An Insight to PureOS 9.0 Hephaestus

Unlike many other secure & privacy-respecting operating systems, PureOS does not get celebration in every release. Say for example QubesOS, Tails, Whonix, and OpenBSD, they all get celebrations every time they reach a new version. However, after a period of version 8.0, now PureOS reaches version 9.0 as per February 2020 I could tell. This article overviews PureOS in general and version 9.0 in particular starting from a little Librem computers intro, then things about the new Amber codename, the switch from Rolling to Stable style of release, and more. I also added valuable links at the end about its history and development. I hope this article can sum up well about PureOS for you. Enjoy!

Today in Techrights

• Alexandre Oliva’s Message About Cancel Culture at the FSF
• Good People Need to Run for Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board Positions After an FSF Coup Threw in the Towel, Pushing Out the Founder
• FSF’s Interim Co-President Alexandre Oliva on Being Cancelled
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 22, 2020
• Links 23/2/2020: PipeWire 0.3 and Osu!

Planet Changes and Cilium

• Planet Arch Linux migration

  The software behind planet.archlinux.org was implemented in Python 2 and is no longer maintained upstream. This functionality has now been implemented in archlinux.org's archweb backend which is actively maintained but offers a slightly different experience.

• Cilium drops 1.7 release, upping insight and manageability

  Network and API connectivity project Cilium has been released in version 1.7, providing users with a UI for observability platform Hubble and the option to apply cluster-wide network policies. Cilium is an open source project developed by US startup Isovalent to provide and secure network connectivity and load balancing for workloads such as application containers or processes. It is based on a virtual machine-like construct called Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) which can be found in the Linux kernel.

OSS and Development

• Someone is selling the free, open source Playnite launcher on Steam for $100

  Playnite is a free open source PC application designed to be an all-in-one answer to the growing number of game launchers we've all got on our desktops. In other words, it combines libraries from the likes of Steam, Epic Games Store, Uplay and GOG Galaxy, and then lets you organise them however you see fit. Jody tried it last year and came away impressed. I should emphasise the "free" above: it is available straight from the source here and, according to the site, "no features are locked behind a paywall and the complete source code is available under the MIT license". The MIT license basically surrenders the software to any kind of use with no restrictions, including resales.

• uGet is an open source download manager for Windows and Linux that also supports Torrents and Video downloads

  The GUI has four panes, a menu bar and a toolbar. The Status pane in the top left corner displays all downloads and the ones which are Active, Queuing, Finished, and Recycled (deleted). The total number of downloads for each category is displayed next to its name, and you can click on any of these to see the list of items contained. Switch to the Category pane to jump between the default and the ones you have created. You can use the Category menu to add new sorting options, set the default download folder for each category, maximum active downloads, and also the maximum upload and download speeds. The pane below the toolbar is the download list pane; anything that you select in the status pane is displayed here. It shows the name, the file size of the download that has been completed, the total size, the progression percentage, time left to complete the download, and the upload/download speeds of each file. The View menu can be used to customize the columns that are displayed in the list pane, and the other visual elements of the program. Highlighting an item in the download list brings up its summary on the bottom pane.

• Open Source Music Tagger Picard 2.3 Released With Custom MP4 Tags Support

  Free and Open source MusicBrainz announced the point release of Picard 2.3 with major changes to the user interface, tag, and desktop integration support. MusicBrainz stores all the metadata of the music and Picard is the official tag editor that helps in identifying and organizing the digital audio recording.

• For Square Crypto, the Way to Bitcoin Mass Adoption Is Open Source

  When Jack Dorsey founded Square in February 2009, Bitcoin was all of one month old. In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto and Dorsey were likely laying the groundwork for their respective creations concurrently in the year prior. Ten years later, the two would converge in what now seems like an inevitable collision. Square launched its Venmo-like payment service, Cash App, in 2013. The application features common stock investing, and i

• Gold-nuggeting: Machine learning tool simplifies target discovery for pen testers

  Recognizing this analogy with the precious metals industry, researchers at Delve Labs have developed Batea, an open source tool that leverages machine learning to find valuable information in network device data.

• ’Second Revolution’ In Electronic Bond Trading

  Sri Ambati, chief executive and founder at H2O.ai, told Markets Media that the firm’s open source platform can perform one billion regressions in less than five seconds.

• Google ‘AutoFlip’ can resize video using AI

  The way we consume video has changed a lot over the course of the last decade. We now watch videos on our mobile devices from anywhere and because of this, video content comes in a wide variety of formats. Google recognizes this shift and so last week their AI team announced ‘AutoFlip’ an open-source framework for “intelligent video reframing.”

