin mining.

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• The 6 most important announcements from Google Cloud Next 2019 — Anthos is the new name of the Google Cloud Services Platform, Google’s managed service for allowing enterprises to run applications in their private data center and in Google’s cloud.
• PowerShell growth fueled by Linux use — PowerShell Core usage has grown significantly in the last two years. In particular, the bulk of our growth has come from Linux usage
• Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
• Mozilla still on track to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in Firefox
• Protections Against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining Available in Firefox Nightly and Beta
• Matrix suffers security breach — An attacker gained access to the servers hosting Matrix.org. The intruder had access to the production databases, potentially giving them access to unencrypted message data, password hashes and access tokens.
• Archive of deleted GitHub Issues lodged by the hacker
• Chinese government proposes ban on bitcoin mining — A Chinese ban on cryptocurrency mining would be a huge deal for the global bitcoin community.

A new way to run Android apps on Linux using Wayland, Sailfish and Mer merge, and more.

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• Chef goes 100% open source — “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”
• Chef’s Different Recipe
• Linux developer abandons VMware lawsuit — For over 10 years, VMware was accused of illegally using Linux code in its VMware ESX bare-metal virtual machine hypervisor. After a German court dismissed the case, the Linux programmer behind the lawsuit has called it a day.
• Court not happy case was initiated for ideological reasons — Since Hellwig's complaint was evidently motivated by idealistic motives - as the judge himself noted at the trial.
• Conservancy statement
• New way to run Android apps on Linux — It's now possible to run Android applications in the same graphical environment as regular Wayland Linux applications with full 3D acceleration.
• Sailfish and Mer merging — Mer has served it’s purpose and can retire.
• UBports Foundation finally created — We are very proud and excited to announce that we are about to be granted the status of an official foundation.
• EU launches blockchain association — The International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) grew out of months of forums and roundtables held by the commission to create a strategy around the emerging technology.

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 Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!

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• GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
• Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
• Debian project leader candidates emerge
• Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
• New Red Team Project — The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
• CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
• Funded by Github
• Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge” - Conservancy Blog
• NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
• Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
• Jeff Barr – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Android finally getting desktop mode — The AOSP Launcher has a new component that, when launched, brings up a new Android desktop interface.
• Here are the new Android Q features

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 we say goodbye to Koroa, find a reason to checkout GRUB nightlies, and how Android aims to kill passwords for good.

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• LineageOS 16.0 released — We feel that the 16.0 branch has reached feature parity with 15.1 and is ready for initial release. With 16.0 being the most recent and most actively-developed branch, on March 1st, 2019 it will begin receiving builds nightly and 15.1 will be moved to weekly builds.
• XDA Coverage of LineageOS 16.0
• KaiOS now with 85M feature phones shipped — With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google
• KaiOS is doing well in US too
• RISC-V Support Added To The GRUB Bootloader — As working towards this year's GRUB 2.04 update, we've known they have been on the finishing stretch for merging RISC-V support and as of this morning that milestone has been crossed.
• RISC-V Support in the FreeRTOS Kernel
• Bringing energy efficiency to IoT architecture
• The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance
• Thunderclap and Linux — The authors built a "fake" network card2 and performed various DMA attacks and were able to temper with memory regions that their network card should have no access to whatsoever.
• [announce] Struck by a Thunderbolt
• [official site] Thunderclap
• RIP Korora — "Our @kororaproject website has been redirected to @fedora as we do not have any new releases coming. Thank you for your support over the last 13 odd years."
• We saw this coming

And why KDE joining the Matrix, along with others might be establishing a new open source standard.

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• KDE is adding Matrix to its instant messaging infrastructure — KDE is adopting non-proprietary and decentralized instant messaging services and is now running its own community-managed instance of Matrix.
• Matrix the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app
• Interview with Matthew Hodgson: Matrix in the French State
• New Release: OnionShare 2 — OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services.
• Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again — “Some cloud providers have repeatedly taken advantage of successful opensource projects, without significant contributions to their communities.”
• Arm unveils new Neoverse chips for data centers — Arm claims that the design provides as much as 2.5 times more processing power for certain server workloads than the previous Cortex-A72 architecture.
• GCC 9 Compiler Support For The Arm Neoverse N1 + E1
• Linus' doubts
• Intel Confirms Apple Macs Will Switch to Arm CPUs by 2020, Says Report
• Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha — Hangover 0.4 is the first (alpha) release from this project for running x86/x86_64 Windows programs now on 64-bit ARM Linux distributions.
• Linux Academy - Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote)

Plus Void Linux issues a warning, running Linux on ARM laptops built for Windows, and more.

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• Google refocuses Android Things as a ‘platform for OEM partners’ — When Google announced Android Things at its 2015 I/O developer conference, it pitched it as a versatile, embedded, and open operating system designed to run on low-power and memory-constrained internet of things (IoT) devices with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.
• Android Developers Blog: An Update on Android Things
• Now you can run Linux on (some) ARM laptops designed for Windows 10 on ARM — The folks behind the AArch64 Laptops open source project on github have come up with a way to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on some of the first Windows 10 on ARM laptops.
• aarch64-laptops
• Microsoft Developer: You Still Should Have Anti-Virus With Windows Subsystem For Linux — In CPU/system benchmarks we routinely see Windows 10 WSL with Ubuntu and other distributions performing very well, but when it comes to disk reads/writes, it's drastically slower than bare metal Linux installs and in some cases much slower still than dedicated virtual machines.
• What’s new for WSL in Windows 10 version 1903? – Windows Command Line Tools For Developers — The next Windows update is coming soon and we’re bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it. These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line.
• Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend — We are going to consolidate and use a single database, PostgreSQL. We began investigating a move to a single database upstream in Pulp as early as 2016.
• [Pulp-dev] Transition from Mongo to Postgre — MongoDB is great at what it does and a good fit for some use cases, but we learned that it's not the best fit for Pulp.
• (Red Hat dropped MongoDB in January)
• Digitalocean launches Managed Databases for PostgreSQL — Starting with support for PostgreSQL, Managed Databases enables developers of all skill levels to quickly and easily spin up a high-performance database cluster that is worry-free and scalable
• Void Linux loses control of .eu domain — We would like to warn people of a domain name that is no longer under Void Linux control. voidlinux.eu lapsed in its original registration, and was purchased by an unknown 3rd party before Void Linux could regain ownership.
• J.P. Morgan Creates Digital Coin for Payments — J.P. Morgan this month became the first U.S. bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency. The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.
• JPMorgan is creating a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar — The new cryptocurrency will be built atop JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain technology, a variant of Ethereum that has been modified to serve the needs of a major financial institution like JPMorgan.
• Don’t Call JP Morgan Chase’s New ‘JPM Coin’ a Cryptocurrency

Plus new disk encryption coming to Linux, Intel releases their open source encoder for future video on the web, and more.

