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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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• A new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel — The vulnerability consists of a stack buffer overflow due to an integer underflow vulnerability inside the nft_payload_copy_vlan function, which is invoked with nft_payload expressions as long as a VLAN tag is present in the current skb.
• netfilter: nft_payload: add C-VLAN support · torvalds/linux@f6ae9f1
• CVE-2023-0179
• CVE-2023-0179- Red Hat Customer Portal
• [net,3/3] netfilter: nft_payload: incorrect arithmetics when fetching VLAN header bits - Patchwork
• oss-sec: Re: CVE-2023-0179: Linux kernel stack buffer overflow in nftables: PoC and writeup
• libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API — Libvirt 9.0 adds support for external snapshot deletion with QEMU using its existing API, libvirt 9.0 with QEMU now supports PASST as "Plug A Simple Socket Transport" for connecting an emulated network device to the host's network, QEMU external back-end support for SWTPM as a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM), support for passing file descriptors rather than passing files for the QEMU disk, and other additions.
• JFS Filesystem’s Days are Numbered — IBM developed the JFS file-system originally in the 90's for AIX and the second-generation implementation then ported to Linux after it was made open-source.
• Firefox 109.0 Ships Manifest Version 3 — Manifest Version 3 (MV3) extension support is now enabled by default (MV2 remains enabled/supported). This major update also ushers an exciting user interface change in the form of the new extensions button.
• Here’s what’s going on in the world of extensions
• Manage your extensions using the extensions button in the toolbar
• Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly
• Google delays start of Manifest V2 Chrome extension deprecation — The original plan called for Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds to start experiments that turned off Manifest V2 extension support. Additionally, Manifest V3 would be required to get the “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store. 
• Firefox 109 Adds New Extensions Button, Manifest V3 Support — The biggest new feature is the new Unified Extensions button in the toolbar.
• Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed
• Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening — Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions

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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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• K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
• K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
• K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
• Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
• Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
• Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
• Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
• 5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
• Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
• Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
• Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
• Photopea | Online Photo Editor

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• Red Hat - Senior Software Engineer - HDR Enablement — The Red Hat Workstation Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work on desktop, compositor, and GPU support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats and displays for Linux.
• Jared Domínguez on Twitter — "It's that time again. I'm looking for someone to join my team to work on enabling HDR support in upstream Linux, Fedora and RHEL. Global applicants welcome. Underrepresented minorities highly encouraged."
• Ubuntu to Make Firefox Snap Default in 21.10 — “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
• Bug #1943840 “[FFe] Update the ubuntu-desktop-minimal seed to us…”
• Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop — This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.
• Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple’s M1 GPU — Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.
• XDC 2021 - Day 1 - September 15, 2021 - YouTube
• Apple M1 USB Type-C Linux Support Code Sent Out For Testing — Sven Peter has sent out the initial USB Type-C enablement work for the Apple ACE1/2 chips used by Apple M1 systems.
• Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12 — While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
• Alyssa Rosenzweig on Twitter — Hello from Linux on my M1's internal storage! Thank you to @svenpeter42 for the NVMe driver. My daily driver now supports internal storage plus hotpluggable HDMI (native resolution), USB, and Ethernet.
• X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security
• LVFS Serves Up 2+ Million Firmware Downloads In The Past Month — Over the past thirty days, LVFS has served up more than two million firmware files to users.
• LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
• Richard wrote on twitter — We hit 2 million firmware downloads in the last 30 days for the first time. There are now over 3000 firmware files available on the LVFS, with over 100 vendors using 50 different protocols. It's been a huge amount of work but it feels pretty awesome.
• LVFS Supported Device List
• Researchers Find Malware Hiding in Windows Subsystem for Linux | Tom’s Hardware
• There’s now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux — "These files acted as loaders running a payload that was either embedded within the sample or retrieved from a remote server and was then injected into a running process using Windows API calls,
• KSMBD In-Kernel File Server Already Needs Important Security Fix - Phoronix — This "important security fix" was sent in today for the Linux 5.15 kernel, potentially landing in time for 5.15-rc2 later today.

