Google blocking Microsoft Edge from accessing its services is something that happened on several occasions in the last few years, but now it turns out that the search giant has turned the attention to a series of less high-profile Linux browsers as well. Users are reporting on reddit that a number of Linux browsers can no longer be used to log in to Google services, such as Gmail and Google Docs, with the error page indicating that the apps may no longer be supported.
[Source: Softpedia]
Open source software is free, or, more accurately, Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) is free of charge. In the real world, open source software projects when applied and deployed in commercial (sometimes mission-critical) use cases will often be supplied as the ‘licensed’ version of the original software innovation, which comes at a cost. Although many commercial use cases do deploy open source licensed software at zero cost, in these cases, it is not uncommon for commercial support contracts to be taken out. An Israel-based start-up is hoping to change the way some projects are run by offering a kind of changeable licensing switch system for open developers to use.
[Source: Forbes]
Google announced today two updates for Messages, the default SMS app in the Android mobile operating system. Starting today, Android users in the US and selected countries will get access to two new features named Verified SMS and Spam Protection. As the name of the first feature hints, Verified SMS works by confirming the identity of the SMS sender.
The second Messages app feature announced today is named Spam Protection. This feature works by showing a notification bar at the top of the Messages app when the app believes a newly-received message contains the markers of a classic SMS spam text.
[Source: ZDNet]
In May this year, users of popular open source project FUSE for macOS noticed the source code for the latest update was missing. The project had become closed source and was no longer free for commercial use. But as The Reg discovered when we had a talk with its maintainer, there was a very good reason for that – and it’s not a good look for the many companies that used it.
FUSE stands for File System in Userspace and lets developers create a custom filesystem without writing code for the kernel. FUSE has a long history. It was created for Linux and ported to other Unix-like operating systems including FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. In 2007, Google released a port for Mac OS X as open source. In 2011 this was forked to become osxfuse, later renamed FUSE for macOS.
[Source: The Register]
In Linux, the uniq command can help find out the individual users who are logged into a given server, but it’s not a straightforward process. mYes, using the command on its own yields a list of who’s logged in, but it can list individual users more than once depending on what they’re doing.
There are ways to get around this by sorting the results of uniq so they deliver only once the names of all the users. This 2-Minute Linux Tip video by Network World’s Unix as a Second Language blogger Sandra Henry Stocker shows how to do just that.
[Source: ITWorld]
The Eclipse Foundation today announced the formation of the Edge Native Working Group, which will drive the adoption of open source software for edge computing. Founding members include Adlink, Bosch, Edgeworx, Eurotech, Kynetics, Huawei, Intel, and Siemens. The working group plans to focus on creating an end-to-end software stack that will support deployments of today’s most transformative technologies, including the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles.
[Source: VentureBeat]
Open source web framework Electron is now part of the OpenJS Foundation‘s incubation program. The Foundation announced the development at Node+JS Interactive in Montreal on Wednesday.
Electron, the open source framework created for building desktop apps using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, is based on Node.js and Chromium. Additionally, it is widely used on many applications including Discord, Microsoft Teams, OpenFin, Skype, Slack, Trello, Visual Studio Code, and many more.
[Source: TFiR]
Twitter has a new madcap scheme to try and deal with its growing population of propagandists, bots and common-or-garden jerks. The company is set to fund researchers looking to decentralise social media standards for a shared open-source alternative. The team name: Bluesky, which sounds a bit like a perpetual runner-up on The Apprentice to us.
“Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media,” wrote CEO Jack Dorsey on Twitter. “The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”
[Source: The Inquirer]
On December 9, WireGuard announced that its secure VPN tunnel kernel code will soon be included in Linux net-next tree. This indicates, “WireGuard will finally reach the mainline kernel with the Linux 5.6 cycle kicking off in late January or early February!”, reports Phoronix. WireGuard is a layer 3 secure networking tunnel made specifically for the kernel, that aims to be much simpler and easier to audit than IPsec.
On December 8, Jason Donenfeld, WireGuard’s lead developer sent out patches for the net-next v2 WireGuard. “David Miller has already pulled in WireGuard as the first new feature in net-next that is destined for Linux 5.6 now that the 5.5 merge window is over,” the email thread mentions.
[Source: Packt Hub]
Nvidia released a new version of its long-lived proprietary graphics drivers for Linux, BSD, and Solaris-based operating systems that fixes various bugs from previous releases and adds support for a new GPU. Coming just three weeks after the Nvidia 440.36 driver, which introduced support for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER graphics card, the Nvidia 440.44 graphics driver is here to add support for the Nvidia Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design graphics card on Linux, BSD, and Solaris systems, as well as support for the __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE environment variable for Vulkan apps on GNU/Linux systems.
[Source: Softpedia]
