Linux Action News

Linux Action News

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Linux Action News episodes

  • Linux Action News 149

    Solid releases from GNOME and Firefox, bad news for custom Android ROM users, and a new container distro from Amazon.

    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.
    27 min
  • Linux Action News 148

    Let's Encrypt is forced to revoke customer certificates, the big change coming to FreeNAS, and the trick to running Android on an iPhone.

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

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    • Let’s Encrypt discovers CAA bug, must revoke customer certificates
    — On Leap Day, Let's Encrypt announced that it had discovered a bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code.
  • Let’s Encrypt changes course on certificate revocation
    • — Administrators are getting a little more time to replace affected certificates.
  • Check code loop blunder strikes
  • Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates
  • 2020.02.29 CAA Rechecking Bug
  • Revoking certain certificates on March 4
  • 5 years of Intel CPUs and chipsets have a concerning flaw that’s unfixable
    • — Converged Security and Management Engine flaw may jeopardize Intel's root of trust.
  • New AMD Side Channel Attacks Discovered, Impacts Zen Architecture
  • Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020
    • — I hope to be DPL again some year, but 2020 is the wrong year for me and for the project. So I will not nominate myself this year, but hope to do so some future year.
  • DPL elections 2019, congratulations Sam Hartman!
    • — The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Sam Hartman!
  • Bits from the DPL For December 2019
  • systemd v245 released, with homed stuff
    • — A small new service systemd-homed.service has been added, that may be
    used to securely manage home directories with built-in encryption.
  • FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying
    • — With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name!
  • Facebook is shifting its Libra cryptocurrency plans
    • — The Libra project will now support existing currencies in addition to the proposed Libra token
  • Jailbreak your iPhone using a rooted Android phone and checkra1n
    • — Checkra1n gained support for Linux, making it possible to jailbreak iOS 13 devices using a Linux computer.
  • Install Android 10 on your Apple iPhone 7
    • — Project Sandcastle, allowing you to run Android on your Apple iPhone 7.
    20 min
  • Linux Action News 147

    Bruce Schneier puts his name behind Solid, Firefox starts to roll out DNS over HTTPS as default, and Microsoft's Linux first device ships to customers.

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

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    • Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS
    — This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family.
  • The Story of Collabora Office for Phones
  • Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users
    • — The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users.
  • Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
  • The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
  • Securing Firefox with WebAssembly
    • — RLBox, a new sandboxing technology.
  • Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me
    • — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
  • Building a World-Class Team at Inrupt
  • Microsoft's Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller plus cloud service, hits general availability
    • — Microsoft is making its Azure Sphere secure IoT service generally available after several years of testing and previews.
  • A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35
    • — The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35.
  • The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a RAM upgrade
    • 25 min
  • Linux Action News 146

    Microsoft Defender for Linux is in preview, Mozilla's VPN has a secret advantage, and why the community is calling out NPM Inc.

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

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    • Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview
    — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.
  • Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise
  • Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint now live under one App
  • Microsoft Works - Wikipedia
  • Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service
    • — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
  • The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced
  • IVPN applications are now open source
  • Tom Scott video about VPNs
  • Android 11 Developer Preview
    • — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.
  • npm struggling to fund FOSS devs
    • — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder
  • The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security
    • — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources
  • The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems
    • — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.
  • Most-used libraries revealed
  • The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security
    • — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are far more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.
    28 min
  • Linux Action News 145

    The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out.

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

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    • KDE Plasma 5.18 Released
  • KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released, This is What's New
  • MATE 1.24 released
  • OpenShot 2.5.0 Released
    • — Perhaps one of the most exciting changes in OpenShot 2.5.0 is our experimental support for hardware acceleration.
  • OpenShot Video Editor Just Got a Massive Update
  • Firefox 73.0 Released
    • — Today’s Firefox release includes two features that help users view and read website content more easily, quickly.
  • Firefox ESR 68.5.0 Released
  • Tor Browser 9.0.5 Released
    • — This release updates Firefox to 68.5.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.13, and on desktop, Tor to 0.4.2.6. We also added a new default bridge and backported a few improvements from the alpha series.
  • Tails 4.3 is out
  • An Update from Essential
    • — We have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.
  • Essential, Andy Rubin’s phone company, is shutting down
  • Andy Rubin’s smartphone startup, Essential, is dead
  • After just one phone, Essential Products ends
  • NetBSD fundraiser
    • — We are trying to raise $50,000 in 2020
  • NetBSD 9.0 Released
    • 16 min
  • Linux Action News 144

    Why we're disappointed in the CoreOS Container Linux transition, Mycroft goes troll hunting and the complicated story brewing at the GNU Project.