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 the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

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• Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
• Remove cipher algorithm and mentions of copyrighted material
• GitHub reinstates youtube-dl library after EFF intervention
• $6 billion Linux deal? SUSE IPO rumored — SUSE, the major European Linux company, may soon be spun out in a $6 billion IPO.
• EQT Said to Plan IPO of $6 Billion Software Developer SUSE
• Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
• Librem 5 Mass Production Phone Has Begun Shipping — Purism has begun shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers.
• Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
• Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
• Starting January 4, 2021, Google will block all sign-ins to Google accounts from embedded browser frameworks — The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
• Guidance to developers affected by our effort to block less secure browsers and applications

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 latest Mozilla project being spun-out, and how Timescale might have a solution for a self-sustaining open-source business in the cloud era.

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• Lenovo expand enterprise desktop range preinstalled with Ubuntu — Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is certified across 30 of Lenovo’s ThinkPads and ThinkStations range
• The September release and EndeavourOS ARM arrived — Our ARM branch is fully based on Archlinux ARM.
• EndeavourOS ARM
• Microsoft’s Edge browser is arriving on Linux in beta next month — The Linux preview is part of a bigger push to get businesses on Edge
• Microsoft launches Chromium Edge release candidate — Microsoft is trying to position Edge and Bing as “the browser and search engine for business.”
• Microsoft Edge for Linux will Ship With These Features Missing
• Linux GUI apps are coming to Windows — GUI app support is still a work in progress, but Microsoft program manager Craig Loewen shared a GIF showing what it looks like when you launch an GUI application like the Nautilus file manager or GIMP image editor using a command in a Linux terminal window.
• Researchers Say Microsoft Edge's Telemetry Has the Worst Privacy of Any Major Browser — A research paper suggests the data Microsoft Edge sends to its back-end servers has a persistent hardware-based identifier which could be used to find a user's identity.
• Last phase of the desktop wars?
• An Important Update on Mozilla WebThings — We are writing to inform you that the WebThings project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project.
• Killed by Mozilla
• Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%
• Building a self-sustaining open-source business in the cloud era — We explain why we are making these changes, what this means for users, and why we think this is necessary for the open-source industry as a whole.

Plus why our long-term view for Mozilla took a turn for the worse this week, and two recent enterprise wins for Desktop Linux.

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• Google starts uploading the Android 11 source code to AOSP — Google has officially released the stable version of Android 11 for its range of Pixel smartphones going back to the Pixel 2.
• Android 11 Update Tracker
• Here are all the hidden changes in Android 11
• Google announces Android 11 Go Edition with support for 2GB RAM devices
• SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia — SoftBank is set to sell the UK’s Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than $40bn
• Introducing the Promoted Add-ons Pilot — This pilot program, which will run between the end of September and the end of November 2020, aims to expand the number of add-ons we can review and verify as compliant with Mozilla policies,
• Access Linux filesystems in Windows and WSL 2 — WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2,
• WSL Mount Limits
• Ubuntu 20.10 Adding Active Directory Support To The Installer — The "Ubiquity" installer used by the Ubuntu desktop is set to feature Active Directory (AD) integration with the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10 release.

Plus, the new PinePhone options coming soon, our thoughts on recent Mozilla news, lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll, and AWS Bottlerocket.

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• Lenovo begins rollout of Fedora Linux on their laptops, Ubuntu systems due soon — The first model appearing with Fedora as an option is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8. Not only has it rolled out with Fedora, it's right there on the store and you can't miss it as it shows up first, as it's also the cheapest option for this model available right now.
• HP Z series on Ubuntu — HP announced the launch of its Z series of laptops and workstations certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the latest additions to their popular professional workstation line.
• PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition — I am thrilled to announce that the next Community Edition (CE) of the PinePhone will feature Manjaro.
• Pinephone will ship with Manjaro next
• LineageOS 17.1 adds support for the Google Pixel 2, Pixel 3a, Pixel 4 — Over the last couple of months, the team has added support for devices like the ASUS ROG Phone II, Google Pixel 3 series, Samsung Galaxy A7 2016, Xiaomi Mi A1, Samsung Galaxy J7 2015, OnePlus One, Sony Xperia XZ2, and many more.
• Mozilla rolls out Firefox 80 for Android — Along with the changes mentioned above, Firefox 80 for Android also includes a bunch of security fixes.
• Update on extension support in the new Firefox for Android
• Lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll Incident — The key element Rothschild like trolls require is the presumption of validity of a granted patent.
• Announcing the General Availability of Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers — Bottlerocket is a free and open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers.
• Bottlerocket on Github
• AWS unleashes a new homegrown Linux
• AWS introduces Bottlerocket: A Rust language-oriented Linux for containers — There's a new security-oriented Linux for containers in town from Amazon and its name is Bottlerocket. Instead of being built almost entirely in C, it includes many components written in Rust.

