Linux Action News Video

Mozilla puts your money where your mouse is and partners with Scroll to launch Firefox for a Better Web. We'll explain the details, and why it might just have a shot.

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

Links:

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

Why Debian is facing one of its most critical moments yet, Microsoft and GitHub buy npm, and our thoughts on Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 "Debbie."

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

Links:

• npm is joining GitHub — I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.
• The npm Blog — Next Phase Montage
• Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire
• GitHub for mobile is now available
• LMDE 4 “Debbie” released! — LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”.
• Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 — Jonathan Carter

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.

Links:

• 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.

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.

Links:

• 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

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.

Links:

• 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

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.

Links:

• 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.

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.

Links:

• 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 —

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.

Links:

• 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.

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.

Links:

• 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

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.

Links:

• 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