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• Raspberry Pi opens IRL store — The store is located on the first floor in the Grand Arcade in the centre of Cambridge, UK.
• Security bug fixed in LibreOffice but not OpenOffice — Austrian researcher Alex Inführ publicly reported the vulnerability on Friday
• LibreOffice 6.2 has a new UI — LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface
• Android PNG vulnerability — A maliciously crafted PNG image could execute code smuggled within the file, if an application views it.
• Adiantum: encryption for the low end — Low-end devices bound for developing countries, such as those running the Android Go edition, lack encryption support because the hardware doesn't provide any cryptographic acceleration.
• Google Adiantum announcement
• Intel Releases Open Source Encoder for Next-Gen AV1 Codec — SVT-AV1 requires Skylake-generation or newer Xeon processors with at least 112 threads and at least 48GB of RAM for 10-bit 4K video encoding.
• The AV1 Video Codec - YouTube Talk — This talk will discuss the road from specification to production, the current state of AV1 deployment, and our own efforts to write an AV1 encoder in Rust, rav1e. It is intended for a technical audience, but does not require previous signal processing experience.

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 we announce a new Linux podcast, and run down the many ways to run Ubuntu on Windows.

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• Choose Linux - New JB Show — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
• Steam For Linux Now Lets You Play Windows Games From Other Stores — Users can now launch Windows games purchased on platforms outside of Steam from inside the Steam for Linux client.
• Looks like it’s still using Wine 3.16
• Wine 4.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes.
• Microsoft Employee Hints at Windows Core OS Open Source Components — The Security Program Manager then said that he "improved the security posture of Windows Open Source Components through initiatives that investigate vulnerabilities found and establish a process for remediation.”
• Multipass for Win10 public beta — Multipass, at its core, is a service to manage Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) virtual machines in Windows 10 without the overhead of faffing about with Hyper-V (although Hyper-V is most definitely required to make the thing work).
• Ubuntu Core 18 gets 10 years of support — Dell has been working closely with Canonical over the past three years to certify Ubuntu Core on all our Edge Gateway platforms.
• Debian releases new images with apt fix — This point release incorporates the recent security update for APT, in order to help ensure that new installations of stretch are not vulnerable. No other updates are included.
• It might be harder to block ads in Chromium — Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including ad blockers.
• Google poaches 14-year Mac veteran from Apple to bring Fuchsia to market — Stevenson started at Apple in 2004 as a Product Release Engineer for OS X. In this role, he “triaged and diagnosed” application and framework issues, while also working with third-party developers.

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 Homebrew comes to Linux, the recent Ethereum Classic attack, and more.

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• Chrome OS may soon let companies choose their own distro for Linux apps — Device administrators will be able to designate a URL for Chrome OS to download the Linux distro from a hash to ensure the download was successful.
• Github offers free private repos — Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering.
• Homebrew comes to Linux — The most significant changes since 1.8.0 are Linux support, (optional) automatic brew cleanup and providing bottles (binary packages) to more Homebrew users.
• Amazon launches Mongo-compatible DocumentDB — The launch of AWS DocumentDB – a fully managed document database service – comes just months after MongoDB announced a new licence
• Phoenix joins the LVFS — Just like AMI, Phoenix is a huge firmware vendor, providing the firmware for millions of machines.
• Ethereum Classic suffers 51-percent attack — Rollback attack let attackers spend 88,500 previously spent coins.
• Coinbase Suspends Ethereum Classic

Plus the BSDs rebase their ZFS on the Linux implementation, the EU has bug bounties, and Thunderbird gets set to fly!

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• Raspberry Pi joins RISC-V Foundation — We're excited to have joined the @risc_v Foundation as a silver member. Hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and @debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture.
• Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Driver Finally Being Mainlined — The Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen retails for about $60 USD and with the Linux 4.21 should be playing nicely with the mainline kernel.
• MIPS to be open sourced — The MIPS Open initiative will help greatly expand the existing MIPS ecosystem comprised of thousands of developers and over 100 academic institutions worldwide by offering new opportunities to create innovative solutions from third-party tool vendors, software developers and universities.
• Wave Computing takes funding over $200 million
• EU Offers Bug Bounties For 14 Open Source Projects — As the bug bounty programs begin to roll out in January, security experts worry that the programs miss the mark on truly securing open source projects.
• Mozilla "experimenting" with more ads in Firefox. — “This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner.”
• Thunderbird ready to fly into 2019 — Welcome to 2019, and in this blog post we’ll look at what we got accomplished in 2018 and look forward to what we’re going to be working on this year.
• FreeBSD admits that Linux is better (when it comes to ZFS) — In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL. This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos.

Plus there’s no avoiding how far off we were when it came to Bitcoin last year, but that didn’t stop us having a go again this year!

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Acquisitions, solid releases, a revolution for gaming, politics in the kernel community, Chrome OS coming of age, and more.

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• IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Most significant tech acquisition of 2018 will unlock true value of cloud for business
• Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS — The world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc.
• Welcome to Fedora CoreOS — This new thing will be “Fedora CoreOS” and serve as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS.
• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches 1.0 — Stratis 1.0 was quietly released last week with the 1.0 version marking its initial stable release and where also the on-disk meta-data format has been stabilized.
• Microsoft to acquire GitHub — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub
• Microsoft joins OIN — Microsoft is joining the Open Invention Network (“OIN”), a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk.
• Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — Azure Sphere is a solution for creating highly-secured, connected Microcontroller (MCU) devices, providing you with the confidence and the power to reimagine your business and create the future.
• Ubuntu 18.04 released — The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023.
• Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — At OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a keynote that Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) support lifespan would be extended from five years to 10 years.
• Valve’s “Steam Play” uses Vulkan to bring more Windows games to Linux — Valve announced today a beta of Steam Play, a new compatibility layer for Linux, to provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games.
• Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Valve is no longer highlighting Steam Machine hardware through the front page of its online Steam store, seemingly putting a final nail in the coffin of Valve's partnership with third-party PC builders.
• Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
• Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer.
• Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs — The revamped Linux code of conduct encourages behaviors like accepting constructive criticism gracefully, using inclusive language, and being respectful of “differing viewpoints and experiences.”
• Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed — Support for Linux will enable you to create, test and run Android and web app for phones, tablets and laptops all on one Chromebook. Run popular editors, code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command-line. Everything works directly on a Chromebook.
• Chrome OS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
• Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Mr. Beaufort points to a Chromium Gerrit commit that gives details of the feature that shows M70 of Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default.

Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

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• Intel Working On Open-Sourcing The FSP — Firmware support package (FSP) for initializing the Intel silicon - the CPU, memory controller, chipset.
• Intel introduces the deep learning reference stack — The Deep Learning Reference Stack is highly-tuned and built for cloud native environments.
• Uber brings Horovod project for distributed deep learning to Linux Foundation — Uber has used Horovod to support self-driving vehicles, fraud detection, and trip forecasting. Contributors to the project include Amazon, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.
• The x32 subarchitecture may be removed — The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic.
• Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’ — This means that everyone who downloads AOSP, going forward, will download these two Fuchsia related repos.
• FreeBSD 12.0 released — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
• Ho, Ho, Ho - 12.0 | BSD Now 276

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 AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.

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• Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
• Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.
• Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.
• AMP Project’s new governance model now in effect — Two key features of AMP’s new governance model are the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC).  We have endeavored to ensure that these committees consist of people who bring a wide variety of perspectives, with representatives from different AMP constituencies.  
• Necuno Mobile: An open phone with Plasma Mobile — With a focus on openness, security and privacy, the Necuno Mobile is built around an ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6 Quad and a Vivante GPU. According to Necuno, none of the closed firmware has access to the memory.
• Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation Announce Joint Collaboration — This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
• Firecracker mini VMs tipped to the next big thing — Firecracker can launch user space or application code in less than 125ms and microVMs at a rate of 150 per second per host. It churns out fairly compact microVMs too, with each requiring less than 5MiB of memory overhead, so thousands can co-exist on a single server.

Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.

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• Huawei testing Fuchsia on the Honor Play — A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play.
• Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
• Atari VCS update — Mostly unfiltered excerpts of some of Rob Wyatt’s internal notes to the Atari VCS team over the past several months of development that reveal some of the story around the origins of the Atari VCS Operating System.
• Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning — Today we are making Auto Scaling even more powerful with the addition of predictive scaling. Using data collected from your actual EC2 usage and further informed by billions of data points drawn from our own observations, we use well-trained Machine Learning models to predict your expected traffic (and EC2 usage) including daily and weekly patterns.
• Free continuous delivery service for open-source developers — “It’s free for the open-source community. So it’s an open source only offering. There’s no paid plan, and it’s only available to public GitHub repositories,”
• America’s nuclear arsenal relies on supercomputer running RHEL — Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores.

Plus the new Red Hat Enterprise beta has modularity, why Canonical might be ready for investors, and the bad week for cryptocurrencies.

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• New mid-range Raspberry Pi launched — TL;DR: you can now get the 1.4GHz clock speed, 5GHz wireless networking and improved thermals of Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a smaller form factor, and at the smaller price of $25.
• Raspbian updated — Today we’re releasing a new update for Raspbian, including a multimedia player, updated Thonny, and more.
• Kodak's new 3D printer has a Raspberry Pi inside
• Android prepares for folding screens — The multi-resume feature now makes it possible for multiple apps to be open and actually be running at the same time. Google is now allowing manufacturers to keep all apps resumed/active when in multi-window.
• Essential launches $149 clip-on headphone jack — It’s the $149 magnetic headphone jack adapter Essential promised way back in September 2017. The company first announced in June that the accessory would start shipping in the summer, but it apparently missed that deadline.
• Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — "I'm delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years," said Shuttleworth
• Ubuntu Advantage — $2,500 cart minimum applies.
• Canonical looking for investors — Shuttleworth likens this program of getting the company ready to IPO to getting fit. “There’s no point in saying: I haven’t done any exercise in the last 10 years but I’m going to sign up for tomorrow’s marathon,” he said.
• RHEL 8 beta released — Allows updating user space without breaking everything.
• Cryptocurrency market tanks — Within one brutal hour yesterday, Bitcoin’s price plummeted by around $800. The coin is trading under $5,800 for the first time since its October 2017 boom
• Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale is happening now! Transform your cloud skills here at Linux Academy. Take your career to the next level with hands-on cloud and Linux training.

Plus it's the end of the line for the Nexus devices, and more!

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• Booting Linux on new Macs — Apple's T2 security chip being embedded into their newest products provides a secure enclave, APFS storage encryption, UEFI Secure Boot validation, Touch ID handling, a hardware microphone disconnect on lid close, and other security tasks. The T2 restricts the boot process quite a bit and verifies each step of the process using crypto keys signed by Apple.
• WSL gets new features — A slate of improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update. 
• Samsung announce Linux on DeX — Samsung is announcing the beta launch of Linux on DeX which extends the value of Samsung DeX to Linux developers. Linux on DeX empowers developers to build apps within a Linux development environment by connecting their Galaxy device to a larger screen for a PC-like experience.
• Linux on Dex
• KDE Connect Updated — Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.
• GSConnect updated — The GNOME Shell UI has been rewritten to better conform to design guidelines. Appearance is important to everyone and work will continue to improve usability for touchscreens, HiDPI and users requiring accessibility features.
• Librem 5 slips again — I am reluctant to give a new timeline for shipping the dev kits… What we know is that our new PCB fabrication here in the USA will be 11 business days. We will make over 300 of these boards, which are pretty complex—we have over 160 different parts and more than 500 components in total per board. This takes some time, even with the amazing SMT machines placing tiny parts.
• Nexus devices finally dead — An over-the-air (OTA) update, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, is now rolling out to both the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P (as well as to the Pixel/Pixel XL, the Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL), bumping up both phones to the latest November security patches. But if Google’s update policies are to be followed here, then this will be the last update to be released to both Nexus phones, meaning that the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P have now officially reached end-of-life (EOL) status. Furthermore, online and phone support for both devices is also being discontinued.

Plus we go over the newly publish Ubuntu statistics, and Google's new Android licensing scheme in Europe.

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• Ubuntu 18.10 released — Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new community-developed default theme.
• More Ubuntu statistics published — This report is generated from basic, non-identifiable system data that was provided by users when installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
• elementary OS 5.0 Juno released — Juno is such an incredible release, and it’s here thanks to all of our supporters.
• MongoDB makes change to license — The SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.
• Google changes Android licensing policy in Europe — Ad giant to charge for key applications amid license shakeup and antitrust fine
• CoC Committee Added Plus Interpretation & Mediator — It turns out Greg KH was working in private with various kernel maintainers/developers on addressing their feedback and trying to come up with solutions to the contentious issues in private.

