Games: Lutris, Critters, Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood, Bittersweet Birthday, Arcane Fortune, Rising World
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 25th of January 2021 03:16:07 PM Filed under
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Lutris game manager v0.5.8.3 out, requires contributors to agree to a CLA
For regular Linux gamers, Lutris is pretty much a household name by now. For those that aren't - Lutris is a game manager allowing you to sort through all your games from various stores.
Not only that it also allows you to manage emulators for your favourite classics, Windows games using the Wine compatibility layer and quite a lot more. It's very useful and they continue polishing up the overall experience after a huge update went out late last year.
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Critters for Sale is super weird, first episode out free and the rest this year | GamingOnLinux
Love you wild adventures? Critters for Sale is one you should take a look at because this is the second time I've played it and I still have no idea what the hell is going on.
Originally released on itch.io back in 2019 which I mentioned here, and a contributor also took a look later, it's now seen a first episode release on Steam with Critters for Sale: SNAKE. It's so bizarre! A point and click visual novel adventure, one that's black and white with a bunch of animated scenes in the middle of the screen.
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Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood from The Coma devs launches February 10
Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood is going to take you on an adventure that loops over with twists and turns, featuring a narrative time-loop like some kind of Groundhog Day. Developed by Devespresso (The Coma & The Coma 2) and published by Headup, it sounds pretty Oz-esque and amusing with the recognizable Devespresso Games manhwa-style.
Initially starting off in Early Access, they've now announced it will begin on February 10. The roadmap to release suggests the final version will be live in March with one third of the story chapters already available. They're using Early Access mainly to ensure the full release is nice and smooth.
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Try the demo for Bittersweet Birthday, a creepy action game with you being hunted
Bittersweet Birthday is an upcoming action game set inside a mysterious building. You wake up dazed and confused, there's people after you but someone is trying to help you escape. An interesting setting full of intrigue, with each fight being a unique combat encounter.
"Bittersweet Birthday is an action game where every combat encounter is a challenging and unique fight. You can also explore different areas and help many of the NPC populating them with their everyday struggles while learning more about the world and its history."
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Empire building terminal game Arcane Fortune adds trade, nobility, assassination | GamingOnLinux
Inspired by the likes of Dwarf Fortress, Civilization, SimCity and more we have the free and open source Arcane Fortune which continues to expanding in features. Played in your favourite command-line terminal application, or just use the pre-made launch script it comes with that sorts out everything for you.
Seems like it has some genuinely great ideas, and considering how ridiculously popular Dwarf Fortress is, we know that shiny graphics are not a key to success. Perhaps Arcane Fortune will be able to carve out a nice niche.
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Open-world voxel sandbox game Rising World is going through a rewrite | GamingOnLinux
After entering Early Access in 2014, JIW-Games have been rewriting their open world sandbox game Rising World to move away from Java and instead use the Unity game engine.
They actually announced this back in 2019, as part of a post mentioning how changes to the Valve algorithm for showing games had dropped off their store page traffic dramatically. They said about wanting to rework a lot of it and Unity would help them achieve this.
Back in December they finally showed off the result of their efforts, with a massive overhaul available in Beta that's now using Unity and they're continuing to support Linux.
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The Demise of Chromium as Free Software
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 23rd of January 2021 01:29:52 AM Filed under

