News/2

• Brave Web Browser 1.20.108 Is Released With Fix For Major Security Flaw In Private Tor Windows
  
  
  Several recent version of the Brave Web Browser have had a very unfortunate DNS-leak flaw in the "private" Tor-based browsing feature. The latest version 1.20.208 has a new version of the Chromium core it is based on (88.0.4324.182), a fix for DNS leaks in supposedly "private" web browser windows and two fixes specific to macOS. You should upgrade if you rely on Brave for "private" web browsing or use it to access Tor onion sites.
  
• Genius Mathematics Tool 1.0.26 Is Released
  
  
  Genius is a fully featured calculator somewhat similar to programs like Matlab and Octave. It is written by math professor Jiří Lebl with mathematicians in mind. The latest version supports evaluations in the range boxes in the plotting window and it has numerous minor fixes under the hood.
  
• The Linux Foundation and IBM Announce Seven New Open Source Surveillance Projects to "Promote Racial Justice"
  
  
  A digital content surveillance system designed to flag news articles, headlines, blogs and programming code with by-them forbidden language and a mobile application for recording "potentially racially charged incidents to help enable transparency" are the first two of seven new software projects hosted by the Linux Foundation in collaboration with IBM, RedHat and American Airlines.
  
• Mesa 21.0.0-rc5 Is Released
  
  
  The Mesa 21 release-cycle got derailed after a strong rc4 on February 5th. It is now back on track with what will likely be the last release-candidate before the final Mesa 21.0 release. Mesa 21 will offer a ton of new features to AMD graphics card users, many performance improvements for Intel iGPUs and there's also early pieces of code for ray-tracing on Intels upcoming Xe HPG gaming GPUs.
  
• NVidia Cripples Proprietary Graphics Driver In Order To Sell Specialized Crypto-Mining Cards
  
  
  The American technology giant Nvidia has announced that their closed-source graphics driver now features a intentional digital restrictions management (DRM) bug that cripples performance on certain specific workloads such as mining digital Ethereum (ETH) currency. Nvidia story, which does not hold water, is that they are doing this to ensure retail-availability of their RTX 3060 graphics card.
  
• Cine-encoder 3.1 Is Released
  
  
  cine-encoder is a handy tool for quickly converting between video formats. It support for preserving HDR meta-data and hardware encoding on Nvidia, and only Nvidia, graphics cards. The latest version has a "improved" design, bug-fixes and support for drag and drop.
  
• Linux 5.11 Supports Syscall User Dispatch Which Could Allow More Windows Games With DRM To Run Under Wine In The Future
  
  
  Many Windows games use direct system calls in their implementation of DRM and anti-cheat features. This is a problem because Windows API re-implementations like Wine do not get to see these syscalls and the Linux kernel has no idea what to do with them. The newly released Linux 5.11 kernel has a solution.
  
• Linux Has Landed On Mars
  
  
  NASA has landed a new rover called Perseverance on Mars. It has it's own miniature helicopter named Ingenuity that can take off, navigate, and land on Mars without human intervention. Ingenuity runs a custom Linux-based operating system, Linux has now reached Mars.
  
• Krita Announces Four Seasons of Leon and Kiki Drawing Contest
  
  
  The free software drawing program project Krita has announced a drawing contest. If you are good at drawing then you can draw a picture with Kiki and Leon and win a drawing tablet from Huion, who is sponsoring the contest. Huion does not offer any official GNU/Linux support for their tablets.
  
• Firefox 85 Is Released With Dismal Out-Of-The-Box Performance
  
  
  Firefox 85 partitions network connections and caches in order to further prevent cross-site tracking and "supercookies", it has fixes for 5 "high" and 6 "medium" impact security issues and support for Adobe Flash is dropped. Graphical performance is absolutely horrible out of the box, but it can be tweaked to perform decently using the hidden about:support settings page.
  
• Patently Obvious: The Year The Lawyers Came To FOSS
  
  
  The GNOME foundation was sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging on August 28th, 2019. The lawsuit alleged that the GNOME Shotwell photo manager was infringing on Rothschild patents. The GNOME foundation eventually settled with the Rothschilds in March 2020. Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME foundation, went through the entire process in a 25 minute presentation at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference this weekend.
  