Plus Google's new Linux hardware, Flatpaks have met their critic, and more.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 5 released — While many have already joined the community on 16.04 with OTA-4, in addition to the long-term support of upstream Ubuntu development, OTA-5 will include a more stable experience, new tweaks, and new features to show off this next stage of Ubuntu Touch development.
• Plasma 5.14 released — A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
• User Error Episode 50: Understand The Hype — It seems to be all about Plasma these days so we want to know if the hype is justified.
• Website criticises Flatpaks — To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app
• Redis modules forked — Redis put some of the program's code under the anti-open-source Common Clause license. Now, developers are counterattacking by forking the code.
• Microsoft joins OIN — Joining OIN reflects Microsoft’s patent practice evolving in lock-step with the company’s views on Linux and open source more generally.
• ChromeOS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
• Restyling apps at scale

Plus Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channels his inner Shuttleworth.

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• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches Its 1.0 Stable Milestone — Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release.
• Stratis Whitepaper
• ​Red Hat Satellite integrated new, improved Ansible DevOps — Red Hat is adding Ansible DevOps capabilities to its Red Hat Satellite system management program.
• hibernation — does it work for you? — We have had a long discussion about hibernate (suspend to disk) being unreliable. But there seems to be no hard data. Let's gather some!
• Microsoft announces app mirroring to let you use any Android app on Windows 10 — The feature, which Microsoft is referring to as app mirroring and shows up in Windows as an app called Your Phone, seems to be work best with Android for now. Although Microsoft did announce the ability to transfer webpages from an iPhone to a Windows 10 desktop so you can pick up where you left off on mobile.
• Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — An OS purpose built for security and agility to create a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences. Our secured OS builds security innovations pioneered in Windows into an HLOS small enough for MCUs.
• Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Board — Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Kit_US Version
• Microsoft open-sources Infer.NET AI code — Infer.NET, which is on GitHub right now, takes a model-based approach to machine learning. The developer gives the framework a model, and the framework then develops a machine-learning algorithm directly from the model provided.
• Node.js and JS foundations looking to merge — “The Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation boards have met several times already to discuss a potential alignment of the communities. The Foundation leaders and key technical stakeholders believe that a tighter alignment of communities will expand the scope of the current Foundations and enable greater support for Node.js and a broader range of JavaScript projects,”

Plus a new release of our favorite non-distro, GPL revoking debunking, and Android turns 10.

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• Android turns 10 — This was an era in which Android devices were responding to Apple, and not vice versa as we find today.
• Google's Project Zero criticises Linux distros for tardy kernel patches — Project Zero accuses Linux distributions of leaving users exposed to known kernel vulnerabilities for weeks.
• CVE-2018-17182 in Ubuntu — As of 2018-09-26, fixes for this issue are applied to all kernels uploaded to RELEASE-proposed today. and should be released around Monday, Oct 1, 2018.
• No, GPL can't be revoked — For anybody who has been concerned by the talk from a few outsiders about revoking GPL licensing, this new section in the Software Freedom Conservancy's copyleft guide is worth a read. Thus, anyone downstream of the contributor (which is anyone using the contributor’s code), has an irrevocable license from the contributor. A contributor may claim to revoke their grant, and subsequently sue for copyright infringement, but a court would likely find the revocation was ineffective and the downstream user had a valid license defense to a claim of infringement.
• KDE neon Rebased on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver". We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.
• At least half of Azure is running Linux — "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux."
• Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned — Mozilla is taking this a step further by also letting you sign up for alerts for when your accounts appear in any (known) breaches in the future.
• Mintcast needs new hosts — Rob and Isaac talk about ending their time doing the podcast and ask who would like to take over.
• Linux Academy Job Openings

Plus Venezuela ties its currency to a cryptocoin, and our reaction to Windows 95 getting stuffed inside an Electron app.

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• Flatpak reaches 1.0 — Flatpak 1.0 is the first version in a new stable release series. This new 1.x series is the successor to the 0.10.x series, which was first introduced in October 2017.
• Venezuela ties its currency to a cryptocoin — It is supposed to be a liquid asset reflective of the price of oil, and there is of course a whitepaper that describes the system in broad strokes, though it lacks almost any real technical detail.
• Linux turns 27 — Some FOSS fans consider the first public release of (prototype) code, which dropped on October 5, 1991, as more worthy of being the kernel’s true anniversary date. Others, ourselves included, take today, August 25, as the “birth” date of the project.
• IRC Turns 30
• Debian turns 25
• GNOME turns 21
• Intel Microcode update didn’t allow benchmarks — Since the microcode is running for every instruction, this seems to be a use restriction on the entire processor. Don’t run your benchmarker at all, not even on your own software, if you “provide” or publish the results.
• Until they changed their mind
• Windows games for Steam on Linux confirmed — What many people suspected turned out to be true, DXVK development was actually funded by Valve. They actually employed the DXVK developer since February 2018. On top of that, they also helped to fund: vkd3d (Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan), OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges, wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11 and more.
• Proton — Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on Linux and macOS operating systems. It uses Wine to facilitate this.
• Windows 95 available as an Electron app — This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Yes, it's the full thing. I'm sorry.
• Although this isn't exactly a new idea

Plus KDE 3 lives on, Endless ships on Asus, and major distros patch against Foreshadow.

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• Valve working to make Windows games work on Steam OS
• Endless OS shipping on Asus hardware
• Trinity Desktop R14.0.5 released
• Help LVFS gather NVMe data
• Linux 4.18 Arrives With Some Big Changes
• 4.18.3 is already out
• Major distros patched against Foreshadow

Plus some hard data on why it's time to drop 32-bit Linux, and Lubuntu's got a new direction.

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• Slackware dev has financial problems
• Follow Up post by Patrick
• Patrick Volkerding’s PayPal
• YouTube slower on Firefox
• YouTube Classic – Add-ons for Firefox
• Firefox to lose some features
• Another German region dumps FOSS
• Another reason to dump 32-bit Linux
• Lubuntu’s new direction
• Fedora Needs Some Help If Continuing To Support The LXQt Desktop

Plus Debian joins KDE's council of wizards.