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, 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.

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 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 Microsoft makes it into linux-distros, the Raspberry Pi 4 charger issue, and more.

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• Server breach at Pale Moon project goes undetected for 18 months — Server breach at Pale Moon browser project goes undetected for 18 months.
• Data breach post-mortem
• Firefox addons outage post mortem — Sorry this took so long to get out; we’d hoped to have this out within a week, but obviously that didn’t happen. There was just a lot more digging to do than we expected. In any case, we’re now ready to share the results.
• ISPA withdraws Mozilla Internet Villain Nomination and Category — In the 21 years the event has been running it is probably fair to say that no other nomination has generated such strong opinion.
• Firefox 68 Released
• Microsoft admitted to linux-distros list — I see no valid reasons not to subscribe Microsoft (or part(s) of it, see below) to linux-distros. The only voiced reasons not to, such as in Georgi Guninski's posting and in comments on some technology news sites that covered Microsoft's request, are irrelevant per our currently specified membership criteria.
• On Microsoft request to access private linux bugs
• Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C issues confirmed — The Pi's co-creator Eben Upton says that not every USB-C cable will power the Pi.
• IBM Red Hat deal closes — IBM and Red Hat announced today that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion.
• Mathew Miller's comments
• Fedora to drop snap plugin in gnome-software — In Fedora 31 I'll be disabling the snap plugin from GNOME Software.
• Drop snap support (!253) · Merge Requests · GNOME
• Canonical’s Robert Ancell calls the merge request “premature”
• Remove GsAuth support. (!255) · Merge Requests — This used to be used in the Snap and Ubuntu Reviews plugins, but is now no longer required. The remaining usage in the Snap plugin is not a common case on desktop and not necessary to support anymore.

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 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 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 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 mixed news for Google, and a surprising blockchain fact.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 4 Released — After eight months of work, the UBports Foundation is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-4. This release features Ubuntu 16.04 as its base (previously 15.04), bringing security fixes and greater stability to unseen corners of the operating system.
• LMDE 3 released — The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 3 “Cindy” Cinnamon Edition.
• Mozilla publishes Firefox user data — As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.
• Firefox to block tracking — In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.
• Google hands off Kubernetes to the community with $9M donation — As a testament to Kubernetes’ maturity, we’re excited to take the next step, and are opening the Kubernetes project's cloud resources up to contributors. We’re funding this move with a $9 million grant of GCP credits
• Blow for Google in Oracle Android case — Google will have to go to the US Supreme Court if it wants to contest the reversal of a verdict — in a long-running case with Oracle — that had found its use of 37 Java APIs in the Android mobile operating system was covered by fair use.
• Blockchain is a lot older than you might think — the world’s oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it’s been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world’s most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

Steam Machines were pronounced dead and then alive this week, we'll try and clear things up, and Mozilla has a new project.

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• Linux kernel to remove several old CPU architectures — The architectures which will become deprecated are Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score and Tile. Although not being deprecated, the Unicore32 and Hexagon architectures are also at risk but their maintainers are working on improving the situation so their support can be continued.
• RISC-V Support Continues Maturing Within The Mainline Linux Kernel — Linux 4.17 kernel include support for dynamic ftrace, clean-ups to their atomic and locking code, module loading support is now enabled by default, and other fixes.
• Save money using RISC-V rather than Arm — According to a report published last week by The Information, more than 80 tech goliaths including Nvidia, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and Tesla are working to adopt RISC-V technology. The main reason behind the push to adopt RISC-V is said to be the processor's open-source design, which will facilitate "a much cheaper way to build chips for new technologies like autonomous vehicles," says the source.
• Debian now supports RISC-V — We've been working in the last few weeks to do a (second) boostrap of Debian for RISC-V, and after a few weeks of hard work it is now bootstrapped and has been imported into the Debian infrastructure,
• Linux-Libre prioritises freedom over security — One of their new changes on top of this deblobbed kernel is dropping error messages that suggest users update their CPU micrcode.
• Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Steam Machines no longer show up under the drop-down menu for "Hardware" on the main Steam store page. Promotional language and images for Steam Machines were also previously featured prominently on a hardware-focused landing page on the store (archived version), but that page now redirects to a simple search results page for the store's "hardware" category.
• Steam Machines aren't dead yet — We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed.
• TOR Messenger discontinued — “The adoption of Tor Messenger was low and the real need is for metadata-free alternatives"
• Mozilla Brings Firefox to Augmented and Virtual Reality — We believe that the future of the web will be heavily intertwined with virtual and augmented reality, and that future will live through browsers. That’s why we’re building Firefox Reality, a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets.

