News

Mozilla Lays off 25% of its Staff

It’s sad to hear that Mozilla, creators of Firefox, my favorite web browser, is significantly reducing its workforce. Especially now, that Google renewed its search engine deal with Mozilla for another three years. The cut mainly hits the Servo, MDN, and security teams.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/

Paragon Releases NTFS Driver Under GPL

Paragon Software GmbH releases it’s NTFS Read-Write driver for the Linux kernel under GPL.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2911ac5cd20b46e397be506268718d74@paragon-software.com/

Red Hat Introduces Flatpak Runtime for Desktop Containers

I always prefer using and building native packages over packaging formats like Snap, Flatpak, or AppImage, but it’s good to know that with the release of Enterprise Linux 8.2, they introduced a Flatpak runtime and SDK.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/08/12/introducing-the-red-hat-flatpak-runtime-for-desktop-containers/

Happy 27th birthday, Debian!

https://bits.debian.org/2020/08/debian-turns-27.html

Happy 25th birthday, CPAN!

http://blogs.perl.org/users/neilb/2014/07/cpan-day---14th-august.html

Articles

TCP Window Scaling, Timestamps, and SACK

In this article, the author takes an in-depth look at TCP extensions and debunking the myths that you should disable them for performance and security reasons.

https://fedoramagazine.org/tcp-window-scaling-timestamps-and-sack/

Photos from Bell Labs Datacenter in the 1960s

Photos from a different time. Sample caption of one of the images:

Computer Operations Supervisor. This was a large IBM mainframe computer around 1967 when this picture was taken. One meg of memory, 648 meg of hard drives, no video and it cost in the millions!

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/inside-bell-labs-datacenter-1960s/

Releases

Emacs 27.1

Personally, vi/Vim is the editor of my choice, but for years I plan to use the other text editor out there for some day-to-day work too. Maybe this point-release is the right opportunity to start doing so.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/news/NEWS.27.1

QEMU 5.1.0

Version 5.0 of the popular processor emulator was released at the end of April this year. This week version 5.1 was made available with a lot of improvements for ARM, RISC-V und Power, and x86. Also new is Zstd compression for QCOW2, as well as various crypto improvements.

https://www.qemu.org/2020/08/11/qemu-5-1-0/ https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/5.1

Projects

CRIU

CRIU is the project that provides checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux, as it is used in Podman and Docker.

https://criu.org/Main_Page

httpstat

httpstat visualizes URL call statistics.

https://github.com/reorx/httpstat

:wq