Get best of the week

FOSS News No. 7 - a review of free and open source news for March 9-15, 2020



Hello everyone!

Continuing reviews of free and open source news (and a bit of coronavirus). All the most important thing about penguins and not only in Russia and the world.

In the issue No. 7 of March 9–15, 2020:

  1. Firefox 74 release
  2. Full home automation in a new building. Continuation
  3. Community Open Source Methods for Countering COVID-19
  4. Open Group Introduces New Platform for Advanced Open Source Software Development
  5. Pleroma 2.0
  6. Project OWL
  7. 6 Open Source Kubernetes Docker
  8. MangoHUD – Linux,
  9. 10 Open Source
  10. AWS Bottlerocket, GNU/Linux
  11. Red Hat
  12. Memcached 1.6.0
  13. FreeNAS TrueNAS
  14. Basilisk – Firefox
  15. Google USB-
  16. : 50% ,
  17. Chrome OS 82 will improve the terminal
  18. Debian 8 Support Extended For Over 5 Years
  19. Patent for SIFT Object Recognition Algorithm Expired
  20. Canceled or moved online due to COVID-19 GNU / Linux and Open Source conferences

Firefox 74 release




The major release of Firefox 74, the second most popular browser in the world and the first among free software, took place. Some of the innovations according to OpenNET:

  1. Assemblies for GNU / Linux use the RLBox isolation mechanism, aimed at blocking vulnerabilities in third-party libraries.
  2. DNS over HTTPS is enabled by default for US users.
  3. Disabled support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 protocols.
  4. The release note recommended the Facebook Container add-on, isolating the main Facebook site from sites using its widgets to increase privacy.
  5. Discontinued support for add-ons installed by the workaround and not tied to user profiles.
  6. WebRTC has enhanced protection against leakage of internal IP address information during voice and video calls.
  7. For Windows and macOS, the ability to import profiles from the Microsoft Edge browser based on the Chromium engine is implemented.

In addition to innovations and bug fixes in Firefox 74, 20 vulnerabilities were fixed.

Details

Full home automation in a new building. Continuation




The promised continuation of the article on Habré, to which I gave a link in No. 5 , about the construction of a "smart home" in a separate taken odnushka using FOSS software. In the new material, the author gave answers to comments, considered whether the use of the “smart home” provides resource savings, gave simple tips that he himself realized only after he built the solution himself and talked about the transition from openHAB to Home Assistant.

Details

Community Open Source Methods for Countering COVID-19




FOSS’s ideals apply to areas outside of typical software applications, writes Hackaday. So, a group appeared to pool resources to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The group formed around Just One Giant Lab, a non-profit organization operating from Paris, France. They strive to create an open platform for scientific cooperation on a wide range of problems facing humanity. The current project aims to create an open-source method for safely testing for the presence of COVID-19 infection to help work better with cases that appear around the world. The current state of work is reduced to a laboratory notebook prepared by a group that is available online.

Details ( [1] , [2] )

Open Group Introduces New Platform for Advanced Open Source Software Development




HelpNetSecurity reports that the Open Group, a vendor-independent technology consortium, and the University of Aquila have announced a partnership with a consortium of leading European research organizations, technology developers, industrial software developers, and open source sites. The EU-supported CROSSMINER project raised € 4.5 million to develop an innovative platform that explores the software code and interactions associated with FOSS projects. The tools that CROSSMINER platform provides to software developers include:

  1. Code analysis tools for assessing project quality.
  2. , (, , , ), , .
  3. .
  4. .
  5. , - .



Pleroma 2.0




Linux.org.ru announces the release of the second major version of Pleroma, "a federated social network for microblogging written in Elixir and using the standardized W3C ActivityPub protocol ." This is the second largest network in Fediverse, many social networking sites that communicate with each other via open protocols. Pleroma is "a high-performance server that can run on low-power systems, such as, for example, Raspberry Pi or cheap VPS", the publication complements. The innovations, according to Linux.org.ru, are not so significant, but I found it important to mention this release because of the interesting topic of decentralized social networks in general.

Details

Project OWL for Disaster Response




TechRepublic reports that the Linux Foundation has announced the deployment of embedded Open Source IoT device software for Project OWL, winner of the IBM Call for Code global contest. The foundation invites developers around the world to create mesh nodes for global emergency communications networks. According to the organizers, Project OWL helps to quickly establish communication and improve communication between first aid providers and civilians in need of assistance, facilitating organization, location and logistics during or after natural disasters. Project OWL IoT devices, DuckLinks, can be deployed or activated in the event of an accident.

