All the News that Matters

• Gentoo: GLSA-201807-02: Passenger: Multiple Vulnerabilities
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in Passenger, the worst of which could result in the execution of arbitrary code.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1438-1: opencv security update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: Early versions of opencv have problems while reading data, which might result in either buffer overflows, out-of bounds errors or integer

• ArchLinux: 201807-13: networkmanager-vpnc: privilege escalation
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: The package networkmanager-vpnc before version 1.2.6-1 is vulnerable to privilege escalation.

• ArchLinux: 201807-12: apache: denial of service
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: The package apache before version 2.4.34-1 is vulnerable to denial of service.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1437-1: slurm-llnl security update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: CVE-2018-7033 Fix for issue in accounting_storage/mysql plugin by always escaping strings within the slurmdbd.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1436-1: gosa security update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: Fabian Henneke discovered a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the password change form of GOsa, a web-based LDAP administration program.

• ArchLinux: 201807-11: znc: multiple issues
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: The package znc before version 1.7.1-1 is vulnerable to multiple issues including privilege escalation and directory traversal.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1435-1: dnsmasq regression update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: The dns-root-data update to 2017072601~deb8u2 broke dnsmasq's init script, making dnsmasq no longer start when dns-root-data was installed.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1434-1: linux-base update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: The linux-base package has been updated to support the package of Linux 4.9 that was recently added to Debian 8. This resolves a dependency that was not satisfiable by the jessie and jessie-security suites.

• Debian LTS: DLA-1433-1: openjpeg2 security update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: CVE-2015-1239 Fix for denial of service (process crash) via a crafted PDF.

• Fedora 28: libgit2 Security Update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: Update to 0.26.5 (CVE-2018-10887, CVE-2018-10888)

• Fedora 28: perl-Archive-Zip Security Update
  `bbLinuxSecurity.com`/bb: This release fixes a directory and symbolic link traversal vulnerability in Archive::Zip::Archive Perl module that allows an attacker to writite into an arbitrary file accesible by a local user.

• Google Data Transfer Project will help you move your data between services
  VIDEO: Google, together with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook, is introducing the open-source Data Transfer Project, which will enable consumers to transfer their data directly from one service to another.

• Monitor website contents modification with Python
  The beauty of python programming. It does everything for you and saves serious money for a company spends to monitor it’s competitor websites. There are many ways to Monitor website contents modification with Python, however, It was having some different issues like last-modified time are not always possible on some of the sites or download the whole page and compare it every time.

• GNOME 3.30 Desktop Environment to Enter Beta on August 1, GNOME 3.29.4 Is Out
  Now that GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2018 is over, most of the GNOME developers are back at their posts to continue the development of the upcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment.

• How To Install Plex Media Server on CentOS 7
  Plex is a streaming media server that brings all your video, music, and photo collections together and stream them to your devices at anytime and from anywhere.

• Debian-Based Neptune Linux 5.4 Operating System Debuts with New Dark Theme
  Neptune Linux developer Leszek Lesner announced the release Neptune 5.4, a monthly updated installation image of the Debian-based and KDE-oriented operating system that uses the latest software versions and technologies.

• Persepolis Download Manager: Impressive Python frontend for aria2
  Persepolis Download Manager is a handy open source download manager written in Python and PyQt. It’s a graphical frontend for aria2 aiming to make downloads both easier and faster.

• Lubuntu 18.10 May Support 32-Bit PCs If There's Demand, Here's How You Can Help
  It was brought to our attention that the upcoming Lubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system series may continue to support 32-bit installations if there's demand from users.

• Microsoft Visual Studio Code replumbed for better Python taming
  Python Language Server an option for those that codeMicrosoft's Visual Studio Code, the company's Electron-based source code editor for Linux, macOS and Windows, has been bestowed with the company's Python Language Server, making it more fluent in the popular programming language.…

• Using Linux Containers to Manage Embedded Build Environments
  Linux container technology has been proposed by companies like Resin.io as a simpler and more secure way to deploy embedded devices. And, Daynix Computing has developed an open source framework called Rebuild that uses Linux containers in the build management process of embedded IoT development.

• KDE Applications 18.08 Software Suite Enters Beta, Adds Apple Wallet Pass Reader
  With KDE Applications 18.04 reached end of life with the third and last point release, the KDE Project started working earlier this month on the next release of their open-source software suite, KDE Applications 18.08.

• What's New in Apache Subversion 1.10.2
  The first Subversion was released in 2000 and by then many improvements have been implemented till then.  This release of subversion 1.10.2 is the superset of previous releases and major enhancements have been incorporated in this release.

• NetBSD 8.0 Released with Spectre V2/V4, Meltdown, and Lazy FPU Mitigations
  The NetBSD open-source operating system has been updated this week to version 8.0, a major release that finally brings mitigations for all the Spectre variants, Meltdown, and Lazy FPU security vulnerabilities, as well as many stability improvements and bug fixes.

• Python's founder steps down, India's new net neutrality regulations, and more open source news
  In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look Python's founder stepping down, India's new net neutrality regulations, O'Reilly's thoughts about tech giants, and more.Python loses its leader The head of one of the most popular free software/open source software projects is stepping down. Guido van Rossum announced that he's giving up leadership of the project he founded, effective immediately.read more

• Streamlining build environment management with Linux containers
  At the Open Source Summit, Daynix Computing’s Yan Vugenfirer demonstrated his company’s open source “Rebuild” framework, which uses Docker containers to help streamline the management of build environments. Linux container technology has been proposed by companies like Resin.io as a simpler and more secure way to deploy embedded devices. And, Daynix Computing has developed an […]

• Chromebook Users Will Soon Be Able to Install Debian Packages via the Files App
  Google continues to work on the Linux app support implementation for its Linux-based Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks by adding initial support for installing Debian packages via the Files app.

• Vivaldi's New Qwant Privacy-Focused Search Engine, Microsoft Makes PowerShell Core a Snap, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 Now Available, Apache Software Foundation's Annual Report and More
  News briefs for June 20, 2018.

• Atomic Modeling with GAMGI
  For this article, I'm moving back into the realm of chemistrysoftware—specifically, the General Atomistic ModellingGraphic Interface, or GAMGI. GAMGIprovides a very complete set of tools that allows youto design and visualize fairly complex molecules.