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• Arch Linux AUR Repository Found to Contain Malware
• Minimal Ubuntu released
• Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader
• PEP 572 and decision-making in Python
• Firefox for Android enters maintenance phase as team prepares new browser
• Arm throws shade on RISC-V
• But then backtracks
• HTC's blockchain smartphone
• Debian Joins KDE's Advisory Board

Plus we try out AWS' new Linux WorkSpace, RISC-V's Linux first commitment looks a lot stronger this week, and why we think the STARTTLS Everywhere initiative is a great first step.

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• SiFive talks up RISC-V
• RISC-V so far not as open as hoped
• But will be soon
• Announcing STARTTLS Everywhere
• Gentoo’s GitHub compromised
• AWS adds Linux to WorkSpaces
• Google ups its Linux Foundation membership to platinum
• Google invests in KaiOS

Plus new commits suggest Fuchsia will support Linux apps, Fedora CoreOS is announced, and we look over the first public Ubuntu desktop metrics.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 4 RC released
• Android X86 8.1 RC released
• Fuchsia will support Linux apps
• Atari’s PR train goes off the rails
• Welcome to Fedora CoreOS
• A first look at desktop metrics
• Ubuntu Data Usage Infographic

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• Ubuntu MATE 18.10 - dropping i386 images — Less than 10% of Ubuntu MATE users are running the i386 (32-bit Intel) images.
• 18.10 and beyond - 64bit images only | Ubuntu Budgie — from the various reports and statistics we have observed from 16.04 budgie-remix all the way to you enthusiastic 18.04 trail-blazers, almost all of you are now using the 64bit ISO.
• Lubuntu finally ready to move to LXQt — Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first release to ship with LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, according to Simon Quigley.
• Korora takes a “break” — Korora for the forseeable future is not going to be able to march in cadence with the Fedora releases. In addition to that, for the immediate future there will be no updates to the Korora distribution.
• Void Linux struggling as leader goes missing — There still are multiple members to the Void Core Team and others working on this independent Linux distribution, but their project leader has "disappeared". There's been no contact since January but no "meaningful contact" in over one year.
• Fedora 28 released — The headline feature for Fedora 28 Server is the inclusion of the new Modular repository. This lets you select between different versions of software like NodeJS or Django

Plus Ubuntu's plans to collect user metrics, the Linux on Galaxy survey, and Plasma desktop on a Nintendo Switch.

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• dtrace relicensed as GPLv2 — This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.
• Firefox adding sponsored stories to the new tab page — What’s next? We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta. This will be shown to a small portion of U.S. users as we start to test.
• AMP Stories and AMP for email — Starting with the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email today, the new feature will allow users to perform simple tasks such as booking calendar appointments and checking into flights directly within the layout of the email.
• Related
• Ubuntu plans metrics collection — "We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
• Ubuntu adds 'Minimal Install' option 18.04 — The new “minimal install” option appears in section of the installer that asks whether you want to install restricted codecs to enable multimedia playback alongside the main desktop.
• Linux on Galaxy Survey — “In order to determine how to best design the product to meet your needs, we ask for a moment of your time to complete this Linux on Galaxy Survey.”
• Plasma running on a Switch — Code execution is all the rage these days, but can your Switch do *this*?

Plus fail0verflow gets Linux on the Nintendo Switch, and our favorite new features of VLC 3.0.

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• MATE 1.20 — The theme for this release has been stabilising the MATE Desktop by replacing deprecated code and modernising large sections of the code base. We’ve also improved our window manager (Marco) and added support for HiDPI. Along the way we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs. Squished ‘em dead!
• Plasma 5.12 — Speed and memory improvements are the focus of this long-term release. The new Plasma LTS uses less CPU and less memory than previous versions. The process of starting the Plasma desktop is now significantly faster.
• VLC 3.0 — Network browsing for distant filesystems (SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS...)
• Nextcloud 13 — This release brings improvements to the core File Sync and Share like easier moving of files and a tech preview of our end-to-end encryption for the ultimate protection of your data. It also introduces collaboration and communication capabilities, like auto-complete of comments and integrated real-time chat and video communication.
• Android x86 7.1 — It’s a full port of Android, instead of being more of an application player like other solutions.
• Bliss-x86 Oreo 8.x
• Changes coming to elementary OS AppCenter — One of the primary goals of developing AppCenter Dashboard was to build a sustainable app ecosystem. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that although the AppCenter ecosystem is growing, nobody can make a living on it yet. That’s what we mean when we say “sustainable”. Writing apps is a real, hard, full-time job. If we want to see more high-quality, Open Source apps then we need to prioritize getting third-party app developers paid.
• Elementary OS Juno will be version 5.0, not 0.5 — Among them a small yet appreciable bump to the version number. Yes elementary OS 0.5 Juno will actually be elementary OS 5.0.
• Announcing “Project Things” — We kicked off “Project Things”, with the goal of building a decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ that is focused on security, privacy, and interoperability.
• Nintendo Switch runs Linux — According to fail0verflow, there’s a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia’s Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip. when your console starts, it reads and executes a piece of code stored in a read-only memory (hence the name ROM). This code contains instructions about the booting process.

Plus more hardware for Plasma Mobile, Matrix gets a big boost, and the FSF receives a large Bitcoin donation.

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• Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS, Expanding its Kubernetes and Containers Leadership — Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million
• TechSNAP Episode 353: Too Many Containers — We introduce you to Kubernetes, what problems it solves, why everyone is talking about it, and where it came from. Also who shouldn’t be using Kubernetes, and the problems you can run into when scaling it.
• LibreOffice 6.0 Released — The release of LibreOffice 6.0 marks the first major update to the productivity suite since the LibreOffice 5.4 release back in July 2017. It also coincides with the anniversary of the very first release of LibreOffice in January 2011.
• How do I test Plasma Mobile? (part 2) — Currently there are two possible ways of testing Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, Using postmarketOS Installing Halium and a KDE neon-based rootfs
• GNOME and KDE in PureOS: diversity across devices — If we were doing short-term planning it would be easy to “just use Plasma” for the Librem 5, but that would undermine our long-term vision of having a consistent look/feel across all our devices, where GNOME/GTK+ is already the default and what we’ve invested in.
• Purism considering UBports for the Librem 5
• Purism Might Develop An X11-Free Wayland Compositor — We also reviewed and evaluated compositing managers and desktop shells that we could use for a phone UI. We aim to use only Wayland, trying to get rid of as much X11 legacy as we possibly can, for performance issues and for better security. From our discussions with GNOME maintainers of existing compositors and shells, we may be better off igniting a new compositor (upstreamed and backed by GNOME) in order to avoid the X11 baggage.
• Matrix receives large investment — We’re delighted to announce that our friends at Status have made a major strategic investment ($5M) in New Vector: the company which currently employs most of the Matrix.org core team.
• FSF receives large Bitcoin donation — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received a record-breaking charitable contribution of 91.45 Bitcoin from the Pineapple Fund, valued at $1 million at the time of the donation.