Details

The 6 Best Open Source Monitoring Utilities for Kubernetes and Docker




Edition DevOps enlightens. Kubernetes and Docker are the two most common buzzwords in modern DevOps conversations. Docker is a tool that lets you containerize and run your applications, and Kubernetes provides you with a platform to organize or manage these containers, since managing thousands of containers manually using the Docker CLI would be a practical nightmare. However, simply running thousands of containers and managing them through Kubernetes is not enough. You must properly monitor and analyze them to ensure that your services are working and working optimally. This process is called Software Reliablity Engineering (SRE), a term initiated and popularized by Google. It includes three elements: 1) monitoring; 2) logging; 3) error tracking. And if you aren’t in the know,There are 6 tools that can make your life much easier:

  1. Prometheus;
  2. Grafana;
  3. Elastic Stack;
  4. Sensu Go;
  5. Sysdig Inspect;
  6. Jaeger.



MangoHUD – Linux,




Forbes discusses the topic of benchmarking games on GNU / Linux and introduces a new project, MangoHUD. This is a Vulkan overlay that can be activated in any Steam Proton game (which translates the Microsoft DirectX graphics API for graphics into Vulkan that understands Linux). It can also be run on native Linux games using Vulkan or using software such as Lutris. MangoHUD is defined on its GitHub page as a tool for monitoring CPU, GPU and RAM usage, as well as for monitoring the minimum, maximum, and average frame rates. But he does a lot more, and looks absolutely beautiful, doing it, the newspaper writes. MangoHUD also writes this data to a text file, similar to how FRAPS or MSI Afterburner works. But FlightlessMango takes it one step furtherBy creating a “User Tests” section on your website that allows you to download these text files and watch how great interactive charts and graphs are created.

MangoHud Details

on GitHub

10 Open Source datasets for text classification




Analytics India Mag specially for Data Science specialists has compiled a list of 10 open datasets that you can freely use in your work:

  1. Amazon Reviews Dataset - several million user reviews and ratings;
  2. Enron Email Dataset - half a million Enron management emails;
  3. Goodreads Book Reviews - more than one and a half million reviews and other information;
  4. IMDB Dataset - 50,000 reviews;
  5. MovieLens Latest Datasets - 27 million ratings and more than a million tags for 58 thousand films from 280 thousand users;
  6. OpinRank Dataset - more than 42 thousand reviews on cars and more than 250 thousand on hotels;
  7. SMS Spam Collection - more than 5,000 sms messages marked as spam;
  8. The Blog Authorship Corpus – 680 19 , blogger.com 2004;
  9. WordNet – , ;
  10. Yelp Reviews – 6 .




AWS Bottlerocket, GNU/Linux





AWS has released its own open source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped down Linux distribution, akin to projects like CoreOS Linux, now defunct, and Container-Optimized OS from Google. The OS is currently in the preview stage, but you can test it as an Amazon machine image for EC2 (and, accordingly, under Amazon EKS). As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr notes in his statement, Bottlerocket supports Docker images that are compatible with the Open Container Initiative format, meaning that all Linux-based containers will be launched. "Container-optimized operating systems will give development teams additional speed and efficiency to perform workloads with higher throughput, better security and uptime , ”said Michael Gerstenhaber, Product Management Director at Datadog.

Details

Red Hat Introduces Enhanced Petabyte-Level Data Warehouse Solution




Red Hat, Inc., a leading global provider of open source solutions, has announced the availability of Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 to provide a simplified, petabyte storage facility for cloud development and data mining. Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 is based on the Nautilus version of the Ceph open source project. “ Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 enables enterprises to efficiently scale and support ever-increasing data and workload requirements while providing simplified installation and management, ” said Amita Potnis, director of research at IDC. Here are some features of the new solution:

  1. A simplified installation process that allows you to complete a standard installation in less than 10 minutes.
  2. «» , .
  3. , .
  4. Kubernetes, .



Memcached 1.6.0




A significant release of the Memcached 1.6.0 RAM data caching system, which operates with key / value data and is distinguished by its ease of use, has been released, OpenNET writes. The new version has stabilized the implementation of extstore storage, which allows using SSD / Flash drives to expand the cache size. The second important change in the new version was the processing of the network interaction code, which was adapted for the automatic processing of batch calls within a single system call. Recycling the network subsystem also allowed us to switch to the dynamic allocation of buffers as needed, instead of the static assignment of buffers. It also announced the transfer to the category of an outdated binary protocol for interacting with the server. The binary protocol has been replaced by a new text protocol,demonstrating the optimal combination of performance and reliability and covering all operations previously available through binary and text protocols. The old text protocol will continue to develop unchanged.



FreeNAS TrueNAS




IXsystems announced the unification of its products for fast deployment of network storage, the free FreeNAS distribution will be combined with the commercial project TrueNAS, expanding the capabilities of FreeNAS for enterprises and pre-installed on storage systems manufactured by iXsystems, OpenNET reports. Users will be offered two editions - TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. The combination will speed up development and shorten the release preparation cycle up to 6 months, strengthen quality control, synchronize development with FreeBSD to provide more rapid support for new equipment, simplify documentation, unify sites, simplify migration between commercial and free distributions, and accelerate the transition to OpenZFS 2.0.