• Cinnamon 4.0 Desktop Environment Promises to Be Fast and Have No Screen Tearing
  Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre announced today some of the work that he and his team are doing to improve the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 3.0 operating system and Cinnamon 4.0 desktop environment.

• 32-Bit Vs. 64-Bit Operating System
  This has really been confusing to some people choosing between 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Head over to any operating system’s website, you will be given a choice to download either versions of the same operating system. So what is the difference? Why do we have two different versions of the same OS? Let us solve this mystery here, once and for all.

• Google Embraces New Kubernetes Application Standard
  Google is brining commercial Kubernetes applications to its cloud marketplace, but it isn't using Helm charts.

• Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Administration Join Forces To Overhaul the Endangered Species Act
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Endangered Species Act, which for 45 years has safeguarded fragile wildlife while blocking ranching, logging and oil drilling on protected habitats, is coming under attack from lawmakers, the White House and industry on a scale not seen in decades, driven partly by fears that the Republicans will lose ground in November's midterm elections. In the past two weeks, more than two dozen pieces of legislation, policy initiatives and amendments designed to weaken the law have been either introduced or voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration. The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives. [...] The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation -- the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement -- a centerpiece of his administration.
          
  
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• IoT Security Flaw Leaves 496 Million Devices Vulnerable At Businesses, Report Says
  Nearly a half-billion Internet of Things devices are vulnerable to cyberattacks at businesses worldwide because of a 10-year-old security flaw, according to a new report from a security software vendor. From a report: The report was published Friday by Armis, a provider of Internet of Things security software for enterprises that focuses on detecting threats in IoT devices at workplaces. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has previously made security disclosures, including the BlueBorne malware attack that impacted 5 billion IoT devices.
          
  
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• China's JD.com Plans Move Into Europe
  Chinese e-commerce company JD.com plans to expand in Europe and aims to have finalized its strategy for entering the market by the end of the year, its chief executive told a German newspaper. Reuters: China's second largest e-commerce business also wants to open an office in Germany by the end of 2018, the Handelsblatt daily cited Richard Liu as saying. "For me it's no longer just about selling products from Germany in China. I would also like to sell products in Europe," Liu told the paper. "We have just got to clarify the details." Further reading: JD.com is expanding its consumer base with drone delivery and local recruits who can exploit villages' tight-knit social networks to drum up business.
          
  
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• The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime's Free, Fast Shipping
  Amazon's Prime Day shopping spree offers free, fast shipping -- but experts say there's a hidden environmental cost that doesn't show up on the checkout page. From a report: Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills. Free and fast shipping has always been a Prime membership's marquee perk -- one that's drawn in over 100 million subscribers who pay $119 annually. A 2017 study by UPS found that nearly all (96%) US customers had made a purchase on a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, and over half (55%) said free or discounted shipping was the primary reason. [...] That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items. "There are more sales in lower-price products online than there have been in stores," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor at the NPD Group, told BuzzFeed News. And all of those transactions are negatively impacting our planet, according to Miguel Jaller, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis: "People are consuming more. There's more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options."
          
  
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• Google Tests Curvy Chrome Tabs With Material Design Overhaul
  Google is trying out a new Chrome interface that for the first time in a decade presents a very different look for the tabs and address bar at the top of the widely used web browser, CNET reports. It adds: Since its public debut in 2008, Chrome has featured a trapezoidal tab for each website you have open. But tabs now look very different on Chrome Canary -- a very rough-around-the-edges version used to test changes before they reach a broader audience. The active tab has a slope-shouldered look with curved corners. The grayed-out inactive tabs merge with the the browser itself and are separated only by thin vertical lines. In addition, the address bar's text box is a gray oval against a white backdrop, instead of a round-cornered white rectangle with a hairline border.
          
  
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• Comic Book Publishers, Faced With Flagging Sales, Look To Streaming
  Comic book publishers are facing a growing crisis: Flagging interest from readers and competition from digital entertainment are dragging down sales. Hoping to reverse the trend, publishers are creating their own digital platforms to directly connect with readers and encourage more engagement from fans. From a report: One of the biggest direct-to-consumer efforts is DC Universe, a platform from DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Digital Studios that will offer streaming content, including original and classic TV series. DC Universe is "a huge opportunity" that offers "ultimate creative control," said Jim Lee, a co-publisher of DC Entertainment. "It allows you to look at wider adaptations of the source material." [...] The Walt Disney Company, which owns Marvel Entertainment, said last year that it would create a streaming platform that would include Marvel movies like "The Avengers" and "Guardians of the Galaxy." Smaller comic book publishers are testing their own direct-to-consumer platforms. Image Comics, the publisher of popular titles like The Walking Dead and Saga, started a direct-to-consumer platform in 2015 to sell comic book subscriptions and apparel.
          
  
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• Open Gov't Advocates Fear that Private Messaging Apps Are Being Misused by Public Officials To Conduct Business in Secret
  The proliferation of digital tools that make text and email messages vanish may be welcome to Americans seeking to guard their privacy. But open government advocates fear they are being misused by public officials to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws. From a report: Whether communications on those platforms should be part of the public record is a growing but unsettled debate in states across the country. Updates to transparency laws lag behind rapid technological advances, and the public and private personas of state officials overlap on private smartphones and social media accounts. "Those kind of technologies literally undermine, through the technology itself, state open government laws and policies," said Daniel Bevarly, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition. "And they come on top of the misuse of other technologies, like people using their own private email and cellphones to conduct business." Some government officials have argued that public employees should be free to communicate on private, non-governmental cellphones and social media platforms without triggering open records requirements.
          