    Plus, a few community fundraisers.

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    • End-of-life announcement for CoreOS Container Linux
    — We know this timeline is aggressive. We've tried to provide the longest possible migration period consistent with our ability to maintain the OS
  • Glass Enterprise Edition 2 now available for developers
  • Mycroft's Position on Patent Trolls
    • — We are going to litigate every single patent suit to the fullest extent possible including appealing any adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.
  • GNU-FSF cooperation update
    • — Our mutual aim is to work together as peers, while minimizing change in the practical aspects of this cooperation, so we can advance in our common free software mission.
  • GNU-FSF cooperation update — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
  • The draft GNU Social Contract
    • — I have been working with several other GNU Maintainers and volunteers to draft a GNU Social Contract which explains the key commitments we want from the GNU Project.
  • GNU Social Contract DRAFT
  • Jean Louis - Re: A GNU “social contract”?
  • Proposals for the new GNU/FSF relationship
  • Memorial Fund for Mark Greaves, PeppermintOS CEO
    • — This is a tribute to Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec), Husband, Father, Peppermint CEO and distributor.
  • AppCenter for Everyone
    • — This campaign will fund a one-week in-person development sprint to develop and deliver on these key areas.
    23 min
  • Linux Action News 143

    The upcoming Linux kernels are packed full of goodies, Qt changes its licensing terms, and Thunderbird gets a new home.

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

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    • Qt offering changes 2020
    — Moving forward, Qt Long-Term Support (LTS) releases will be restricted to commercial customers.
  • Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt.
  • Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers
  • About “Qt offering changes 2020” – Fading Memories
  • Nikolai Marchenko's message about TheQtCompany's presumed business model
  • Linux 5.5 Released
    • — So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter
    module loading fixes, David didn't think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it's really been very quiet indeed - there's a
    panfrost driver update too, but again it didn't really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week.
  • 10 Best Features in Linux 5.5
  • Some 5.5 kernel development statistics
  • WireGuard + Multi-Path TCP Were Merged Tonight Into Linux 5.6
  • Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6
  • Linus Torvalds pulled WireGuard VPN into the 5.6 kernel source tree
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Adds WireGuard Support
  • The Time Namespace Support Has Been Added To The Linux 5.6 Kernel
  • Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
  • USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
  • Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
  • Thunderbird’s New Home
    • — As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.
  • Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest
  • Ginni Rometty is out as IBM CEO
    • — Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat — which IBM acquired last year in a $34 billion megadeal — will become IBM's president on the same day.
  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down
    • — Under her tenure, IBM experienced 22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018. In the company’s latest quarter, sales dropped 3.9% year-over-year to $18 billion.
  • IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO, Replacing Ginni Rometty
  • OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation
    • — OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.
    22 min
  • Linux Action News 142

    The real reason Rocket League is dropping support for Linux, Wine has a massive release, and the potential for Canonical's new Android in the cloud service.

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

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    • Rocket League will drop support for Mac, Linux versions in March | Ars Technica
    — Change comes eight months after Epic Games acquired the game's creators.
  • Update on Refunds for macOS and Linux Players
  • Support for macOS and Linux (SteamOS) – Psyonix Support
  • Psyonix are ending support for Rocket League on both Linux and macOS (updated)
  • Thanks to Psyonix dropping Linux support, we're getting anti-Linux statements like this from game devs again
  • Wine 5.0 Released
    • — This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes.
  • Wine Is Approaching Six Million Lines
  • Canonical introduces Anbox Cloud
    • — The service is designed to offload workloads from x86 or Arm-based devices to containers in the cloud.
  • The latest Chrome OS education devices will get updates for eight years
    • — Previously, most Chrome OS devices recieved six years of software support.
  • Chromebooks will now get up to eight years of Chrome OS updates
  • Improving 40 million Chromebooks for education
  • Upcycle Windows 7
    • — We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve.
  • Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions
    • 28 min
  • Linux Action News 141

    Nextcloud's new release is so big it gets a rebrand, why Mozilla had a round of lay-offs, and the real possibility of Steam coming to Chrome OS.

    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.
    22 min
  • Linux Action News 140

    Are we overloaded with open source licenses? We consider a simpler future. Results from the Debian init vote are in, and why Amazon's new open source project might be worth checking out.

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

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

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Weekly Linux news and analysis by Chris and Wes. The show every week we hope you'll go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.