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• HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
• Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
• Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
• More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
• India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
• India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
• Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
• Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

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• FOSDEM 2023: Matrix 2.0 — In this talk we will explain the fundamental changes which are landing in Matrix 2.0, which speeds up Matrix to be at least as snappy as the fastest proprietary messaging apps - all while handling thousands of rooms spanning millions of users.
• FOSDEM 2023: Fedora Asahi — Asahi Fedora Remix exists to assist the Asahi community with Apple Silicon upstreaming and to provide a nifty ARM-based Fedora Workstation for those that own Apple Silicon hardware.
• Fedora Asahi Aims To Provide The Fedora Workstation Experience For Apple Silicon Systems
• SIGs/Asahi - Fedora Project Wiki
• FOSDEM 2023: Podcasting 2.0 — In this talk we will show how the Podcasting 2.0 community is reinventing Podcasting by adding tons of new features, while keeping all this interoperable.
• MythTV 33 Released — Some of the MythTV 33 highlights include a new web interface for the MythTV setup experience, a new waveform visualization for the MythMusic area, and switching to the latest upstream FFmpeg release.
• MythTV, Open Source DVR
• Linode's Green Light Beta Program — Get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
• Fedora 38 Change: Unfiltered Flathub — This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering, so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third party repositories feature.
• Fedora 38 To Get Rid Of Its Flathub Filtering, Allowing Many More Apps On Fedora
• The Coder Robe | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.

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• Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
• Sourceware.org
• GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
• Two visions for the future of sourceware.org
• Plasma Mobile Gear Update — The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022.
• The Work-In-Progress Rust-Written Apple DRM Driver Manages To Start Wayland’s Weston — After passing the initial spinning cube milestone this past weekend, Asahi Lina has been working on bringing up more of this reverse-engineered kernel DRM/KMS driver.
• Asahi Lina on Twitter — 🚀 Weston/Wayland works!!! 🚀 KDE doesn’t start all the way yet, but on X at least it showed the splash screen ^^
• Upgrade now to address E2EE vulnerabilities in matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 — Two critical severity vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption were found in the SDKs which power Element, Beeper, Cinny, SchildiChat, Circuli, Synod.im and any other clients based on matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk or matrix-android-sdk2.
• Akamai Turns Linode Up Past 11
• Over the weekend, #MarsHelicopter successfully completed Flight 33 — The rotorcraft reached an altitude of 10 meters (33 ft) and traveled 111.24 meters (365 ft) in 55.2 seconds.
• There will be up to five flights in the 31-day test period. — The NASAPersevere rover will attempt to capture video of those flights.
• NASA’s Asteroid-Striking DART Mission Team Has JPL Members — JPL’s navigation section is experienced at getting spacecraft to faraway locations accurately.
• How JPL’s role in NASA’s DART asteroid impact could save the earth one day – Pasadena Star News
• DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

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• Microsoft changes its mind about open source monetization — Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, but it turns out doing nothing is better.
• Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
• An Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Fix Is Coming For A Very Annoying & Serious APT Problem — "installing the package libudev1 results in a large number of critical packages being removed and rendering the system essentially unusable."
• Bug #1974196 “Installing libudev1 on a new Jammy installation"
• Draft: Mark broken reverse depends for upgrade (!248) · Merge requests
• Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
• SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
• M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
• Asahi Linux Update Brings Experimental Apple M2 Support