  
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• Slashdot Asks: Do You Need To Properly Eject a USB Drive Before Yanking it Out?
  In a story earlier this week, Popular Science magazine explored an age-old topic: Do people need to safely eject a USB stick before they pull it from their computer? The magazine's take on it -- which is, as soon any ongoing transfer of files is complete, it is safe to yank out the flash drive -- has unsurprisingly stirred a debate. Here's what the magazine wrote: But do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way? Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin. That's not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or -- even more unlikely -- the entire storage device. To justify its rationale, the magazine has cited a number of computer science professors. In the same story, however, a director of product marketing at SanDisk made a case for why people should probably safely eject the device. He said, "Failure to safely eject the drive may potentially damage the data due to processes happening in the system background that are unseen to the user." John Gruber of DaringFireball (where we originally spotted the story), makes a case for why users should safely eject the device before pulling it out: This is terrible advice. It's akin to saying you probably don't need to wear a seat belt because it's unlikely anything bad will happen. Imagine a few dozen people saying they drive without a seat belt every day and nothing's ever gone wrong, so it must be OK. (The breakdown in this analogy is that with seat belts, you know instantly when you need to be wearing one. With USB drives, you might not discover for months or years that you've got a corrupt file that was only partially written to disk when you yanked the drive.) I see a bunch of "just pull out the drive and not worry about it" Mac users on Twitter celebrating this article, and I don't get it. On the Mac you have to do something on screen when you eject a drive. Either you properly eject it before unplugging the drive -- one click in the Finder sidebar -- or you need to dismiss the alert you'll get about having removed a drive that wasn't properly ejected. Why not take the course of action that guarantees data integrity? What are your thoughts on this? Do you think the answer varies across different file systems and operating systems?
          
  
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• Boston Dynamics Is Gearing Up To Produce Thousands of Robot Dogs
  Boston Dynamics, maker of uncannily agile robots, is poised to bring its first commercial product to market -- a small, dog-like robot called the SpotMini. From a report: The launch was announced in May, and founder Marc Raibert recently said that by July of next year, Boston Dynamics will be producing the SpotMini at the rate of around 1,000 units per year. The broader goal, as reported by Inverse, is to create a flexible platform for a variety of applications. According to Raibert, SpotMini is currently being tested for use in construction, delivery, security, and home assistance applications. The SpotMini moves with the same weirdly smooth confidence as previous experimental Boston Dynamics robots with names like Cheetah, BigDog, and Spot.
          
  
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• Facebook Confirms It's Working on a New Internet Satellite
  A host of companies believe the better way to connect the estimated half of Earth's population that's still offline is to launch "constellations" of smaller satellites into low Earth orbit, around 100 to 1,250 miles above our planet. According to emails from the Federal Communications Commission, which Wired obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, Facebook is officially one such company. From the report: The emails show that the social network wants to launch Athena, its very own internet satellite, in early 2019. The new device is designed to "efficiently provide broadband access to unserved and underserved areas throughout the world," according to an application the social network appears to have filed with the FCC under the name PointView Tech LLC. With the filing, Facebook joins Elon Musk's SpaceX and Softbank-backed OneWeb, two well-funded organizations working on similar projects. In fact, SpaceX launched the first two of what it hopes will be thousands of its Starlink satellites just this past February. The emails, which date back to July 2016, and subsequent confirmation from Facebook, confirm a story published in May by IEEE Spectrum, which used public records to speculate that Facebook had started a satellite internet project.
          
  
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• People Like Getting Thank You Notes, Research Finds
  From a report: O.K., it's not that surprising. But what did surprise two psychologist as they attempted to get to bottom of why so few people actually send thank yous is that many people totally "miscalibrate" the effect of an appreciative email. They underestimate the positive feelings it will bring. "They think it's not going to be that big a deal," said Amit Kumar, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies well-being. They also overestimate how insincere the note may appear and how uncomfortable it will make the recipient feel, their study found. But after receiving thank-you notes and filling out questionnaires about how it felt to get them, many said they were "ecstatic," scoring the happiness rating at 4 of 5. The senders typically guessed they'd evoke a 3. To be clear -- the notes in question were not your typical "thanks for the Amazon gift card." Rather, the 100 or so participants in each of the four experiments were asked to write a short "gratitude letter" to a person who had affected them in some way. Sample letters included missives of appreciation to fellow students and friends who offered guidance through the college admissions process, job searches and tough times. In lab experiments, Dr. Kumar observed that it took most subjects less than five minutes to write the letters. Further reading: Finding Emails With Certain Variation Of Thank You Vastly Improves Response Rate, Study Finds; and Apparently, People Say 'Thank You' To Self-Driving Pizza Delivery Vehicles.
          
  
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• Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past
  All roads may lead to Rome, but once you get there, good luck taking the subway. The sprawling metropolis is expanding its mass transit system -- a sluggish process made even slower as workers keep running into buried ancient ruins. From a report: "I found some gold rings. I found glasswork laminated in gold depicting a Roman god, some amphoras," says Gilberto Pagani, a bulldozer operator at the Amba Aradam metro stop, currently under construction not far from the Colosseum. Pagani is part of an archaeological team at the site, a certified archaeological construction worker trained to excavate, preserve and build in cities like Rome, with thousands of years of civilization buried beneath the surface. The presence of ancient artifacts underground is a daunting challenge for urban developers. For archaeologists, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. "I think it's the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me, professionally speaking," says Simona Morretta, the state archaeologist in charge of the Amba Aradam site. "Because you never get the chance in a regular excavation to dig so deep. That's how we've found architectural complexes as important as this."
          
  
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• Some Colleges Cautiously Embrace Wikipedia
  Megan Zahneis, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education: Academics have traditionally distrusted Wikipedia, citing the inaccuracies that arise from its communally edited design and lamenting students' tendency to sometimes plagiarize assignments from it. Now, LiAnna Davis, director of programs for Wikipedia's higher-education-focused nonprofit arm Wiki Education, said, higher education and Wikipedia don't seem like such strange bedfellows. At conferences these days, "everyone's like, 'Oh, Wikipedia, of course you guys are here.'" "I think it's a recognition that Wikipedia is embedded within the fabric of learning now," she said. One initiative Davis oversees at Wiki Education aims to forge stronger bonds between Wikipedia and higher education. The Visiting Scholars program, which began in 2015, pairs academics at colleges with experienced Wikipedia editors. Institutions provide the editors with access to academic journals, research databases, and digital collections, which the editors use to write and expand Wikipedia articles on topics of mutual interest. A dozen institutions, including Rutgers University, Brown University, and the University of Pittsburgh, are participating.
          
