R.I.P. mrdocs (1963–2019)

The Scribus Team is deeply saddened to announce the loss of our friend and colleague Peter Linnell who in the end lost his long battle against cancer. It is no understatement to say that without Peter Scribus wouldn’t be what it is today. It was Peter who spotted the potential of Franz Schmid’s initially humble Python program and, as a pre-press consultant at the time, contacted Franz to make him aware of the necessities of PostScript and PDF support, among other things. Peter also wrote the first version of the Scribus online documentation, which resulted in his nickname “mrdocs” in IRC and elsewhere. Until recently, and despite his detoriating health, Peter continued to be involved in building and releasing new Scribus versions.

New features in OpenStack Neutron

OpenStack is the open source cloud infrastructure software project that provides compute, storage, and networking services for bare-metal, container, and VM workloads. To get a sense of the core functionality and additional services, check out the OpenStack map. The platform has a modular architecture that works across industry segments because infrastructure operators can choose the components they need to manage their infrastructure in the way that best supports their application workloads. The modules are also pluggable to provide further flexibility and make sure they can be used with a specific storage backend or software-defined networking (SDN) controller. Neutron is an OpenStack project to provide a de-facto standard REST API to manage and configure networking services and make them available to other components such as Nova.

today's leftovers

• Full Circle Weekly News #125

• Why Open19 Designs Matter for Edge Computing [Ed: Openwashing Microsoft without even any source code]

  On the opening day of this year's Data Center World in Phoenix, Yuval Bachar, LinkedIn's principal engineer of data center architecture, was on hand to explain why the social network's Open19 Project will be an important part of data centers' move to the edge.

• Course Review: Applied Hardware Attacks: Rapid Prototying & Hardware Implants

  Everyone learns in different ways. While Joe is happy to provide as much help as a student needs, his general approach probably caters most to those who learn by doing. Lecture is light and most of the learning happens during the lab segments. He gives enough space that you will make mistakes and fail, but not so badly that you never accomplish your objective. If you read the lab manual carefully, you will find adequate hints to get you in the right direction. On the other hand, if you’re a student that wants to site in a classroom and listen to an instructor lecture for the entire time, you are definitely in the wrong place. If you do not work on the labs, you will get very, very, little out of the course. The rapid prototyping course is a good introduction to using the 3D printer and pcb mill for hardware purposes, and would be valuable even for those building hardware instead of breaking it. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of these technologies. On the other hand, I suspect that the hardware implants course has limited application. It’s useful to learn what is possible, but unless you work in secure hardware design or offensive security that would use hardware implants, it’s probably not something directly applicable to your day to day.

• Nulloy – Music Player with Waveform Progress Bar

  I’ve written a lot about multimedia software including a wide range of music players, some built with web-technologies, others using popular widget toolkits like Qt and GTK. I want to look at another music player today. You may not have heard of this one, as development stalled for a few years. But it’s still under development, and it offers some interesting features. It’s called Nulloy. The software is written in the C++ programming language, with the user interface using the Qt widget toolkit. It’s first release was back in 2011.

• A Complete List of Google Drive Clients for Linux

Security Leftovers

• Russian [attackers] are targeting European governments ahead of May election, FireEye says

   

  FireEye said European government institutions were sent emails with links to websites that appeared to be authentic, luring a person into changing their password and thus sharing their credentials with hackers.

• How to create good SSH keys

  A couple years back we wrote a guide on how to create good OpenPGP/GnuPG keys and now it is time to write a guide on SSH keys for much of the same reasons: SSH key algorithms have evolved in past years and the keys generated by the default OpenSSH settings a few years ago are no longer considered state-of-the-art. This guide is intended both for those completely new to SSH and to those who have already been using it for years and who want to make sure they are following the latest best practices.

• Installing Gnuk on FST-01G running NeuG

• Offline Ed25519 OpenPGP key with subkeys on FST-01G running Gnuk

• Planning for a new OpenPGP key

• Simon Josefsson: OpenPGP 2019 Key Transition Statement

• PewDiePie Ransomware Locks Your Files Until 100M Subscribers Is Reached

  What started as a joke has taken an ugly turn now. PewDiePie fans have begun taking extreme methods to ensure that people “Subscribe to PewDiePie” and the YouTuber reaches 100 million subscribers as soon as possible. The latest one involves a ransomware strain which locks away users’ files indefinitely until PewDiePie gains 100 million subscribers.

• WireGuard Sent Out Again For Review, Might Make It Into Linux 5.2 Kernel

  WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.  WireGuard had aimed to be mainlined in the Linux kernel in 2018 but developers having objections to some elements of the new Zinc cryptography implementation had ultimately stalled that work. But now there's these "v9" patches that address previous objections and so with a bit of luck we might see Zinc and WireGuard merged for Linux 5.2.