LWDW: Firefox Is Back

Kernel 4.14 is out! Samsung demos Dex, Fedora opens the Pipe and Quantum has arrived. All this plus your emails.

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Yishan (new patreon)
Mlangston (new patreon)
Linuxgnuru (tablet stand)

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News

Breaking: physical access still a problem
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/linux-has-a-usb-driver-security-problem/

  • You know what other operating system is vulnerable to having someone getting physical access to a machine?
  • All of them!
  • Not all of these 79 vulnerabilities have been reported, let alone patched.
  • Most are simple DoS (Denial of Service) bugs that freeze or restart the OS.
  • You know what prevents all of this? Glue.

 

Intel’s minix OS now open for business
https://www.techspot.com/news/71836-nearly-every-intel-cpu-since-2008-found-vulnerable.html

  • AMD has a similarly terrifying thing living in it and many other architectures
  • I am curious to see what kind of tomfoolery can be achieved with a standard run of the mill intel processor after the internet at large grabs a hold of this.
  • What if we went through all this trouble and nothing malicious was found.

 

Modern day Java has image issues
https://medium.com/@caspervonb/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32

  • TLDNR: Electron is for the lazy.
  • It’s the lazy man’s framework. Baby’s first app maker.
  • There’s a reason most electron apps chug worse than a high school freshman at a frat party.
  • Electron is a lot like Virtual Programming’s eON, a crappy wrapper which its sole selling point is quickly dissipating.

 

Year of the Linux desktop is here
https://fossbytes.com/linux-distros-galaxy-first-demo-samsung/

  • Again, this will not become a “thing” until it’s 100% wireless.
  • I still support the one phone army knife concept of a single device.
  • While you’re walking about during the work day, it’s your phone.
  • You get home, you plug it into a dock with an external GPU enclosure, a few monitors and peripherals, boom! You got all your device needs in something which fits in your pocket.
  • This still isn’t it.

 

Ctrl+F ryzen
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/12/linux_4_14_released/

  • Installed it on the 17.10 box using mainline.
  • No issues and the NVIDIA binary blob worked OOTB.
  • Alright, one issue with the Steam controlla but it was a bit bizarre.
  • Memory limits have been increased to 128PiB of virtual address space and 4PiB of physical address space.
  • AMD Secure Memory Encryption support has been added.
  • Heterogeneous Memory Management has been added for GPUs.
  • There’s also lots of fixes for the recent crop of USB vulnerabilities that have turned up.
  • First to have a six-year support cycle.

 

Begun, the encroachment has
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-introduces-arm-server-support-red-hat-enterprise-linux

  • With parts like the Centriq 2400 server system-on-a-chip (SoC) about to show up this comes as no surprise.
  • For the server space ARM just makes sense.
  • And servers mean RHEL… in any type of environment where people care more about getting stuff done than politics.

 

Let it go, let it go
http://www.openshotvideo.com/2017/11/openshot-241-released-improved-playback.html

  • Improved image quality and playback smoothness.
  • Yeah, at this point you would have to introduce something that would bring me back.
  • That, that ain’t going to do it.

 

Opera is still a thing
http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/2017/11/opera-49-adds-snapshot-tool-editing-tools/

  • Opera 49 offers a snapshot tool with editing features, including a selfie camera.
  • VK Messenger joins built-in sidebar communicators.
  • Five new currencies for currency converter.
  • I noticed the other day I still have Opera installed in this box.

 

Quantum of browsers
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

  • Seems about the same in Google Docs.
  • Good luck getting me back, and I mean that, no snark.
  • The style inspector feels a lot more like Chrome.
  • Google is now default for search.
  • Still runs like a dog on Android.
  • Remember when I said Firefox betas are always faster than the actual released version?
  • Well, someone better pick up that phone because I called it!

 

Fedora brings the Pipes
https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-27-workstation/

  • Not going to lie, I really want to start messing around with Pipewire.
  • GNOME 3.26
  • LibreOffice 5.4
  • GNOME Boxes

 

Is Google Docs too mainstream?
https://github.com/vigzmv/IPFS-CRDT-shared-editing

  • Something similar to Google Docs, but without any coordinating server.
  • Right now you can edit a text document but that’s about it.
  • It’s google docs without any other functionality than the multiple people editing it at once.

Slice of Pi

Super pip
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/piwheels/

 

Imagine a beowulf cluster
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12037/cheap-supercomputers-lanl-has-750node-raspberry-pi-development-clusters


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Room
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?4lH3uHl

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