  
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• Bot Tweeted Names And Photos Of Venmo Users Who Bought Drugs
  Since Venmo's transactions are "public" by default and broadcast on Venmo's API, a Python programmer decided to publicize a few of them, reports the Mercury News: The creator of the bot named "Who's buying drugs on Venmo" under the Twitter handle @venmodrugs says he wanted users to consider their privacy settings before using Venmo. The bot finds Venmo transactions that include words such as heroin, marijuana, cocaine, meth, speed or emojis that denote drugs and tweets the transaction with the names of the sender and receiver and the sender's photo, if there is one... "I wanted to demonstrate how much data Venmo was making publicly available with their open API and their public by default settings and encourage people to consider their privacy settings," Joel Guerra, the creator of the bot, told Motherboard, a technology news outlet run by Vice.  He shut the bot after 24 hours, according to a Medium essay titled "Why I blasted your 'drug' deals on Twitter": I chose drugs, sex and alcohol keywords as the trigger for the bot because because they were funny and shocking. I removed the last names of users because I didn't want to actually contribute to the problem of lack of privacy... I braced myself for backlash but the response was overwhelmingly positive. People understood my point and I had sparked a lot of discussion about online privacy and the need for users to do a better job of understanding the terms of software they were using -- and a lot of discussion about how companies need to do a better job of informing customers how their data was being used...  After about 24 hours of tweeting everyone's drug laden Venmo transactions I shut down the bot (Python script!!) and deleted all the tweets. I had successfully made my point and gotten more attention than I had imagined possible. Thousands of people were reading tweets and articles about the bot and discussing data privacy. I saw no further value in tweeting out anyone's personal transactions anymore. However, all I ever did was format the data and automate a Twitter account -- the data is still readily available.  His closure of the bot drew some interesting reactions on Twitter.   "booooooooo. I was so entertained by this."   "I remember I had a dealer take my phone and set venmo to private lol."   "we're looking to add a Python developer to our team and I think you'd be a good fit."
          
  
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• Ask Slashdot: Should I Ditch PHP?
  Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino does PHP for a living, but says he's growing "increasingly frustrated with the ignorant and clueless in the vincinity of PHP."  Crappy code and baaaaad application setups is one thing, but people refusing to fix them or simply not even understanding the broader implications of bad applications or attempting SEO with gadgets while refusing to fix 3.5 MB-per-pagecall are just minor tidbits in a history of increasingly unnerving run-ins with knuckledragers in the "web agency" camp...  Will I leave the larger part of this backwards stuff behind if I move to another server-side programming language such as Java or Kotlin for professional work in the broader web area? Do I have a chance to do quality work on quality projects using PHP, or are those slim compare to other programming languages? In short, should I ditch PHP?   "I think .NET is a much cleaner language to work in with Microsoft's excellent Visual Studio IDE and debugger," argues Slashdot reader Agret , adding "there are many large projects in my city hiring .NET developers and being a strongly typed language the code quality is generally better than PHP."   But what's been your experience? And would a frustrated developer find more quality projects by ditching PHP?
          
  
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• Tata will stop selling the 'world's cheapest car'
  Tata's Nano was supposed to be a revolution in automotive design when it was unveiled in 2008 as the world's cheapest car -- in theory, it opened the door to vehicle ownership for people who'd otherwise have to spring for two-wheeled transport or nothing at all. Flash forward a decade, however, and the reality is very different. After winding down production, the Indian car maker has declared that the current Nano "cannot continue beyond 2019." The final manufacturing numbers helped explain the move. Tata made just one (yes, one) Nano in June versus 275 a year earlier, which itself was no great shakes in a market where virtually car segment has seen explosive growth.
  
  While the company didn't formally explain the exit, there were numerous problems that plagued the Nano from the start. It didn't roll off the line until 2009, and there were both quality and safety issues (particularly a tendency to catch fire) that damaged its reputation.
  
  However, the biggest obstacle to success may have been the design of the car itself. Tata thought that focusing on price above all else would help sales, but that cost-cutting was arguably a turn-off -- it looked like you were settling for a sub-par machine just because of the price tag. India's burgeoning middle class appeared to be more interested in saving up for cars they'd be happy to own, if they felt pressure to get cars in the first place.
  
  This doesn't rule out a future Nano, but it'd likely require a fundamental change in philosophy that focuses on value for money rather than a rock bottom sticker price. And there's no guarantee that it would be successful even then. While car hailing apps like Uber might not dominate, they still reduce the need for car ownership. In some cases, it could be cheaper to simply cars on demand instead of buying one.
  
  Source: Economic Times
  

• NASA helps businesses make use of its satellite data
  NASA has made its raw satellite data widely available for a long while. Now that it has a privatization-minded leader, though, it's looking to make that data more palatable for the business crowd. The administration has released a Remote Sensing Toolkit that should make it easier to use observational satellite info for commercial purposes, including straightforward business uses as well as conservation and research. The move consolidates info that used to be scattered across "dozens" of websites, and helps you search that unified database for helpful knowledge -- you don't have to go to one place for atmospheric studies and another to learn about forests.
  
  The kit includes both some ready-to-use tools for making sense of satellite content as well as the code companies can use to craft their own tools.
  
  It's easy to see concerns that NASA might downplay purely scientific uses of its data as a result. Still, this might be overdue. The earlier approach may have offered massive amounts of content (petabytes, NASA said), but there was no one repository where you could find everything you needed. This could encourage more use of that data for all purposes, not just for companies hoping to make a profit.
  
  Source: NASA
  

• HomePod may get phone call support and multiple timers
  While Apple was quiet about HomePod updates at WWDC, that doesn't mean it's twiddling its thumbs -- its staff are privately testing pre-release software. And now, we might now what that software entail.s French site iGeneration claims to have details of the HomePod's iOS 12-based beta, and it could address a laundry list of feature requests for Apple's smart speaker. Most notably, it would include native phone call support. Instead of having to start the call on your iPhone and switch audio inputs, you could both place and receive calls through the HomePod. Your smartphone would just supply the cellular connection. This wouldn't be a new concept by a long shot, but it'd be extremely helpful if you'd rather not stay within earshot of your iPhone's modest speakers.
  
  The beta reportedly addresses a relatively small but important demand: multiple timers. As with Amazon and Google, you could set one timer for the veggies cooking on the stove and another for the roast in the oven. Other additions would include a HomePod version of Find My iPhone, Spanish language support and a "fix WiFi" feature that makes the HomePod connect to your iPhone's network when there's a mismatch (you previously had to reset the HomePod to solve this).
  
  There's no guarantee that these features will make the cut for Apple's customary round of fall software updates, assuming they make the cut at all. It took Apple months to bring multi-speaker stereo and AirPlay 2 to the HomePod despite promising both in 2017. And these still wouldn't address some of the larger gripes with the HomePod, such as its lack of multi-user voice recognition. If this proves accurate, though, the HomePod would be an easier sell to people who want more than a souped-up music player.
  