• FreeBSD Fridays: Introduction to RISC-V on FreeBSD
  
  
  Video: Join Mitchell Horne as he discusses the past, present, and future of FreeBSD’s support for the RISC-V CPU architecture. x86-64 is the most well-supported platform FreeBSD runs on. RISC-V support is not yet complete in all areas, but it is rapidly getting here.
  
• AMD Launches 3 High-End RX 6000-Series GPUs For 4k Gaming
  
  
  AMD has announced 3 high-end graphics cards based on the RDNA2 architecture. Their new mid-range RX 6800 card, comparable to a Nvidia 2080ti, will cost $579 when it becomes available on November 18th. AMDs new RX 6900 XT flagship GPU will cost a whopping $999 when it launches on December 8th.
  
• Prepare To Re-Format If You Are Using An Older XFS Filesystem
  
  
  Linux 5.10 brings several new features to the XFS filesystem. It solves the year 2038 problem, it supports metadata checksumming and it has better metadata verification. There's also a new configuration option: CONFIG_XFS_SUPPORT_V4. Older XFS filesystems using the v4 layout are now deprecated and there is no upgrade path beyond "backup and re-format". The Linux kernel will support older XFS v4 filesystems by default until 2025 and optional support will remain available until 2030.
  
• Linux Is Dropping WiMAX Support
  
  
  It's no loss. There is a reason why you have probably never seen a WiMAX device or heard of it, WiMAX was a wireless last-mile Internet solution mostly used in a few rural areas in a limited number of countries between 2005 and 2010. There is very little use for it today so it is almost natural that Linux is phasing out support for WiMAX and the one WiMAX device it supports.
  
• Fedora 33 Is Released
  
  
  Fedora 33 comes with GNOME 3.38, LLVM 11, Python 3.9, Mesa 20.2 and Linux 5.8. The default file system is btrfs on the workstation edition and the desktop spins while the server editions uses XFS. Spins with GNOME (the default workstation edition), KDE Plasma, LXQt, Cinnamon and Xfce are available.
  
• AMD Announces Record High Q3 2020 Profits And $35 Billion Deal To Buy Xilinx
  
  
  AMD announced their Q3 2020 quarterly results early due to an all-stock acquisition of the American semiconductor company Xilinx for $35 billion. AMD pulled in $2.8 billion in revenue in Q3 2020, up 58% compared to Q3 2019. Their quarterly earnings were even more impressive. Q3 2020 was AMD's best quarter in history in terms of both revenue and earnings.
  
• Corbett Report: YouTube Is Purging Again
  
  
  YouTube has been removing small independent content creators from its platform with regular purges since 2016. YouTube did another big purge this week. Independent content creators who are only on YouTube should take notice and get a presence on alternative platforms. Investigate journalist James Corbett of the Corbett Report is prepared to get purged from YouTube. His videos are available on his own self-hosted website and a number of other video platforms. Most independent creators are not even though YouTube has been suppressing and removing independent creators in favor of large corporate media outlets for nearly half a decade.
  
• Node.js 15.0 Is Released
  
  
  Support for the QUIC protocol, a new AbortController class, a updated N-API with new methods for managing ArrayBuffers, V8 updated to version 8.6 and NPM updated to version 7.0 are among the highlights in the latest Node.js framework for creating JavaScript-based network services like web servers, chat servers and all kinds of real-time applications.
  
• Recording Industry Association of America Gets Youtube-dl Kicked Off GitHub
  
  
  Microsoft GitHub has removed all traces of the very useful youtube-dl utility for downloading videos from YouTube and other websites, including this one, following a questionable DMCA request from the Recording Industry Association of America.
  
• Wine 5.20 Released With 36 Bug-Fixes
  
  
  The latest development release of the Wine Is Not An Emulator Windows API re-implementation has game specifix fixes for Alice Madness Return, Backpacker 3: Americana, Capella no yakusoku, Metro Exodus, Red Evil and Stellaris. There's also several general fixes that make a long list of games run better in Wine 5.20. Audio mixing and audio handling in general should be better with this release.
  