Plus how you can start testing Plasma Mobile, Pursim aims for convergence, and Mycroft is back!

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• Plasma Mobile test ISOs — 44% poll participants wanting to test Plasma Mobile on their device, and/or as a virtual machine, or on real machine.
• Purism aims for convergence — Upon successful completion of our funding campaign, we started to look for a Designer to take care of the user experience for the Librem 5, and a web developer to help us improve the look & feel (and more technical parts) of our website in general. Today, I’m glad to finally welcome them publicly!
• Mycroft Mark 2 — What sets Mark II apart? It’s open source. This means your personal data stays private, you can customize your experience, and Mycroft is a neutral player in the voice game, allowing you to be confident in your personal preference of apps and skills.
• Ubuntu 18.04 to revert to Xorg by default — We have decided that we will ship Xorg by default, and that Wayland will be an optional session available from the login screen.
• Torvalds unhappy with Intel's response to Spectre — Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.
• Are the BSDs dying? — Too few eyeballs on code is a security issue as vulnerabilities go unreported and unpatched. Can FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD survive?

Plus what happened to NHoS, and more!

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• Wine 3.0 Released — This includes in particular Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, as well as OpenGL ES support to enable Direct3D on Android.
• Oneplus pwned — One of our systems was attacked, and a malicious script was injected into the payment page code to sniff out credit card info while it was being entered.
• ​Google moves to Debian for in-house Linux desktop — Google has officially confirmed the company is shifting its in-house Linux desktop from the Ubuntu-based Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the DebianTesting-based gLinux.
• Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status — Some “enterprise” distributions did not backport the changes for this reporting, so if you are running one of those types of kernels, go bug the vendor to fix that, you really want a unified way of knowing the state of your system.
• Red Hat pulls microcode update — Which, er, sounds like Red Hat has given up and, to avoid any blame, has told its customers to just get whatever firmware your CPU maker is offering. And if it works, it works, and if it makes your box fall over, uh, don't look at Red Hat.
• Red Hat: We Didn't Pull CPU Microcode Update — "It's actually an encrypted, signed binary image, so we don't have the capability, even if we wanted to produce microcode. It's a binary blob that we cannot generate. The only people who can actually generate that are the CPU vendors."
• Ubuntu almost ready to patch against Spectre — This week we published candidate Ubuntu kernels providing mitigation for CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 (ie, Spectre / Variants 1 & 2) to their respective -proposed pockets for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful), 16.04 LTS (Xenial), and 14.04 LTS (Trusty).  
• Skyfall and Solace: Meltdown and Spectre are just the beginning — Skyfall and Solace are two speculative attacks based on the work highlighted by Meltdown and Spectre. Full details are still under embargo and will be published soon when chip manufacturers and Operating System vendors have prepared patches.
• NHoS shut down — The small team behind an ambitious NHoS Linux project are calling it a day, citing receipt of a trademark infringement warning from the UK Department of Health's (DoH) "brand police" as the "final straw."

Plus Fedora's new "primary architecture", Ubuntu 17.10 is back, and more.

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• Barcelona to switch to FOSS — According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.
• Nextcloud Talk — We’re very proud to announce today Nextcloud Talk, the first enterprise-ready, self-hosted communication technology giving users the highest degree of control over their data and communication.
• AMP changes aren't good enough for some web devs — The Web is not Google, and should not be just Google.
• Ubuntu 17.10 ISOs available again — The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops.
• lkml.org is hosted on a home connection — The site's backend is hosted on a machine at home which is waiting for someone to enter a luks passphrase after a power outage while on vacation.
• Bad news for the fans of lkml.org — Bad news for the fans of http://lkml.org  : the main board of the server somehow did not survive the outage :( Expect prolonged downtime while I source replacement parts.
• Fedora might make AArch64 a primary architecture — Fedora developers are looking to promote their AArch64 / ARM64 / ARMv8 server offerings to being a "primary architecture" for this next Fedora release.

Plus we follow up on the lawsuit that could split the community, and then we eat some Bitcoin humble pie.

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• UBports release OTA 3 — This update brings some new features and bug fixes atop the Ubuntu Touch 15.04 base. New features include some new packages requested by the community, the default start page and search provider was changed over to DuckDuckGo, and not displaying the keyboard when working with multiple windows. This over-the-air update has also removed the Ubuntu Store from the App Scope.
• Ubuntu Touch working on Android app support — “Project Anbox”. Anbox - a shorted form of ‘Android-in-a-Box” - is a community effort which allows Android apps to execute in a container in a more native way rather than the more common approach of using an Android emulator,
• LEDE and OpenWrt merge — The merged project will use the code base of the former LEDE project.
• Fuchsia available for the Pixelbook — Fuchsia—which only started development in 2016—is Google's third operating system after Chrome OS and Android.
• Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents.
• Law Center and Conservancy updates — Because the SFLC has amended its trademark cancellation petition with a fraud claim, the SFC's motion to toss the complaint must be refiled after the fraud issue been considered.

Plus we put hard numbers on the highs and lows of Bitcoin during 2018.

