A couple of months ago, we wrote about GL.iNet Mudi portable WiFi router with built-in 4G LTE connectivity and supporting features such as the Tor Project...

Rockchip RK3399 based Orange Pi 4 & 4B boards launched last year with a PCIe connector.

Last year at about this time, I wrote a year in review blog post. Since I only worked on Socorro at the time, it was all about Socorro. In 2019, that changed, so this blog post covers the efforts of two people across a bunch of projects.

2019 was pretty crazy. We accomplished a lot, but picking up a bunch of new projects really threw a wrench in the wheel of ongoing work.

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I redid how Socorro handles queueing crash reports for processing. Previously, it used RabbitMQ. I switched it to Google Pub/Sub. In doing this, I removed one of the components between the collector and the processor which was sometimes flakey, so that was good. This was the first step in moving all of Socorro to Google Cloud Platform.

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During the Buildhub and Buildhub2 audits, I decided that while Buildhub2 has a different set of issues with its data, it was better than maintaining two indexes. I wrote up a plan to shut down Buildhub, identified and fixed blocking issues in Buildhub2, and migrated projects from Buildhub to Buildhub2.

Then we shut down and dismantled Buildhub.

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Mozilla Location Services had been dormant for years. It was running Python 2.6 on Scientific Linux. It had a deploy pipeline that was several generations old. It was in an unmaintainable state.

We overhauled it, finished up the Docker-ization of the services, finished the mostly-done migration from Python 2.6 to Python 3, updated dependencies, reduced a bunch of complexity, wrote a lot of documentation, fixed a ton of issues, pushed out a new deploy pipeline and Docker-based infrastructure, and did a series of stop-gap fixes for processing.

For more than a year, we at Mozilla have been working to build a browser that was made to showcase the best of what you love about browsing, but tailor made for Virtual Reality.

Now we are teaming up with Pico Interactive to bring Firefox Reality to its latest VR headset, the Neo 2 – an all-in-one (AIO) device with 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) head and controller tracking that delivers key VR solutions to businesses. Pico’s Neo 2 line includes two headsets: the Neo 2 Standard and the Neo 2 Eye featuring eye tracking and foveated rendering. Firefox Reality will also be released and shipped with previous Pico headset models.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, cyrus-imapd, drupal7-l10n_update, drupal7-webform, htmldoc, nethack, php, and singularity), Mageia (advancecomp, apache-commons-compress-, cyrus-imapd, cyrus-sasl, dia, freeimage, freeradius, igraph, jhead, jss, libdwarf, libextractor, libxml2, mediawiki, memcached, mozjs60, openconnect, openssl, putty, python-ecdsa, python-werkzeug, shadowsocks-libev, and upx), Oracle (container-tools:1.0 and container-tools:ol8), and Red Hat (kpatch-patch).

In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries.

The motivation behind the reproducible builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.

Open source software is often considered safer and more secure than proprietary software because users can, if they want, compile the software from the source code. They know the source of the code running in their environment.  Every component that they are running in their environment can be audited and the developer held accountable.  

In 2016, I discovered this concept of digital nomadism, the idea that for knowledge workers who only need a laptop and an internet connection, you don’t really need to work in an office anymore. You can simply work remotely for companies that will allow it, or as a freelancer for clients who don’t really care where you are so long as the job is done. Many people were already doing it, and even though it had started off as a very difficult lifestyle, in the tracks of the 4-hour work week and other inspiring lifehackers, it had become easier and easier over the years with coworking spaces, AirBnB and even coliving spaces (coworking spaces combined with accomodations, NDLR). The only thing you needed was a knowledge job that could sustain your travels, making it possible for you to pay for temporary accomodation and flights. Some were doing it with dropshipping, others with ad-monetized niche websites, but one of the holy grails gigs seemed to be software development. How fortunate for me!

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But at this point in my life, experience had already taught me that I shouldn’t jump into this sort of transition without a little bit of cautious preparation and experimentation.

First things first, let’s expose the fears, since none of them is irrelevant, none of them should be kept under the rugs. All our fears exist to tell us something, and ignoring them is never the answer.

The one fear I had heard of the most throughout forums and Slack groups about nomadism, and that I could relate to, was loneliness. When you move regularly and on your own, it can be really hard to create connections with other human beings, whether they live in the places where you live for a while, or they are other travellers like you. Bonding takes time, especially for an introvert with trust issues like myself, so I could see myself suffering from that. Thankfully, since it is such a widespread concern, some services had already started to appear to address that. Coliving spaces were a first answer, as they let travellers share accommodations with other travellers, or locals for that matter, creating a de facto sense of community, even for just a few weeks. On the other hand, except if you made a really good friend in that amount of time, you also had to start over almost from scratch in every space. Another answer that looked way more promising to me was travel groups. In addition to helping you with other issues we will talk about later, they also formed those groups of travellers who could follow each other from places to places, and also curated those communities around common sets of values and lifestyles.

But then there was another fear, the extreme opposite one in fact. If it’s not a good idea to hide your fears under the rug, it’s also rarely a good one to forget who you are or try to disguise as someone else to fit into a new lifestyle. I had done that before, but no more. And for better or worse I am an introvert. I am not shy, but energy tends to flow outwards from myself to other people, which means I need some me time every once in a while to recharge. And I wanted to honor and respect that. Which meant I can support more lonely time than extroverts, but I also need to be able to take a step back from time to time. And some of those travel groups I just mentioned looked like a giant frat party, attracting a lot of twenty-something party-goers with their bad habits of peer-pressuring anyone who doesn’t follow along.

We would like to thank those of you who have participated in the Ubuntu Studio Telegram Groups over the past year. While it has been productive, we decided that it would be best to sunset our Telegram bridge to our IRC channels, thereby dropping Telegram from our official support and community channels.

If you are considering starting an online business using the WordPress website then it is important for you to read our article on the Best WordPress Invoice Plugins in 2019. If what you want to do is sell digital/downloadable content without necessarily creating a website from scratch then read on.

Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems.

Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. We detailed the initial allegations in a previous article; Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

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Jailbreaking of smartphones and tablets such as iPhones and iPads is allowed in the US due to a DMCA exemption granted by the US Copyright Office (a division of the Library of Congress).

The Copyright Office says the DMCA exemption for jailbreaking phones and tablets is intended "to allow the device to interoperate with or to remove software applications." There's also a DMCA exemption for security research on all types of devices. But to qualify for the security exemption, it must be "good-faith security research" that is "carried out in an environment designed to avoid any harm to individuals or the public."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes DMCA exemptions in general as "too narrow and too complex for most technology users."