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This is why Leading Linux Distros going to remove Chromium from their Official Repositories
Jochen Eisinger from Google team mentioned in a discussion thread that they will be banning sync support system of Chromium. This lead to lot of frustration in the Linux Dev community & rage against googles sudden decision.
This Decision can kill small browser projects & lead the web to single browser monopoly i.e. Google Chrome!As a result of the googles decision multiple distros are strictly considering removal of Chromium from their official repositories. Leading distros like Arch Linux, Fedora, Debian, Slackware & OpenSUSE have stated that if the sync support goes down from google they will definitely remove chromium from their official repositories.
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Chromium 88 removes Flash support [Ed: But DRM added]
I uploaded a set of chromium packages to my repository today. Chromium 88.0.4324.96 sources were released two days ago.
The release notes on the Google Chrome Releases Blog mention 36 security fixes with at least one being tagged as “critical” but the article does not mention that Flash support has been entirely removed from Chromium now.
Adobe’s Flash was already actively being blocked for a long time and you had to consciously enable Flash content on web pages, but after Adobe discontinued Flash on 1st of January 2021 it was only a matter of time before support in web browsers would be removed as well.
Let’s also briefly revisit the topic of my previous post – Google will remove access to Chrome Sync for all community builds of the open source variant of their Chrome browser: Chromium… thereby crippling it as far as I am concerned.
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Chrome 89 Preparing To Ship With AV1 Encoder For WebRTC Usage [Ed: Massive patent trap]
Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser.
Going back to 2018 there's been AV1 decode support within the browser when wanting to enjoy content encoded in this royalty-free, modern codec. But now for Chrome 89 is coming AV1 encode support.
AV1 encode support is being added for the WebRTC use-case for real-time conferencing. Web applications like WebEx, Meet, and Duo (among others) already support using AV1 for better compression efficiency, improved low-bandwidth handling, and greater screen sharing efficiency. While hardware-based AV1 encoding isn't yet common, Chrome Linux/macOS/Windows desktop builds are adding the ability to use CPU-based AV1 encoding.
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Google and Mozilla Embrace More Restrictions
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 21st of January 2021 02:16:10 AM Filed under


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Extensions in Firefox for Android Update | Mozilla Add-ons Blog
Starting with Firefox 85, which will be released January 25, 2021, Firefox for Android users will be able to install supported Recommended Extensions directly from addons.mozilla.org (AMO). Previously, extensions for mobile devices could only be installed from the Add-ons Manager, which caused some confusion for people accustomed to the desktop installation flow. We hope this update provides a smoother installation experience for mobile users.
As a quick note, we plan to enable the installation buttons on AMO during our regularly scheduled site update on Thursday, January 21. These buttons will only work if you are using a pre-release version of Firefox for Android until version 85 is released on Tuesday, January 25.
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Porting Firefox to Apple Silicon
The release of Apple Silicon-based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news coverage and some surprises at the machine’s performance. This post details some background information on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these CPUs.
We’ll start with some background on the Mac transition and give an overview of Firefox internals that needed to know about the new architecture, before moving on to the concept of Universal Binaries.
We’ll then explain how DRM/EME works on the new platform, talk about our experience with macOS Big Sur, and discuss various updater problems we had to deal with. We’ll conclude with the release and an overview of various other improvements that are in the pipeline.
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Google muzzles all Chromium browsers on 15 March 2021
What is the relevance I hear you ask.
Well, I provide Chromium packages for Slackware, both 32bit and 64bit versions. These chromium packages are built on our native Slackware platform, as opposed to the official Google Chrome binaries which are compiled on an older Ubuntu probably, for maximum compatibility across Linux distros where these binaries are used. One unique quality of my Chromium packages for Slackware is that I provide them for 32bit Slackware. Google ceased providing official 32bit binaries long ago.In my Slackware Chromium builds, I disable some of the more intrusive Google features. An example: listening all the time to someone saying “OK Google” and sending the follow-up voice clip to Google Search.
And I create a Chromium package which is actually usable enough that people prefer it over Google’s own Chrome binaries, The reason for this usefulness is the fact that I enable access to Google’s cloud sync platform through my personal so-called “Google API key“. In Chromium for Slackware, you can logon to your Google account, sync your preferences, bookmarks, history, passwords etc to and from your cloud storage on Google’s platform. Your Chromium browser on Slackware is able to use Google’s location services and offer localized content; it uses Google’s translation engine, etcetera. All that is possible because I formally requested and was granted access to these Google services through their APIs within the context of providing them through a Chromium package for Slackware.
The API key, combined with my ID and passphrase that allow your Chromium browser to access all these Google services are embedded in the binary – they are added during compilation. They are my key, and they are distributed and used with written permission from the Chromium team.
These API keys are usually meant to be used by software developers when testing their programs which they base on Chromium code. Every time a Chromium browser I compiled talks to Google through their Cloud Service APIs, a counter increases on my API key. Usage of the API keys for developers is rate-limited, which means if an API key is used too frequently, you hit a limit and you’ll get an error response instead of a search result. So I made a deal with the Google Chromium team to be recognized as a real product with real users and an increased API usage frequency. Because I get billed for every access to the APIs which exceeds my allotted quota and I am generous but not crazy.
I know that several derivative distributions re-use my Chromium binary packages (without giving credit) and hence tax the usage quota on my Google Cloud account, but I cover this through donations, thank you my friends, and no thanks to the leeches of those distros.
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Proprietary Software and Security Issues
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 19th of December 2020 09:08:35 AM Filed under