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

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• SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Released - Switches To NVIDIA’s Open Kernel Driver — Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month
• openSUSE Leap 15.4 Released
• Element Call Beta 2 includes lots of exciting new updates! — In a walkie-talkie call, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button, either by pressing it on the screen or by holding the spacebar. The catch is that, just like a walkie-talkie or two-way radio, only one person can speak at a time. When someone else is speaking, your PTT button will be disabled, and if you try to push it you’ll hear a warning beep.
• Fedora and Ubuntu EOL announcements — If you are running Fedora 34, the time has come to move on; that distribution will reach the end of its support life on June 7. Users of Ubuntu 21.10 have a little longer, but that release loses support on July 14 and users should update to 22.04.
• Fedora 34 is going EOL in one week
• Ubuntu 21.10 reaches End of Life on July 14 2022
• HP Dev One Now Shipping — Unplug and work from any location. At 3.24 lbs, with up to 12 hours of battery life and an ultra-bright display, HP Dev One was made to perform on the go.
• Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB are Here | Linode
• Apple will allow Linux VMs to run Intel apps with Rosetta in macOS Ventura — You can even use Rosetta with non-Apple Arm CPUs, though you probably shouldn't.
• Running Intel Binaries in Linux VMs with Rosetta
• Hector Martin on Twitter — “Huh, so Rosetta is now a Linux app. Without Linux kernel patches this can’t use any special M1 features, so if this runs significantly better than FOSS offerings that should help dispel the myth that “the M1 has magic make-Rosetta-fast features”.
• Longhorn on Twitter — Well. Rosetta 2 needs a quite recent CPU (post v8.2) to work because of the instructions used. Does it work on non-Apple arm64 CPUs? 🤔 Yes. (allows to settle the argument once and for all that this needs anything Apple specific outside of TSO support*. Answer is a no.)

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• Pop!_OS 22.04 by System76 — Pop!_OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.
• System Updater Nix Support
• Pop System Updater
• Ubuntu Outlines How To Use Its Real-Time Kernel Beta - It Requires Ubuntu Advantage — The RT kernel for x86_64 and AArch64 is tailored to meet the low latency needs and other guarantees for the teclo industry, robotics, critical infrastructure, and other industries.
• Concerns Raised Over The “New” NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year — Less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained.
• Steam Deck Client and OS Updates — Today's update includes Steam, OS, and firmware updates, and may take a few minutes to apply after restarting. Please be patient while your Steam Deck updates.
• Order Email Megathread (04/14/2022) : SteamDeck
• Proton 7.0-2 Out — . Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.
• Element Introduces Threads in Beta — Threads help you separate conversations from the main timeline. Starting a new Thread opens the thread view where you can continue your conversations without interruption from other messages or topics pinging through in the timeline.
• Linux Action News Feedback - Matrix Channel — A place to provide real-time feedback on the show, stories, and more.
• Framework Mainboard Availability and Open Source Release — The Framework Laptop Mainboard is now available in the Framework Marketplace 69. You can order one today in the US and Canada with newly reduced pricing.
• Framework Mainboards
• Framework Mainboar Developer Giveaway Program — To accelerate the ecosystem of projects using Framework Laptop Mainboards, we’re giving away 100 i5-1135G7 Mainboards for free to creators and developers!

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• Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years — Dirty Pipe has the potential to smudge people using Linux and Linux derivitives.
• Catalin Cimpanu on Twitter — “DirtyPipe (CVE-2022-0847) is a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation. It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — “By my count, Dirty Pipe affects only brand-new Android 12 devices like the Pixel 6 and S22. Linux 5.8 and above has only been an Android option for five months."
• Canonical Patches “Dirty Pipe” Vulnerability in Ubuntu 21.10 and 20.04 LTS
• BLASTY on Twitter: “Hacked up a quick Dirty Pipe PoC that spawns a shell by hijacking (and restoring) the contents of a setuid binary.”
• The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability — The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability documentation
• AMD Posts Some New Linux Job Openings From Client CPU To Server — AMD would need a lot more Linux engineers to achieve the same level of timely Linux support and low-level kernel enhancements that Intel has been focused on for years, especially when it comes to Intel's open-source work beyond just the actual hardware device enablement.
• Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! — What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going. You can run it against your existing Matrix homeserver to provide complete self-sovereignty… while still being able to talk to anyone else anywhere on the wider Matrix network! We will also be able to automatically use Matrix’s end-to-end encryption to secure all Element Call conferences
• call.element.io
• https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues
• Extending Matrix’s E2EE calls to multiparty
• Danielle Foré on Twitter — Okay it’s been a full month and this situation still isn’t resolved, and it sucks for you to just be completely in the dark and it’s pretty obvious something is up and people are asking what’s going on, so here is my side of the story 🧵
• Danielle gives an update on elementary Reddit Thread
• Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup

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• Koch: A New Future for GnuPG — Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well.
• A Short introduction to Fuchsia — FuchsiaOS, by now just Fuchsia, was designed to be an entirely modular system, allowing its libraries and applications to be entirely removed, updated and added on it without the system get affected .
• fimage — Portable Fuchsia Emulator
• More Troublesome x86 Android Tablets Being Fixed Up By New Linux Driver — The forthcoming x86-android-tablets driver is focused on the issue of many x86 tablets having invalid entries within their ACPI DSDT tables.
• Libadwaita 1.0 Released For Kicking Off A New Year Of GNOME App Development — GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.
• The Mega Matrix Holiday Special 2021 — Looking back at 2021, it’s unbelievable how much stuff has been going on in the core team.