Details

Basilisk - a fork of Firefox with a classic look and classic extensions




Despite the fact that it is better to stick to conventional web browsers, such as Firefox or Chromium, available for Linux - it does not hurt to know about other browsers, writes It's FOSS. So, recently, the author of the publication came across a fork of Firefox, a Basilisk web browser with the classic Firefox user interface and support for legacy add-ons (thus the fork is similar to Waterfox). Here are some Basilisk features that might interest you:

  1. XUL-based browser;
  2. It supports the "Australis" interface, which was quite popular in versions of Firefox v29-v56;
  3. Support for NPAPI plugins (Flash, Unity, Java, etc.);
  4. Support for XUL / Overlay Mozilla-style extensions;
  5. Using the Open Source browser engine "Goanna", fork Gecko;
  6. Rust Photon ;
  7. 64- .



Google USB-




Google has published a ukip utility that allows you to track and block attacks carried out using malicious USB devices that simulate a USB keyboard for hidden substitution of fictitious keystrokes (for example, during an attack, a sequence of keystrokes leading to the opening of the terminal and execution in it can be simulated arbitrary commands), reports OpenNET. The code is written in Python and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The utility runs in the form of a systemd service and can work in monitoring and attack prevention modes. In the monitoring mode, the detection of possible attacks and logging of activity associated with attempts to use USB devices for other purposes to substitute input are carried out.In protection mode, when a potentially malicious device is detected, it is disconnected from the system at the driver level.



: 50% ,





According to WhiteSource security expert, the number of vulnerabilities in open source projects increased by almost 50% in 2019, and this can be considered good news in the sense that you cannot find what you are not looking for, writes The Register. In its annual Vulnerability Report, White Source links a growing number of vulnerabilities with increased security awareness of open source projects. This is a consequence of the widespread adoption of open source components and the general growth of the community in recent years, not to mention media attention to data disclosure. In other words, mistakes have always been, but they are more noticeable, because we pay more attention. Last year, more than 6,000 open source vulnerabilities were reported, compared with just over 4,000 in the previous one.

Details

Chrome OS 82 will improve the terminal




Google Chrome OS is primarily aimed at working with web applications. However, it is also possible to run Android and Linux applications. And in the upcoming 82nd release (scheduled for release on May 5), it is planned to take another step towards meeting users who are close to GNU / Linux and the command line, reports Liliputing. The terminal will look much more like regular Chrome applications, get a “material” design, tabs and a standard icon with three dots to open the configuration window. Various terminal options will be available for configuration, including:

  1. background color;
  2. font type, size and color;
  3. smoothing;
  4. cursor shape and color;
  5. customization of key behavior (Ctrl + N, Ctrl + T, Ctrl + W, Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, and AltGr);
  6. customizing window behavior.

Details

Debian 8 Support Extended For Over 5 Years




The developers of the LTS branches of the Debian 8 distribution Jessie announced their intention to extend support for Debian 8 for a period exceeding the standard 5 years, Linux.org.ru reports. Initially, support for the eighth version of the distribution was planned until July 2020. Enhanced support will be provided by Freexian as part of the LTS Extended program. As part of the extended distribution support, a limited set of packages will be supported that support only two architectures - amd64 and i386. Support for some packages will not be implemented, including the kernel, they will be offered a replacement.

Details

Patent for SIFT Object Recognition Algorithm Expired




March 8, 2020 expired patent US6711293B1, describing the SIFT technique (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), designed to identify signs in the images. SIFT is applicable in areas such as recognition of objects in the image, superposition of 3D models on the real image in augmented reality systems, map matching, positioning in 3D space, and panorama stitching. If before for the use of SIFT in commercial projects it was required to obtain a license or permission, now it has become available to everyone. SIFT implementation is offered in OpenCV, but it is classified as a non-free set of modules, which requires a separate inclusion. The expiration of the patent will allow you to transfer SIFT to the main composition of OpenCV, and also without limitation use it for pattern recognition in free projects.

Source

Canceled or moved online due to COVID-19 GNU / Linux and Open Source conferences




The new coronavirus pandemic has affected the FOSS community. the list of conferences canceled or rescheduled to other dates or in online conferences is given by ZDNet:

  1. Linux Foundation Member Member Summit: March 10-12, Lake Tahoe - Canceled.
  2. Netdev 0x14: March 17-20, Vancouver - moved online.
  3. Automotive Grade Linux: 18-19, Honolulu - canceled.
  4. SUSECon: March 23-27, Dublin - moved online.
  5. Linaro Connect: March 24-25, Budapest - moved online.
  6. KubeCon: March 30 - April 2, Amsterdam - canceled until July / August.
  7. Open Networking & Edge Summit: April 20-21, Los Angeles - canceled until the fall.
  8. Red Hat Summit: April 27-29, San Francisco - moved online.
  9. DataStax Accelerate: May 11-13, San Francisco - moved online.
  10. RedisConf: May 12-14, San Francisco - moved online.

Details and list of conferences that are still being planned without changes


That's it, until next Sunday!

Subscribe to our Telegram channel or RSS in order not to miss the new issues of FOSS News.

Previous issue

More articles:


All Articles