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Google Blames Gmail, YouTube Outage on Error in User ID System
Google diagnosed a widespread outage that knocked out major services earlier this week, such as Gmail and YouTube, as a mistake with its system for identifying people online.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has several tools that enable it to verify and track logged-in users. In October, the company began moving those tools to a new file storage system, and in the process misreported portions of the data, according to a Friday post. That caused several of its services to go down for 47 minutes Monday morning, a rare technical misstep.
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Windows 10 updates cause CorsairVBusDriver BSOD crash loop
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Microsoft has delivered a partial fix for this nagging Windows 10 bug
Microsoft has released a partial fix for a known issue affecting Windows 10 devices with certain audio drivers for Conexant and Synaptics devices. The issue has been under investigation since May this year.
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Attackers in compromised US system at least since mid-2019: report
Malicious attackers, who were exposed as having hit a number of government and private sector entities through software made by Texas firm SolarWinds, appear to have gained access to that firm's network as early as mid-2019, Yahoo! News claims.
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Suspected Russian [attack]: Was it an epic cyber attack or spy operation?
But for many current and former American officials, that’s not the right way to look at it. By [cracking] into dozens of corporations and government agencies, they say, the [crackers] have pulled off a stunning and distressing feat of espionage. But they note that it’s just the sort of cyber spying that the American National Security Agency attempts on a regular basis against Russia, China and any number of foreign adversaries.
It might constitute an attack if the intruders destroyed data, for example, or used their access to do damage in the physical world, say, by shutting down power grids. But breaking into unclassified government and corporate networks? Reading other people’s emails? That’s spying.
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Exploiting a stack-based buffer overflow in practice
In my previous post, I detailed a fun method of obtaining root access on the Zyxel VMG8825-T50 router, which required physical access to the device and authenticated access to the web interface.
In this post, I will detail the exploitation of a vulnerability that could potentially result in unauthenticated RCE as root, given LAN access only. This vulnerability was also found on the VMG8825-T50 router, but it turns out to be present in multiple other Zyxel devices.
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Expanding Fuchsia's open source model
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 8th of December 2020 08:37:04 PM Filed under

Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system, and today we are expanding Fuchsia’s open source model to welcome contributions from the public.
Fuchsia is designed to prioritize security, updatability, and performance, and is currently under active development by the Fuchsia team. We have been developing Fuchsia in the open, in our git repository for the last four years. You can browse the repository history at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com to see how Fuchsia has evolved over time. We are laying this foundation from the kernel up to make it easier to create long-lasting, secure products and experiences.
Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia's open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.
Also: Google's Fuchsia Open-Source OS To Begin Accepting Community Contributions
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WWW: WordPress, Chrome, Mozilla
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 1st of December 2020 07:20:22 AM Filed under



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Half of Websites Will Be WordPress-Driven by 2025 / Digital Information World
Based on CMS usage trends, now available for 2019 and most of the current year, several outlets have projected that WordPress will be the driving force behind half of all websites by 2025. According to the newest numbers by W3Techs, its usage is growing by 2.47% per year on average. If it continues at this rate, WordPress will surpass 50% market share, potentially within the next five years.
[...]
The pandemic has hastened the shift from brick-and-mortar to e-commerce by roughly five years. Today's 'online first' strategy is commonplace for many new and established businesses. However, as of 2019, less than two-thirds of small businesses had a website. For many business thought-leaders, the idea that a brand is too small or unsuitable for online trade ceases to exist. In the post-millennial marketplace, stores without an online presence give the impression that you're no longer in business.
The trajectory of WordPress has historically depended on the demands of its users. It's continuously unfolded to cater to millions of bloggers and webmasters around the globe. Improvements such as REST API and the Gutenberg editor means WordPress is now better placed to contend with closed-source competitors Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace. Furthermore, you can anticipate developers will see WordPress as a simple solution to power the expansion of all varieties of mobile and web apps.
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Chrome to remove HTTP/2 Push
Chromium developers have announced that they plan to remove support for HTTP/2 server push from the market-leading browser engine. Server push lets web servers preemptively send clients resources it expects them to request later. The technique can reduce the number of network round-trips required before the client has all the resources it needs to display a page. The announcement cited high implementation complexity, low adoption among websites, and questionable performance gains as the reason for the removal.
Server push is an optional feature introduced in the HTTP/2 standard. Chrome can remove it and remain compatible with the HTTP/2 standard. When used correctly, server push can greatly improve page-load times. It also enables use-cases like instant redirects.
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celery-batches 0.4 released!
Earlier today I released a version 0.4 of celery-batches with support for Celery 5.0. As part of this release support for Python < 3.6 was dropped and support for Celery < 4.4 was dropped.
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This Week in Glean: Glean is Frictionless Data Collection
So you want to collect data in your project? Okay, it’s pretty straightforward.
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Google Publishes Latest Linux Core Scheduling Patches So Only Trusted Tasks Share A Core
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 19th of November 2020 01:33:19 AM Filed under