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• Arch Drops 32 bit — The decision means that February ISO will be the last that allows to install 32 bit Arch Linux. The next 9 months are deprecation period, during which i686 will be still receiving upgraded packages. Starting from November 2017, packaging and repository tools will no longer require that from maintainers, effectively making i686 unsupported.
• Tails 3.0 will require a 64-bit processor — We have waited for years until we felt it was the right time to do this switch. Still, this was a hard decision for us to make.
• Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO — There will no longer be any "ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso" produced. There is no longer any effective QA or testing being done on the Ubuntu i386 desktop image on actual 32-bit-only hardware.
• Munich voted to return to Windows — Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.
• WSL added new distros and became easier to install — At its Build 2017 developer conference today, Microsoft announced that Ubuntu has arrived in the Windows Store
• Bitcoin Forked — It was created by Bitcoin supporters worried about growing congestion in the mainstream bitcoin network that has led to slow payment processing and high fees. Bitcoin Cash removes an important technical obstacle that has hampered the growth of the mainline Bitcoin network. In principle, that could allow Bitcoin Cash to become more widely used—and hence more valuable—in the long run.
• And Forked Again — The trouble began earlier this year when a group of cryptocurrency upstarts cloned Bitcoin to create their own version, called Bitcoin Cash. The split, called a "hard fork," came after a long and acrimonious disagreement about how to get Bitcoin to handle more traffic failed to resolve amicably. Now, another group of Bitcoiners wants to create yet another version of the world's most popular digital money on October 25. They're calling it Bitcoin Gold.
• And jumped around 20x in value this year — Bitcoin is now worth over $10,000. The cryptocurrency, which crossed the milestone for the first time since its creation in 2008, surged past $10,000 on Tuesday evening as it climbs toward $11,000, according to research site CoinDesk. Bitcoin has spiked 933 percent since the beginning of the year, when it traded at $968.23, reports the Wall Street Journal.
• The Ubuntu announcement that dominated the year — This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and the product, both of which are amazing. We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile.
• Cyanogenmod became Lineage OS — A new fork of CyanogenMod called Lineage OS is taking up the mantle, and it will keep most of what you loved about CyanogenMod.
• Sailfish carried on — Today it’s our pleasure to announce all the details for Sailfish X, aka Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X!
• Android took a step towards solving the updates problem — With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
• Librem 5 funded — This Monday, 14 days early, we have crossed a historic milestone.
• Firefox OS officially died — Mozilla is shutting down its “connected devices” group, which was responsible for the failed smartphone operating system Firefox OS and, more recently, attempts to build the OS into devices like routers, streaming boxes, and even basic computers.
• Mozilla acquired Pocket — Pocket will join Mozilla’s product portfolio as a new product line alongside the Firefox web browsers with a focus on promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content.
• Launched Firefox Focus — Firefox Focus allows you to browse the web without being followed by tracking ads which are notoriously known for slowing down your mobile experience.
• Project Common Voice — Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re fascinated with creating usable voice technology for our machines. But to create voice systems, an extremely large amount of voice data is required.
• Firefox Quantum — It’s by far the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004
• Faced a lawsuit over their Yahoo deal — We recently exercised our contractual right to terminate our agreement with Yahoo based on a number of factors including doing what’s best for our brand, our effort to provide quality web search, and the broader content experience for our users.

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 the Intel ME situation that's much worse than previously known.

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• Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath — Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yahoo. Today, in response, Mozilla filed a cross-complaint against Yahoo Holdings and Oath for breach of contract.
• Mozilla tackles fake news — The boundaries between truth and fiction are becoming harder to define, in part because of the proliferation of fake news and other forms of misinformation. Mozilla wants to shed light on this by sponsoring public demonstrations, using mixed reality and other art media that make the power of misinformation and its potential impacts visible and visceral.
• Classic Shell abandoned as open source — The source code is available at SourceForge, and the Classic Shell forum will remain online until the end of 2018 for folks that want to continue discussing the project.
• UK and EU plan Bitcoin crackdown — The Treasury plans to regulate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to bring them in line with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financial legislation. Traders will be forced to disclose their identities, ending the anonymity that has made the currency attractive for drug dealing and other illegal activities.
• Android Go released to OEMs — Google’s stripped-down version of Android is ready for OEMs.
• Mediatek announce Go optimized SoCs — MediaTek’s MT6739, MT6737, and MT6580 SoCs, among others, now have board support packages available to run Android Oreo (Go edition). This marks one of the first times that entry-level SoCs are ready to be used shortly after the latest version of Android.
• Pwning Intel ME — The duo say they found a locally exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows the execution of unsigned code on any device with Intel ME 11, even if the device is turned off or protected by security software.

Plus Jolla gets in on the blockchain hype, and we clarify the Linux LTS situation.

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• Bitcoin surges past $10k — Bitcoin has spiked 933 percent since the beginning of the year, when it traded at $968.23
• Big companies join the compliance-first approach to GPLv2 — To provide greater predictability to users of open source software, Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM today each committed to extending the GPLv3 approach for license compliance errors to the software code that each licenses under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2.
• LTS kernel support window clarified — Just because +Greg Kroah-Hartman​ is doing it for 4.4 does not mean that all LTS kernels from now on are going to be maintained for that long.
• New x86 version of Raspbian Released — Today, we are launching the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for PCs and Macs, and we’re also releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi.
• LOL
• Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset — I’m excited to announce the initial release of Mozilla’s open source speech recognition model that has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings. We are also releasing the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset, which was contributed to by nearly 20,000 people globally.
• Mozilla still loaded — The State of Mozilla 2016 is our annual report. This report highlights activities for 2016 and is accompanied by detailed financials.
• Jolla update — Sailfish X has been now out for six weeks

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 Canonical puts out a call for help, Munich votes to return to Windows, and Steam on Linux turns 5.

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• SegWit2x Bitcoin fork called off — "Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together," Belshe said. "Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth."
• Eco friendly Bitcoin competitor announced — Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.
• More Linux On Galaxy details — Described as a “Concept Demo”, the vid has a couple of interesting moments.
• CrossOver enables Windows apps on ChromeOS — CodeWeavers has now announced the availability of their Wine-powered CrossOver software for Chrome OS.
• Canonical wants volunteers to create art for Ubuntu — A new theme based on Adwaita, the default GNOME GTK theme.
• Steam Linux client turns 5 — It was on 6 November 2012 when the Steam Linux beta roll-out began and gained more steam as the year came to a close.
• Munich votes to return to Windows — That means, that Munich will transition to Microsoft Windows 10 in a 2 year phase (till 2020) on 29,000 pcs. The cost for this transition is actually confidential, but is estimated to be more than 100 million euros (more than 116 million US dollars).
• Apple relicenses CUPS — The CUPS Common UNIX Printing System up to now had been developed under the GPLv2 license while now Apple will be switching it to the Apache 2.0 software license.

Plus a new report claims every Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as your house in a week, and two legal matters that may have long-term impacts on the Linux community.