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• New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15 — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Ubuntu Server 21.10 support is here
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Launches As Newer, Faster $10 Single Board Computer
• Microsoft Edge finally arrives on Linux – “Official” build lands in repos — We’re happy to see Edge for Linux finally make Stable and Official status, because we find it handy to have two distinct browsers on any operating system platform we use.
• Element One - Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place — Element One is a huge step change. It’s a very affordable, unlimited usage way for people to have all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place - that’s a combined three billion users!
• Element 1.9.1 - Chat Export is finally here!!
• The 15 Most Interesting Linux 5.15 Kernel Features From NTFS3 To KSMBD — Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week.
• Linux 5.15 Released
• Fedora considers removing NIS support — The change proposal does note that: "For some users this change may be a bit disruptive and it may require some learning curve for switching to alternative solutions".
• What is the support status of Network Information Service — As seen from the RHEL8.3 release notes the yp rpms (ypserv, ypbind, yp-tools) have been marked as deprecated. Furthermore those components will no longer be available in RHEL-9.
• Fedora 35 Cleared For Release Next Week — Confirmation of Fedora 35 being ready to ship next week was announced today.

Plus, we try out Element’s new voice messages and share our thoughts.

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• This week in KDE — The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 21.08 as the newest series of their open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects.
• KDE Gear 21.08 Brings Improvements to Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, and Many Other KDE Apps
• KDE Plasma Introduces A New Overview Effect, Many Wayland Fixes - Phoronix
• #6 Sharing, Caring · This Week in GNOME
• Ubuntu 21.10 Likely Sticking To The GNOME 40 Desktop — Ideally we would have updated to 41 but feature freeze is today and we didn’t really have the resources available for the update.
• MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support — After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more.
• Element introduces Voice Messages — This has been one of our oldest and most upvoted feature requests ever, so we are incredibly happy to unleash our first version of it at last.
• Join the Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix Server
• Tenacity Update
• LINUX Unplugged 419: What’s Cookin’ at System76
• Launch Configurable Keyboard | System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.

Plus Pwned Passwords goes open source, the public release of Fuchsia, and Valve's rumored Linux handheld.

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• After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for ‘policy violations’ — All told, it appears something like 700 Freenode channels have been seized and re-permissioned, supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince”
• IRC Announcement - Fedora Magazine
• Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations
• One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
• kline󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on mastodon: “andrew lee just seized over 700 channels on freenode”
• PSA: Ubuntu’s IRC Channels Have Moved from Freenode to Libera Chat
• Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
• Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the .NET Foundation and Working with the FBI
• Pwned Passwords is now open source!
• Troy Hunt on Twitter RE: the news
• The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
• Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub — Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub.
• Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
• Linux Action Show 431
• Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC — On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal".
• New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
• Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement
• Nextcloud iOS app Open Sourced
• GitHub: nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS
• Nextcloud iOS app License Guidelines
• List of Open-Source iOS Apps
• Jami on the Mac App Store
• mediaU on the App Store
• Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.

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

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

Plus Google adds its weight behind Rust in the Linux Kernel, and the new security features landing in WSL2.