  Via: 9to5Mac
  
  Source: iGeneration (translated)
  

• 'Cosmos: Possible Worlds' trailer explores alien life and butterflies
  After the briefest of teases at the start of the year, Fox is ready to show Cosmos: Possible Worlds in earnest. The network has released an initial trailer that suggests Possible Worlds will follow the basic formula of the reborn series' first season while covering some decidedly different ground. As the name implies, there's a focus on extraterrestrial exploration and seemingly fantastical ideas. What would alien life be like, Neil deGrasse Tyson asks, and what are we doing to venture beyond Earth? There's even talk of exploring "paradoxical realities."
  
  At the same time, the show will focus on the small scale, including the very personal. You'll see the inner workings of a butterfly's wings, not to mention the early days of the late astrophysicist (and original Cosmos host) Carl Sagan. The series is once again focusing on how everything is connected, rather than treating biology and human endeavor as separate from the vastness of space.
  
  There's still no release date for Possible Worlds beyond the previously mentioned spring 2019 window. From this first glimpse, however, the odds are that your perception of the new season will depend on how much you liked its predecessor. If nothing else, it's good to see science take the spotlight at a time when it's frequently under attack.
  
  
  Source: Fox (YouTube)
  

• NSA leader creates task force to fight Russian cyberattacks
  The President might have claimed that Russia stopped hacking the US, but intelligence officials know otherwise -- and they're stepping up their fight against the ongoing threat. Recently installed NSA and Cyber Command chief Paul Nakasone has created a dedicated task force (the Russia Small Group) to tackle online threats from Putin's regime. While he wasn't specific about what the group would do, he said it was "in line" with what intelligence agencies have been doing ever since the 2016 presidential election. In short: they're devoting extra energy to preventing a repeat of the widespread hacking from two years ago.
  
  Nakasone argued that this wasn't optional. If the US decided to "stand on the sidelines" and didn't focus its energy on digital adversaries like Russia and China, it risked letting those opponents shape the virtual battlefield. They "undermine" elections, stoke social tensions and steal sensitive info, Nakasone said -- you need people who can tackle this on a "continual basis."
  
  It's not shocking that Nakasone would pursue this route. He's a four-star Army general who is running both the NSA as well as a recently elevated Cyber Command. If anyone is likely to both focus on threats from specific countries and see the bigger picture of online security, it's him. The question is whether or not the Russia Small Group will have a meaningful effect on the 2018 mid-term elections. It might, but it was formed so recently that it may need time to reach its full potential and give Russia second thoughts.
  
  
  Source: Bloomberg, Aspen Institute (YouTube)
  

• 'Disenchantment' trailer reveals a fantasy land gone wrong
  Netflix has finally offered more than a brief peek at posted the first full trailer for the animated series, and it's evident from the get-go that nothing in the fantasy genre is sacred here. The clip takes jabs at tropes like the royal wedding (Princess Bride, anyone?) and even Game of Thrones' best-known seat. You also get a better feel for characters beyond the roguish (but maturing) Bean. Elfo is hopelessly innocent, while Luci stands as Bean's literal and figurative personal demon.
  
  The 10-episode run premieres August 17th. It's far too soon to say whether or not this will come close to replicating the better moments of Futurama or The Simpsons, but the basic ingredients are there: Groening's iconic art style, top talent (such as Broad City's Abbi Jacobson in the main role) and ample amounts of cultural commentary.
  
  
  Source: Netflix (YouTube)
  

• Snapchat ends its peer-to-peer payment service on August 30th
  Snap's one-time hope of becoming a major player in money transfers has come to an ignominious end. The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it's discontinuing its Snapcash service on August 30th. While it didn't say what would happen to users' accounts, it promised that they'd receive notifications through both the Snapchat app itself as well as the support website. It's sad news if you're a frequent Snapchatter who used the feature to cover your share of restaurant bills, but you could see this coming given the competition and Snap's own fortunes.
  
  Snapcash launched in 2014 as a partnership with Square that theoretically gave both sides a tremendous boost: Snap got a payment platform with relatively little work, while Square attached its service to a very familiar name. However, it's no secret that Snapcash didn't take off. For many, Venmo is the household name when it comes to pay-your-friends apps -- and that's not including mounting competition from the likes of Facebook, Zelle or tightly integrated features like Apple Pay Cash and Google Pay. No matter how well Snapcash worked, it was just one fairly ordinary option in a sea of choices.
  
  The shutdown also comes as Snap itself has been struggling to stay competitive. Remember, Snapcash launched when Snapchat was at a cultural zenith, and Instagram was still two years away from introducing an imitative Stories feature that would ultimately help it eat Snap's lunch. It was easy for Snap to add a feature like this when everything was coming up roses -- it's harder to justify it now, when the company's core business is at stake. The discontinuation of Snapcash could help Snap refocus its efforts, especially now that it might have other, more effective ways of raking in revenue from your payments.
  
  Source: TechCrunch
  

• Google reportedly offered Android changes to EU in 2017
  The European Union may have characterized its $5 billion Android antitrust fine as punishment for an intransigent Google, but the practical reality might be different. Bloomberg sources have claimed that Google offered to make changes to its Android policies in August 2017, not long after it received an EU antitrust penalty for its product search practices. Although Google didn't dive into specifics, it had offered to "loosen restrictions" in Android contracts and had considered distributing its apps in "two different ways."
  
  The EU wasn't having it, according to the sources. Officials reportedly said only that a settlement was "no longer an option," and that Google's offer was "too little too late." It couldn't even mention the possibility of paying a fine as part of an agreement -- regulators had effectively locked in their course of action. Google had tried to talk about ending the probe considerably earlier than that, according to the tipsters, but regulators supposedly either stonewalled or said it was too early to negotiate. If so, there may have only been a brief window of opportunity for a truce.
  
  The revelations, if accurate, ultimately leave Google in the same boat: it's now facing a giant fine and significant changes to its mobile strategy if its appeal doesn't succeed. They do suggest that the penalty wasn't inevitable, though, and that Google might well have implemented Russia-style changes months sooner if the EU had wanted to bend.
  
  Source: Bloomberg
  

• The best website builder for small businesses
  By Kevin Purdy
  
  This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full website builder guide here.
  