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 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 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.

Plus our take on the pending death of Flash, some great work by the Debian project & Mozilla updates us on Project Common Voice.

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• Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2 — We’re not happy, proud, pleased or ambivalent to announce this alpha. No, not us. The is our most “Super” alpha ever and we’re ecstatic to present this fine release for your distro delectation. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is brimming with new toys to play with.
• Uptake of Fedora 26 is really strong — It's already surpassed F24 and those of you still on F23.
• Boltron preview — Fedora’s Modularity Working Group (and others) have been working for a while on a Fedora Objective.
• openSUSE Leap 42.3 — “By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.
• The death of Flash — Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
• Some people don’t want it to die — Open sourcing Flash spec would be a good solution to keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons.
• Update on Debian Reproducible Builds Project — At the start of 2015 it was safe to say that Debian was fairly alone in the quest for reproducible builds, and a relevant number of developers were unconvinced by the effort's goals. Thankfully, this is not true anymore.
• More on Mozilla’s Project Common Voice — Today’s speech recognition technologies are largely tied up in a few companies that have invested heavily in them.

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• Endless OS 3.2 Released, Rebases From GNOME Shell 3.8 To 3.22 — On the UI side, there are big updates to its desktop with the re-basing process from GNOME Shell 3.8 to GNOME Shell 3.22. Moving forward, they intend to re-base their desktop changes much more often to allow for a smoother transition to using the newer GNOME code in their operating system.
• Tuxedo Announces Its Own Ubuntu Flavor — “What we have done is [deliver a] desktop that is strongly adapted to the needs of our users. With [our] own theme, own icons, own boot logo and […] the latest firmware, the latest NVIDIA drivers (if necessary) and Linux kernel 4.11 preinstalled! Not to mention our configuration adjustments on the GRUB and optimizations to other system-relevant files.”
• 2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results — There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings.
• These Videos of Mycroft Are Just Too Funny — As an intended open-source alternative to Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Home, the humble Mycroft AI has an awful lot of hype to live up to.
• Youyota Sailfish OS 2-in-1 Tablet — The Youyota Tablet packs Quad-Core Intel chipsets, and runs on Sailfish OS.
• Mozilla launches Project Things IoT framework on Raspberry Pi — Mozilla has now announced its own Project Things framework designed to pull together existing Web of Things specifications and code under a global framework comprised of device, gateway, and cloud components. As a starting point, it released a prototype version of a Things Gateway stack that runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Plus we discuss the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey, the really fancy new trick Opus has pulled off in the latest release & more!

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• Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017 — We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline. The result is 3% CPU usage to play an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell. 4K h265 HEVC is also playable but requires a Skylake or later processor.
• 2017 Linux Laptop Survey — So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties -- this survey isn't just for our own benefit and enjoyment at Phoronix.
• Jolla Summer 2017: CEO's Update — It has been a while since our last update about the remaining Jolla Tablet refunds – we are committed to it and we will be progressing on it in a pace our financial situation permits us to do. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
• Mozilla launches Firefox Focus for Android — Like the iPhone and iPad version, the Android app is free of tabs and other visual clutter, and erasing your sessions is as easy as a simple tap.  
• Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView — Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView. Barbara Bermes, product manager for Firefox Mobile at Mozilla, told eWEEK.
• Project Common Voice — Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
• Opus 1.2 — Speech quality improvements especially in the 12-20 kbit/s range + Improved VBR encoding for hybrid mode + More aggressive use of wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s + Music quality improvements in the 32-48 kb/s range + Generic and SSE CELT optimizations + Support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms + DTX support for CELT mode + SILK CBR improvements + Support for all of the fixes in draft-ietf-codec-opus-update-06 (the mono downmix and the folding fixes need --enable-update-draft) + Many bug fixes, including integer wrap-arounds discovered through fuzzing (no security implications)
• Comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 — Here's a comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 so you can hear for yourself how the quality has improved and how Opus now sounds in general. As an anchor (OK, and also to make us look good!), we've also included MP3 samples.