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• Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years — The proposed transaction has been pitched as delivering value for shareholders, both in the short term and once the two corporations have less complicated structures that will let them compete more aggressively.
• Dell Technologies Announces Planned VMware Spin-Off — Under terms of the planned spin-off, VMware will distribute a special cash dividend of $11.5 - $12 billion to all VMware shareholders, including Dell Technologies.
• Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History
• COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 — We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.
• There’s no place like GNOME: System 76 introduces COSMIC desktop GUI for its Pop!_OS Linux — System76 said that it studied user behaviour and sought to refine key elements of the desktop accordingly.
• pop-os/cosmic: — Computer Operating System Main Interface Components
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, indeed. Pop!_Shell will remain a separate extension.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, tiling will remain a separate extension and can be used on other distros. COMIC can as well.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — The is an extension that creates a unique GNOME UX while maintaining compatibility with GNOME and the GNOME app ecosystem and HIG.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — Pop with the COSMIC desktop.
• Carl Richell on Twitter — We’re currently developing and testing on X and Pop 21.04 will default to X as well. However, we may be able to shift over to Wayland for future releases with the recent nvidia news about Wayland driver support.
• Google backs effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel — "We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel."
• Google Supports Getting Rust Into The Linux Kernel
• HN: Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel
• Linux 5.12 Diverted From Release To Allow An Extra Week Of Testing — Due to still a number of fixes landing this week, .Linus Torvalds decided to be safe and go for the extra round of testing.
• The 12 Most Interesting Changes Of Linux 5.12
• A bumpy 5.12 is due for release
• Element Matrix Services launches bridging for Microsoft Teams — A single Microsoft Teams Bridge supports unlimited users across unlimited channels. Pricing is based on the number of active users using the bridge from MS Teams, at a cost of $0.50 per user per month. Traffic from Element (or any other Matrix-based client) is free.
• HN: Will this bridge be be open source?
• Servicing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 Linux kernel — We’ve just shipped the 5.10.16.3 WSL 2 Linux kernel version to Windows Insiders which brings exciting new changes: Support for the LUKS disk encryption, and some long-awaited bug fixes.
• Microsoft Docs: Release Notes for WSL kernel
• microsoft/WSL: Issues found on WSL
• Hangover 0.6.5 Released For Running Windows Software On ARM64, POWER — Wednesday's release of Hangover 0.6.5 now allows for starting QEMU automatically if needed.

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• Element suspended on Google Play Store — At 2021-01-29 at 21:35 UTC Google suspended Element from the Play Store without warning or notification
• Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle — After Whatsapp’s announcement, rival app Telegram reported a 500% increase in users and Signal saw an 18-fold increase in download numbers, putting it on track to cross 1m new users each day.
• Element team waiting hours — Update: we’re still waiting for a response from Google to our explanatory mail sent ~8 hours ago. Thanks all for your patience while we get this sorted...
• New Linux SUDO flaw lets local users gain root privileges — The issue is a heap-based buffer overflow exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, listed in the sudoers file or not), with attackers not being required to know the user's password to successfully exploit the flaw. The vulnerability was introduced in the Sudo program almost 9 years ago, in July 2011.
• 10-year-old Sudo bug lets Linux users gain root-level access
• Buffer overflow in command line unescaping
• Sudo vulnerability allows attackers to gain root privileges on Linux systems (CVE-2021-3156) - Help Net Security — "This vulnerability is perhaps the most significant sudo vulnerability in recent memory (both in terms of scope and impact) and has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 10 years."
• New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in All Supported Ubuntu Releases
• Mitre - CVE-2020-28374
• Red Hat Customer Portal: CVE-2020-28374
• Debian: CVE-2020-28374
• Ubuntu: CVE-2020-28374
• The killing of CentOS Linux: ‘The CentOS board doesn’t get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do’ — Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.
• Rocky Linux gets a new sponsor—Gregory Kurtzer’s startup, Ctrl IQ — Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."
• Linux maintainer says long-term support for 5.10 will stay at two years unless biz world steps up and actually uses it — Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.
• Rust Game Server One-Click App Linode — A free-for-all battle in a harsh open-world environment.

Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.

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• Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
• Android Things Shutdown FAQ
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
• Google, Qualcomm partner to bring 4 OS Android updates to new chipsets — The new plan is three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates.
• Qualcomm promises three years of Android updates for its entire SoC lineup
• Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
• Native Steam (Borealis) on Chrome OS likely arriving mid-2021
• GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development — The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• GTK 4.0 – GTK Development Blog
• Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
• Matrix.to — Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app
• Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
• Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play — Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.
• I have resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee – Terence Eden’s Blog — I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.
• AWS joins the Blender Development Fund — AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

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 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 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.

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 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.