Google engineer Joel Fernandes sent out the ninth version of their "core scheduling" patches for the Linux kernel that allows for allowing only trusted tasks to run concurrently on the same CPU core -- in cases where Hyper Threading is involved to safeguard the system against the possible security exploits.
Core Scheduling has been a popular topic since vulnerabilities like MDS and L1TF have come to light. Core Scheduling aims to make Hyper Threading safer and by only letting trusted tasks share a CPU core is a reasonable safeguard for still leaving Hyper Threading active on servers rather than disabling it in the name of security. DigitalOcean, Oracle, Google, and other major x86_64 players have all been interested in core scheduling and working on different solutions in order to keep HT/SMT active. Particularly for the major cloud server providers having to disable HT/SMT would be a big blow to their models.
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FydeOS beta brings Chromium OS to the PineBook Pro (Android app support too)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 18th of November 2020 09:37:43 PM Filed under


The PineBook Pro is a $200 laptop with a 14 inch full HD display, a Rockchip RK3399 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and support for a bunch of different operating systems… most of which are GNU/Linux distributions.
But you can also turn the laptop into a Chromebook-like device by installing a new beta release of FydeOS 11.2 for the PineBook Pro.
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Noscript cures font vulnerabilities
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 13th of November 2020 08:11:34 PM Filed under



In the past month, I've read about a dozen security bulletins involving remote execution exploits due to font parsing vulnerabilities in a range of operating systems, from desktop to mobile. In all these cases, there was a detailed mention of problems, but very little if any mention of possible solutions, other than vendor updates, that is.
Which is rather intriguing, because there is a tool that can help you with fonts. It's called Noscript, it's a supreme browser extension available in Firefox and more recently in Chrome, and it allows you to govern the loading of fonts in your webpages. A simple and elegant tool that can save - or at the very least, significantly minimize, headache with fonts. But does it get the spotlight it deserves? Of course not, drama and fear are far more interesting. Let's see what gives.
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Uncovering the Best Open Source Google Analytics Alternatives
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 23rd of October 2020 10:19:57 AM Filed under


Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data. In a nutshell, it is the study of website visitor behavior. It is the process of using online data to transform a organization from faith-based to data driven.
This type of software helps you generate a holistic view of your business by turning customer interactions into actionable insights. Using reports and dashboards, web analytics software lets you sort, sift and share real-time information to help identify opportunities and issues. Keeping track of web visitors, analyzing traffic sources, measuring sales and conversions are just some of the possibilities.
Google Analytics is an excellent well known free service that lets webmasters and site owners access web analytics data. The web service generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and sources. It helps marketers and is the most widely used website statistics service. But the biggest downside with Google Analytics is that your data is controlled and used for Google’s own purposes, not just by you. It is also not an open source solution, with a webmaster or site owner being denied access to the raw data.
There are also many other remote-hosted web analytics services that are well-designed and comprehensive. However, if you want an open source solution where the software is hosted on your own server, there are some good alternatives. Having the software installed on your server means that you retain full control over your data, with the possibility of integrating that data into your own system. This solution might, for example, be important to people who do not want to give Google (or another organization) the invitation to control a large portion of their online activity, or who want to be fully in control of visitor privacy.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled the following list of open source web analytics software.
Also: ITFirms Lists Top Free, Open-Source Statistical Analysis Software
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