• Sensor Fusion Hub Driver For AMD Laptops With Gyroscopes Is Coming To Linux 5.11
  
  
  It's been a long and hard road to acceptance for AMD's Sensor Fusion Hub Linux driver. The first revision was submitted to the Linux kernel Mailing List in January 2020. It took eight revisions and a lot of effort before Jiří Kosina finally accepted it into the hid.git#for-5.11 tree, almost guaranteeing that it will become a part of Linux 5.11.
  
• Linux Support for Variable Refresh Rates On Gen12+ Intel GPUs Is On The Way
  
  
  Intel developer Manasi Navare has submitted a series of patches for the Linux kernel that brings support for variable refresh rates on Intel's latest graphics chips to the Linux kernels i915 driver. The feature is only enabled on Tiger Lake, Sapphire Rapids and newer Intel graphics chips.
  
• Richard Brown: MicroOS Desktop, The Road to Daily Driving
  
  
  openSUSE Chairman and MicroOS Release Engineer Richard Brown presented OpenSUSE's minimal MicroOS Linux distribution as a potential desktop operating system at the openSUSE+LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 last week in a half an hour long presentation. MicroOS is a minimal Linux distribution primarily made for cloud services, IoT devices, containers and those types of use-cases. It could potentially also be used as a light desktop system similar to ChromeOS and an alpha version of MicroOS for Desktop is available. There are some problems to be solved on the road to a stable release as Richard Brown explains.
  
• US Department Of Justice Lawsuit Against Google Could Kill Firefox
  
  
  A US Department of Justice lawsuit against Google on the grounds that they are a "monopolist" could result in the death of the one realistic free software web browser alternative that's not based on the Google-controlled Chromium code-base and its Blink rendering engine. Mozilla will need to find some other partner willing to pay them $400 million a year if they are forced to cancel their sweet "royalty" contract with Google.
  
• Modern Web Standards Are Leaving Niche Web Browsers Behind
  
  
  There's plenty of web browsers to choose from on desktop computers but there's not much of a choice if you look beneath the surface. There's a ton of web browsers based on Google's Chromium code-base, a few mostly iOS and macOS browsers based on Apple's Webkit engine and then there's Firefox with it's own Quantum rendering engine. There also Pale Moon with it's own Goanna rendering engine. It is increasingly falling behind the bigger browsers and more and more websites are broken in it as web developers deploy web standards other browsers, but not Pale Moon, support.
  
• The Closed-Source NVIDIA Linux Driver Is Incompatible With Linux 5.9 And Support Won't Come Until Mid-November
  
  
  The latest Nvidia graphics driver for Linux, v455.28, won't work with the latest Linux kernel. This may be due to an intentional change on the Linux kernel side that blocks third party shims from using GPL-only symbols. Regardless of the root cause, anyone using Nvidia on Linux should stick with Linux 5.8 for now. Nvidia has promised that an updated driver compatible with Linux 5.9 will arrive mid-November.
  
• When "progress" is backwards
  
  
  Lately I see many developments in the linux FOSS world that sell themselves as progress, but are actually hugely annoying and counter-productive. Counter-productive to a point where they actually cause major regressions, costs, and as in the case of GTK+3 ruin user experience and the possibility that we'll ever enjoy "The year of the Linux desktop".
  
• Microsoft Edge For Linux Is Here
  
  
  Microsoft kept good on their promise to release a Linux version of their Edge web browser product in October 2020. It's here with packages available for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE. The browser itself is not very unique or special, it's mostly just Chromium wrapped in a Microsoft-skin. There are some Microsoft-specific features tied to Microsoft's web services, and that's about it. Performance is about the same as what you get with other Chromium-based web browsers.
  
• Firefox 82 Is Released With Four High-Impact Security Fixes
  
  
  Mozilla Firefox 82 is faster on websites using flex CSS layout, there's a new picture-in-picture button that you may or may not find annoying enough to disable and there's four high-impact and two medium-impact security fixes. There's no performance improvement in synthetic benchmarks.
  

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