  After researching 17 of the top website-building services and hosts, building 20 websites with seven of the most promising ones, and changing hundreds of little things on each page, we believe Wix is the best way for a small business to put up a professional-looking website. Its templates, setup interview, and editing tools create modern, clean-looking sites that you can easily customize, and adding crucial tools like contact forms or restaurant menus is easier than with other website-building tools. Wix's customer support is reliable, its free trial is generous, and its pricing is clear and fair for small businesses.
  
  Beyond the basics of site editing, Wix offers a wealth of plug-ins for adding Google Maps, OpenTable, appointment booking, and other tools to your website. Its search engine optimization tools are easy to understand and use, and thanks to Wix's size and scale, your site should remain reliable and available even under heavy traffic.
  
  Weebly lacks the variety of templates that Wix provides, and it can't automatically build you a site by asking you about your business. But Weebly's editing interface is simpler and provides less room for error with its drag-and-drop boxes. Weebly also (paradoxically) offers deeper access to the code behind your site, but has fewer useful plug-ins and forms from the start. You should try Weebly if you can't find a template or generated site you like on Wix, if you want to make some specific changes to your site using code (or a code-savvy helper), or if price is the most important factor for you, as the Starter package for Weebly costs one-third less than Wix's comparable Combo package.
  
  Every designer we spoke with specifically recommended Shopify for any business that's looking to sell goods online. Although our top picks have built-in ecommerce tools, it makes more sense for most businesses to use Shopify, or at least its Lite version, and embed Shopify's tools into their websites—Shopify works with both of our top picks, and you won't be locked in if you decide to change your site later.
  Why you should trust us
  I've written a number of Wirecutter guides to software, including tax software, budget apps, and picks in our home-office guide. Before joining Wirecutter, I wrote about the Web and apps for years, both as an editor at the productivity and software site Lifehacker and as a freelancer for publications including Fast Company, Fortune, and ITworld. I have some experience building websites, with very basic tools (Notepad and HTML), ridiculously convoluted tools (Jekyll, which powers my personal site), and some of the modern building tools reviewed here, including WordPress and Squarespace.
  
  In addition to using my own experience, I enlisted the help of a dozen Wirecutter writers and editors to help test site-building apps. Some were experienced with building and maintaining websites, whether through all-in-one tools like those we considered or through manual setup and coding, while others were making a site for the first time.
  
  I also spoke with several experienced designers about their processes for building websites for clients, both with template-based building apps and through a traditional design-and-build process. Brandon Davis is the co-founder and creative director of Block Club, a branding and strategy agency that has built websites for clients with Squarespace, through Brandcast, and from scratch. Paige Brunton is a Squarespace design specialist who has built sites previously in WordPress and works with a variety of individual, nonprofit, and business clients. Idelle Fisher, proprietor of Pickle-Wix Web Design, has over 15 years of professional Web-design experience (and, as you might guess, works to set up Wix sites for clients).
  Who this is for
  These services are for small-business owners, because a small business needs to have its own website. A business can (and usually should) be active on social media, sell in multiple stores, and find customers wherever they may be. But lacking a stand-alone site on the greater Web means losing out on potential business and brand recognition.
  
  A proper website lends legitimacy and trustworthiness to a business, as compared with businesses that exist only on review sites such as Yelp or in Google Maps. A well-made website lets people find your business when they're searching for what you offer, not just your business name. You can also tell your business's whole and honest story on its website, rather than competing for attention on (and trying to discern the unknowable sorting system of) a search engine. If nothing else, a website lets you publish your phone number, address, and business hours in a place where people will know that info is accurate—most people have been burned a few times by relying on the hours listed for a business in a mapping app.
  
  "Small business" is a big concept, so we researched and wrote this guide with three types of businesses in mind:
  A retail business that wants people to find it and visit it: a restaurant, a shop, an indie movie theater. A business that wants to sell goods online, at a volume that its existing employees can handle. A service-oriented business that wants to exude professionalism: a law firm, a consultant, a contractor.
  If your business already has a website, either a site on another build-it-yourself platform or one you paid a developer to make, switching to one of our all-in-one picks will likely mean starting over. Most site-building apps cannot import site data, or the look and feel of a site, beyond whatever you can copy and paste. At the same time, you may find that one of our picks can create a site that looks and functions better than what you currently have, and websites built with a good site-building app can be much easier to update and improve.
  How we picked
  First, we researched 17 of the most prominent website building and hosting services, looking at pricing, features, and templates or example client sets.
  
  There's no easy way to say which building platform offers the "best" tools for making a business website that is easy to navigate, gives people the information they need, reaches the audience searching for it, and has professional polish. Someone with a clear plan and good design instincts, and maybe a little code knowledge, can turn out a decent site using a cheap, underpowered Web-template tool, while the most sophisticated website-building app can only nudge a site owner into making good decisions about what to put up and where to put it. And you can't fully tell whether a particular service will work for your needs until you've gotten deeper into building a site.
  
  However, speaking with Wirecutter staffers and our experts gave us a sense of what we should look for in a good build-it-yourself platform:
  An interface that requires no code knowledge whatsoever to put a site together, and is also easy for other people to update (even if they didn't make the site originally). Site templates that do not demand a wealth of high-quality images just to get a page up. Where possible, a site platform should offer built-in, tasteful stock-art options for business owners who don't have a library of photos or illustrations. Basic analytics and search engine optimization, or at least guidance on building search-friendly sites, without requiring payment for a premium package. Storage and bandwidth that would not restrict a typical small-business website (preferably unlimited). Timely, friendly, effective customer support for standard-tier customers. Live chat and phone calls during business hours are best, but fast email response is okay. A functional contact form that works on any browser. Pricing that is in line with most of the competition. Most of the extra features offered in the higher-price tiers of site-building apps are marketing or SEO tools that a business could likely buy separately. A website builder shouldn't cost significantly more than mainstream competitors, roughly $20 to $40 per month. Social integration that can be customized and made to look not awful. A free trial of some kind. Websites, and especially online stores, are complex endeavors, and finding out that a platform lacks a feature you need shouldn't happen after you've paid. No intrusive or distracting "Built by" or "Made with" branding or logos. (Minimalist branding is acceptable.) Integrated email and domain management.
  For any business-related website, reliability (it doesn't go down, or it comes as close to "5 nines" as possible) is crucial. We could not test this aspect directly, and most website providers don't offer reliability guarantees, but our picks are companies that are large enough that outages are not common—or at least only as common as most large-scale server outages that affect the Web from time to time.
  
