Linux Action News Video

Ubuntu sets the Internet on fire, new Linux and FreeBSD vulnerabilities raise concern, while Mattermost raises $50M to compete with Slack.

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

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

Elders in the community show us how to properly build services, Huawei is reportedly working on a Sailfish OS fork and Apple joins the Cloud Native club.

Plus Facebook wants you to use their cryptocurrency, and CERN launches "The Microsoft Alternatives project".

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• Mozilla says paid subscription service is coming to Firefox — The goal for Mozilla is to develop “diverse sources of revenue” so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser.
• New Firefox branding — The “Firefox” you’ve always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first.
• Apple joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining as a top-level Platinum End User Member.
• MAlt project — The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases.
• Huawei's struggle in the US has led to it cancel a new MateBook — Huawei CEO Richard Yu has confirmed an indefinite hold on the release of a new MateBook laptop.
• Huawei may use Sailfish OS-based Aurora — Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile operating system based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.
• Huawei's operating system in pipeline on 1 million phones? — In a smartphone supply chain report that Huawei has allegedly shipped 1 million smartphones with its self-developed "HongMeng" operating system onboard for testing.
• Facebook’s cryptocurrency to debut next week backed by Visa, Mastercard, and others — Each will invest around $10 million to fund the development of the currency and will become part of the Libra Association, an independent consortium that will govern the digital coin independently of Facebook.

Mozilla's master strategy becomes clear, CockroachDB surrenders to the software as a service reality, while Microsoft and Oracle link up.

Plus Google argues that keeping Huawei on their Android is better for all, and Chris gets sucked into Stadia.

Links:

• Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default — At Firefox, we’re doing more than that. We believe that in order to truly protect people, we need to establish a new standard that puts people’s privacy first.
• Relicensing CockroachDB — But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.   
• Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds — Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
• Google is fighting to keep doing business with Huawei — Three sources told the Financial Times that Google's argument is that cutting ties with Huawei could pose a national security risk.
• Stadia details announced — Stadia games run on custom Linux-based server hardware maintained by Google, promising "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance." Game audio and video is streamed from those servers to a user's device, and inputs are streamed from the user to the server over a network of what Google says are "7,500 edge nodes" around the world.

Frankenstein Linux malware and a Docker bug that's blown out of proportion get our attention this week.

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

Links:

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

Firefox has a new speed trick, openSUSE Leap has a time-traveling kernel while the project plans for the future, and we react to Antergros coming to an end.

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

Links:

• Latest Firefox Release is Faster than Ever — We applied many of the same principles of time management just like you might prioritize your own urgent needs.
• Firefox 67 - Dark Mode CSS, WebRender, and more
• Smooth video playback with AV1 decoder
• It's not all beer and skittles for Firefox 67
• openSUSE Leap 15.1 released — The release of Leap 15.1 improves YaST functionality and the installer.

ZombieLoad's impact on Linux, AMP to start hiding Google from the URL, and the huge Linux switch underway.

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

Links:

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

RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.

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

Links:

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

Fedora 30 is out, we share our thoughts. Purism's new Librem One service is launched, we're rather skeptical and the reason might surprise you.

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

Links:

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

Docker Hub gets hacked, Nextcloud 16 has a new feature to prevent hacks, and France's 'Secure" Telegram replacement gets hacked within an hour.

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

Links:

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

Ubuntu 19.04 is released we share our take, OpenSSH has an important release, and Mozilla brings Python to the browser.

Also WebThings is launched and we think it might have a shot.

Links:

• Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released — Improved performance is what defines the ‘Disco Dingo’
• Open infrastructure, developers and IoT are 19.04's focus — Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.
• Ubuntu 19.04 Flavours Available to Download
• Introducing Mozilla WebThings — Project Things is graduating from its early experimental phase and from now on will be known as Mozilla WebThings.
• WebThings Documentation
• Pyodide — Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser.
• OpenSSH 8.0 released — This release contains mitigation for a weakness in the scp(1) tool and protocol (CVE-2019-6111).
• Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe — Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission's ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.