• This open-source framework, ‘AutoFlip’, can do automated video cropping using AI

  Many times when we see a video on mobile devices is badly cropped, it is not much you can do about it. Understanding this problem, Google’s AI’s team has built an open-source solution on top of MediaPipe, Autoflip, which can reframe a video that fits any device or dimension (landscape, portrait, etc.). AutoFlip works in three phases. The first phase includes scene detection; the second is the video content analysis, and the third is reframing. For this tool, if a video and a target dimension are given, it analyzes the video content. Later it develops optimal tracking and cropping strategies, which finally enables it to create an output video at the same time limit in the desired aspect ratio.

• Tech Events in Africa: Nerds Unite, Open Source Festival and #CodeZone

  It’s a new week and another opportunity to meet up with like-minded people, become better in your chosen field and seal those deals for your startup. And we at TechNext want to help with a list of tech events happening around you this week.

• An unofficial version of Brave browser brings native ARM64 support

  Privacy-focused Brave browser launched late last year after almost four years of being in the works. The browser is based on the Chromium open-source project and joins the likes of Microsoft Edge that is built on that platform. However, while Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s offering currently support ARM64 PCs natively in the stable channels, Brave does not. That might change, as Windows Insider MVP Jeremy Sinclair was able to compile an unofficial build of the open-source Brave browser that natively supports ARM64 PCs. The recompiled build (version 1.6.33) uses Microsoft’s ARM64 Chromium libraries and can run natively on those PCs like the Surface Pro X. Samsung Galaxy Book S. Native support results in improved performance and efficiency since the browser will not have to run in emulation.

• The Brave web browser is taking on Google Chrome: Is it safe?

  The creator of Brave, Brendan Eich, also created JavaScript and co-founded the Mozilla Project that led to the development of the Firefox browser. Brave is based on the open-source Chromium browser that’s also the basis for Google’s Chrome, Opera and most recently Microsoft’s Chromium Edge browser. Open-source means that anyone can take the source code and build whatever they’d like out of it, but it doesn’t mean that all the browsers are the same. In the case of Brave, they chose to focus on user privacy by blocking trackers, scripts and ads by default. The natural by-product of blocking all this activity that usually goes unnoticed by the average user is faster load times. Brave can also make use of the wide variety of extensions for Chromium-based browsers via the Chrome Web Store at chrome.google.com.

• This new tool could improve economic analysis of sub-national climate policies in the US

  Empowered by the Paris Agreement and a lack of national leadership on climate policy in the United States, state and local governments are leading on their own climate initiatives. California, New York and Colorado have set ambitious greenhouse gas emission and renewable energy targets for 2030. Just last week, Massachusetts introduced sweeping climate legislation targeting net zero emissions by 2050. As these environmental and energy policies move ahead, experts need to invest in economic data and tools that allow them to conduct robust economic analysis, to better inform policymakers, stakeholders and the public on how to design robust alternative climate and energy policies.

• 2020 Open Access Award Finalists Named

  The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatics.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.

• Are we having fund yet, npm? CTO calls for patience after devs complain promised donations platform has stalled

  At the end of August, JavaScript package registry NPM Inc said it intended "to finalize and launch an Open Source funding platform by the end of 2019." But instead of a platform, what's available at the moment might be better referred to as a feature of the npm command-line interface (CLI). The announcement was received with some skepticism at the time and the project hasn't managed to defy that expectation: There was a minor milestone last November with the addition of the "fund" command to npm v6.13.0. But not much has changed since then.

• RcppSimdJson 0.0.2: First Update!

  RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic simdjson library by Daniel Lemire which truly impressive. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in persing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. I highly recommend the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed. This release syncs the simdjson headers with upstream, and polishes the build a little by conditioning on actually having a C++17 compiler rather than just suggesting it. The NEWS entry follows.

• Nvidia Blames ‘Misunderstanding’ for Activision Faux Pas

  When Nvidia Corp. abruptly dropped Activision Blizzard Inc. games from its new GeForce Now service earlier this week, it left customers wondering what happened. Nvidia said on Tuesday that Activision had asked to have its titles removed from GeForce, but didn’t explain why. It turns out that the video-game giant wanted a commercial agreement with Nvidia before they proceeded -- and the situation stemmed from a simple misunderstanding, Nvidia said on Thursday.