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• Plasma Mobile Roadmap — Our development strategy is to build a basic system and platform around our core values first and then extend this.
• Librem 5 progressing with Plasma Mobile — In general, Plasma Mobile already provides a usable (albeit alpha-quality) mobile interface today. The Qt Quick/QML based Kirigami component library and interface guidelines also provide a nice framework for mobile application developers
• Firefox to remove canvas fingerprinting — The Mozilla Foundation is boosting privacy in an upcoming version of its Firefox browser by removing the snooping capability called canvas fingerprinting, a method of tracking users across multiple websites.
• Tor flaw: TorMoil — TorMoil threatens Mac and Linux versions of Tor browser; Windows and Tails not affected.
• Canonical joins GNOME Foundation Advisory Board — The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu operating system, has joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board.
• SCO vs. IBM Lives on — As Groklaw records, this case kicked off in 2003. The dispute centres on “Project Monterey” a joint effort by SCO and IBM to build a unified UNIX capable of running on several different microprocessor architectures. SCO – at that time known as the Santa Cruz Operation – sold versions of UNIX and tossed some of its source code into the Project Monterey mix, as did IBM. The parties signed a “joint development agreement” (JDA) to formalise the deal.
• SFLC files a suit against Conservancy — This trademark action is in its early stages. SFLC filed a petition on September 22. Yesterday, we provided an answer that lists defenses that we plan to use.

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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.

Plus our brief thoughts on the new Ubuntu release, its various flavors, an important milestone, and the larger Open Source story.

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• Samsung enable Linux on their phones — Linux desktops will become available if users plug their phones into the DeX Station, the device that lets a Galaxy 8 run a Samsung-created desktop-like environment when connected to the DeX and an external monitor
• Purism Now Shipping Their Laptops With Intel ME Disabled — Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled.
• Purism partner with Nextcloud on end-to-end encrypted storage — Purism plans to include Nextcloud in the Librem 5 phone, as well as within PureOS for its Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops. Additionally, Purism will be discussing with Nextcloud about a future Purism NAS that runs completely free software including Nextcloud and services.
• LVFS/fwupd need donations — At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.
• Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement — It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years – actual compliance.  
• Ubuntu 17.10 released — Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.13-based kernel, glibc 2.26, gcc 7.2, and much more. Ubuntu Desktop has had a major overhaul, with the switch from Unity as our default desktop to GNOME3 and gnome-shell.
• Happy 13th Birthday — Ubuntu 4.10 ‘Warty Warthog’ wasn’t the most glamorous looking release, but it offered open-source enthusiasts of the day a simple, straightforward install from a single CD. The distro was notable for trying to “detect as much hardware as possible, simplifying the X install.” GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 were among the software assembled for the formative release.
• Ubuntu MATE — After six months of tireless work we present Ubuntu MATE 17.10, by far the best release we’ve ever produced.
• Xubuntu — Accelerated video playback with Intel hardware should now work more reliably out of the box.

Plus some key project updates & more!

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• Solus pushing forward Steam with Snaps — That snap, as some people have already guessed as much, will be the linux-steam-integration project, using a strict-mode LSI intercept module. We can also make various tweaks on top of that runtime to enforce ABI compatibility where it might be missing.
• AAC will be supported in Fedora Workstation 27 — What we will be shipping in Fedora is a modified version of the AAC implementation released by Google, which was originally written by Frauenhoffer. On top of that we will of course be providing GStreamer plugins to enable full support for playing and creating AAC files for GStreamer applications.
• Plasma 5.11 released — Plasma 5.11 brings a redesigned settings app, improved notifications, a more powerful task manager. Plasma 5.11 is the first release to contain the new “Vault”, a system to allow the user to encrypt and open sets of documents in a secure and user-friendly way, making Plasma an excellent choice for people dealing with private and confidential information.
• 5.12 aims for Wayland improvements — If we all just use Wayland and report and fix the bugs we run into I'm sure that 5.12 will be an awesome release on Wayland. So please help to make it happen!
• KDE turns 21 — t was on 14 October 1996 that the "Kool Desktop Environment" was founded by Matthias Ettrich. At the time he wanted KDE to be a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment."
• Fwupd 1.0 Released — fwupd now supports 72 different kinds of hardware, support for another ~12 devices is currently being worked on, many vendors continue using or exploring fwupd, and around 165,000 devices each month get updated firmware using fwupd with LVFS.
• Oneplus collecting data in Oxygen OS — Moore discovered that some of the data being sent to OnePlus' servers included the phone's IMEI number, the phone number, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes, Wi-Fi connection info, and the phone's serial number.
• Say they'll stop — By the end of October, “all OnePlus phones running OxygenOS will have a prompt in the setup wizard that asks users if they want to join our user experience program.” Not only that, but he also stated that OnePlus “will no longer be collecting telephone numbers, MAC Addresses and WiFi information.
• Librem 5 funded — 14 days early, we have crossed a historic milestone.
• Purism Collaborates with Cryptocurrency Monero — The Monero Project is a grassroots, community-driven initiative that advocates for privacy on a global scale by producing several free libre open source software projects, with the flagship offering being Monero, a fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency.

Plus how NGINX plans to make big money, Mozilla wants to reinvent online comments, and more.

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• Connnect Watch smartwatch with AsteroidOS crowdfunding campaign begins — First unveiled in late August, the team behind the Connect Watch have launched a campaign on European crowdfunding site Ulule in hopes of raising about $33,000.
• Sailfish meetup in Krakow — We are inviting you to a meetup with our CEO, Mr. Sami Pienimäki in the city of Kraków on Thursday, September 14th for a round or two of beer!
• What Project Treble Means for Future Custom ROM Development — Because of the way the lower layer of Android was modularized, all Treble devices in the market will be able to boot a generic stock, AOSP Android build. This takes away most of the hassle of porting custom ROMs to an older device since a single, generic Android build can run on many devices.
• Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments — Talk is developed by The Coral Project, a Mozilla creation that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging
• Chinese government bans ICOs — The ruling comes from China’s central bank, which issued a statement criticizing ICOs for “disrupting” the country’s financial order. The regulator described initial coin offerings as “a form of unapproved illegal public financing” that “raises suspicions” of fraud and criminal activity
• Might shut down Bitcoin exchanges — China’s Bitcoin exchanges said on Saturday they are still awaiting clarification from the authorities on a media report that they will be shut down.
• WinBtrfs 1.0 Released For Supporting Btrfs On Windows — Harmstone's WinBtrfs driver is a "reimplementation from scratch" of Btrfs for Windows that supports all major functionality as well as basic RAID 0/1/10/5/6, caching, Btrfs partition discovery, ACLs, symlinks and hardlinks, free-space cache, LZO/ZLib compression, balancing, scrubbing, TRIM/DISCARD, and much more.
• A Breakdown of Operating Systems on Dockerhub — It is clear that Debian is the most popular, with Alpine taking second place, and then a number of others each taking a smaller share.
• NGINX releases application platform with new application server, centralized management tools — Today, NGINX launched its new NGINX Application Platform, a suite of products which together, form a solution made up of application delivery, an application server, and policy-driven monitoring and management.