  For businesses looking to sell goods online, we sought a few more qualities:
  Support for multiple products and identifying information, with as seamless a setup process as possible. A clear fee structure. A store that looks authentic, loads quickly, and is easy to step through, so potential customers don't simply open a new tab and go to Amazon instead. For businesses that mostly sell expertise and appointments, a functional appointment-booking system.
  Using those criteria, we settled on seven apps we wanted to test further: Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, WordPress for Business, GoDaddy GoCentral Website Builder, Simvoly, and Strikingly. Some of these were broadly popular and obvious contenders (Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, and WordPress), while others had an interesting feature set, price, or templates (GoDaddy, Simvoly, and Strikingly).
  How we tested
  Screenshots by Kevin Purdy, Liam McCabe, Daniel Varghese, and Sabrina Imbler
  You can't tell whether a website-building app will work for you until you try it, so I tested each of our seven finalists, using each one to try to improve the website of my favorite lunchtime deli. In doing so, I noted how much time it took until I felt my site had at least one good page ready to present to the world, and how versatile the tool was in letting me change my mind as I went along. I also asked questions of each app's support staff, to test their speed and helpfulness of response. Some of the apps had built-in help tools, and sometimes detailed help forums or FAQ sections, but every app we tested had one or two quirks that left us wanting to ask "How do you ..." questions, so a good support response was crucial.
  
  A dozen Wirecutter staffers also built websites using the seven finalists. Some testers built personal sites, but most tried to remake the website of a favorite small business they thought could use a better one. I asked each tester to spend a maximum of about an hour on each site. We didn't publish our sites, because we didn't want to impact the search results for those businesses or confuse people by presenting an unofficial, incomplete version of that business's identity. But each staffer shared their site with me and answered questions about the building process.
  Our pick: Wix
  Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald
  If you're going to build your website yourself, Wix presents the fewest obstacles to putting an informative, attractive, and useful website online. In our testing, Wix's site generator and template-editing tools were faster at getting a working site up than those of the competition. Wix's editing interface also made adding, adjusting, and removing page elements easier to accomplish than with other site-building apps.
  
  Wix offers a good mix of templates that are different, but not overwhelming in number, and most don't require you to have a wealth of high-resolution images available to make them work. Getting a contact form, online food menus, reservations, or other plug-ins working is simple. The built-in SEO tools are easy to set up. Customer support, even for free plans, was helpful in our testing. Wix's free trial is the most useful of any professional site-building tool we tested, giving you unlimited time with a basic plan to try out the tools and templates. And the company's pricing and plans, while not the cheapest, should fit the needs of most small businesses; they're also clear about what you get at each level.
  
  Jenni Gritters, outdoors editor for Wirecutter, has built sites using Squarespace, WordPress, and Wix, and after our testing, she said she recommended Wix for anyone looking to get a small-business site off the ground. "It's the easiest to use of the three, with pre-built templates that look original and literally no space to mess things up," Jenni wrote in her testing notes. "If people want a pretty website with little to no effort, Wix is a great place to land."
  
  Before you start looking over templates and obsessing over headlines, Wix can take a shot at building a site for your business using its ADI, or Artificial Design Intelligence, script. It sounds hokey, but by asking you what kind of business you have, where it's located, and what you do and don't need on your site, and then quickly generating a site (usually a single page), Wix's ADI can get you going a lot faster than other website-building tools, most of which still require you to pick and choose templates and design items. Other services, if they ask you any questions about your business at all, ask only the category of your business (as WordPress and Squarespace do) or if you have a Facebook page (as Jimdo does). Wix's ADI works even better if your address is in Google Maps, or if your social media pages contain your logo.
  
  You can work on any individual piece of your website with Wix, even just one line of text, rather than having to move things around inside a "block" or "section." Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Wix's interface didn't leave us guessing about how to change things, remove things, or move things around on the page. Wix offers hundreds of templates (more on that just below), so chances are, you'll be able to find one that won't require you to change the layout or page elements significantly.
  
  Having this freedom to move, resize, and customize each element of the page could lead to overenthusiastic mistakes. Wix offers simple undo and redo buttons, and saves a new version of your page every time you save. This is definitely not the case with perhaps the most heavily advertised site builder, Squarespace, where tapping Control+Z or Command+Z to undo sometimes works but sometimes doesn't, and cleaning up mistakes can lead you to wipe out other page elements accidentally or leave you wandering through the settings menus. WordPress's templates offer draft versions and preview links, but not the same kind of undo/redo/history convenience.
  
  When asked to rate (on a scale of one to five, with five being the best) how difficult they would find it to come back and update their Wix sites regularly, two staff testers gave Wix the highest average scores of any app, a four and a five. My own testing led me to agree with them. Updating a site through Wix is similar to designing the site itself: It feels like editing a document, rather than building through code. You can either edit the text of a block or section on the page directly or create a News section on a page and edit the items inside that. Wix doesn't give you a wealth of options, but it does offer more than what most tested site-building apps provide.
  
  Wix offers a variety of templates, organized into specific business or use categories. For example, Wix's "Fashion & Beauty" section has "Hair & Beauty" and "Fashion & Accessories" subsections, and then themes titled "Beauty Salon," "The Makeup Artist," "Hairdresser Site," and such. These specialized options are more useful than some other services' overly broad categories, and they make it easier to get started than Squarespace's vague names like "Montauk" and "Foster."
  
  Wix's templates are not all similar, and they work even for businesses that don't have a variety of good photography on hand. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Modern Web design (and the approach of most website-building services) tends toward large, high-quality images, sometimes animated, often laid out on top of one another, as a visitor scrolls down a long page. But not every business owner has a wealth of images available. Wix provides a few options to get good images on your site, besides uploading yourself: importing from social media accounts, using a free Wix-provided image, or buying images from Shutterstock for about $3 each. Other sites (such as Strikingly) offer free images, and some (such as Squarespace) offer paid art, but having both, plus easy import from Facebook or Instagram or the like, leaves you unlikely to hit a wall because you don't have the right image for a template.
  
  If you don't have the right image for a piece of your site, Wix provides both free and low-cost stock art. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Getting the functional parts of your site working—contact forms, menus, interactive maps, social integration, or even online ordering—is easy with Wix, especially given that most relevant templates will have those sections set up. Contact forms need only your email address to work. Wix launches a small wizard when you assemble an online food menu, and you can fill it out with images (stock or your own). Squarespace, in contrast, has you edit the text of your menu on the page; some other website-building apps provide just an upload spot for a PDF menu (which is fine for some cases, but not particularly mobile-friendly). You have options to accept online reservations and orders through Wix's own services, but you can also integrate OpenTable, any of a number of appointment and booking tools, and many other apps.
  
  Wix's SEO tools are a good introduction to keyword optimizing and writing effective descriptions for your site. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Wix provides some basic SEO tools that, while not anything magical, do coax you into making your site describe itself in search-friendly ways. Most site-building apps claim that SEO is baked into their pages and design. Wix exposes you to a bit of the behind-the-scenes work, such as picking out the strongest keywords, updating a site's meta (search-friendly) description, being mobile-friendly, and more. We liked that Wix didn't pretend there was a secret sauce that only it could provide; the company spells out its SEO advice on the open Web. Upgrading to any paid plan allows you to hook in Google Analytics, Facebook ad tracking, and other analytics tools that are par for the course for a small-business site.
  
  I posed a written question to Wix's support center at nearly 9 p.m. on a Wednesday night and received a detailed response by about 10 a.m. the next day. I asked about the best way to create a menu for a restaurant website that would allow me to frequently change out the daily specials. The company's response seemed considered and written by a human. The suggestion was only a partial solution (creating menu items that appeared only on certain days), but the person responding noted that they had added my suggestion to "the relevant inbox" and "hope to see easier options for daily menus in the future." A fast, affirmative response, and a note that things could be better, is a pretty good result from a late-night support post.
  
  Wix's lengthy, essentially unlimited free trial period is also appealing. With a free account, you can build your site in private, put up a preview (at a Wix.com address) for anyone to check out, and invite collaborators to work on your site, for as long as you like. The features that pull you into paid plans include the ability to remove Wix.com ads and branding from the bottom of your site, to use your own .com domain, and to get more storage. Most small businesses won't bump up against the bandwidth or storage limits of the Combo plan ($12 per month), and we don't think most businesses need the added features of the Unlimited and VIP plans, such as accepting online payments and launching email campaigns, which are likely things a fast-growing business would want handled by a specialized service like Shopify (another pick) or MailChimp.
  Flaws but not dealbreakers
  An inherent flaw of Wix's more detailed, open-ended design capabilities is that if you change a lot of the elements of a template, you can end up making bad style choices with the type, images, layout, sizing, organization, or any other element of Web design. Judging from our testing, Wix won't interfere if you really want to use Comic Sans and a low-res image of a greasy sandwich to poorly advertise your diner. None of the other site-building apps did much advising either, but their editing tools did not offer as many ways to change each element of a page design. Wix's finer-grained controls provide more opportunities for missteps, if someone uses too many of them.
  
  Once you pick a template on Wix, you can't switch to another template—you have to rebuild the site with that new look. Template-switching doesn't work wonderfully on other website builders, as it usually produces a number of errors and odd leftovers, but swapping between templates is at least possible with Weebly and works fairly well on Squarespace.
  
  Wix's Combo package contains most of what we think small businesses will need but imposes monthly limits on file storage (3 GB) and bandwidth (2 GB). While those limits shouldn't affect most small businesses' sites, Wix's competitors, including Weebly and Squarespace, offer unlimited storage and bandwidth at or below that price level.
  
  Testers complained of having difficulty removing page features (sidebar text boxes, large images, contact forms) from certain templates without messing up the page's general layout. Unless you use a single-page layout (or a "strip," in Wix terms), template elements are not modular, and wiping out an entire container means having to smoosh together the elements that were around it to make up for the empty space.
  
  Wix does not allow for editing a website's style sheet (CSS files), and doesn't provide deeper access to the HTML behind the page, or FTP access to the files. This restriction is intentional, but it means that experienced Web designers can't easily fix up your site or introduce custom bits of code or design choices to your site. Both Weebly and Squarespace offer more robust design and code tools in their settings.
  A simpler option: Weebly
  Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald
  If you're willing to give up stylish template options and work with a smaller set of boxier, more-modular editing tools, Weebly is worth considering. It doesn't offer as wide a range of attractive templates, as many ways to alter those templates, an interview-style site setup, or as many plug-in apps as Wix. But Weebly's simpler tools are easier to use, and it provides the same contact forms, maps, and other website basics. It also costs less: Weebly's Starter plan is roughly two-thirds the cost of Wix's comparable Combo plan, has the same essentially infinite free trial, and puts no limits on bandwidth or storage, unlike Wix.
  
  Weebly's interface involves more drag-and-drop blocks than Wix's freeform grid alignments—it's not better or worse, just different. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Weebly is drag-and-drop in the truest sense, as you grab page elements from a left-side bank and then bring them into your page. You don't get as many editing tools and plug-in apps as with Wix, but the ones that most small businesses need should be there. An example: One Wirecutter tester was irked that Weebly had no tools to create a link to a different section of the same page (an anchor link in Web terms); Weebly's support section says you can make an anchor link, but only manually with HTML code.
  
  Weebly allows for more access than Wix does to the CSS and HTML code underneath your site, in case you want to try a font or style that Weebly doesn't offer or bring in outside help. You can also enter, in the page's settings section, your own site description and keywords, and install the tracking code for any tool (such as Google Analytics) you might use. That's handy, but you need to dig into Weebly's "Ultimate SEO Guide" to go further.
  
  Weebly's plug-ins, such as this embedded Google Map, are painless to configure. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Weebly costs $8 per month for the Starter plan, which removes Weebly advertising, lets you use your own domain, provides unlimited storage, and adds site stats and a few other tools. That's just two-thirds of the price of the most similar Wix plan, with no storage or bandwidth restrictions, making Weebly worth considering if you don't mind choosing from plainer templates and doing more of the design work yourself.
  An add-on for selling goods online: Shopify
  Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald
  Shopify is the online-sales service that each designer we spoke to—even those who specialized in site-building apps with built-in ecommerce tools, like Wix and Squarespace—specifically recommended. We didn't test Shopify in the same way that we tested website-building apps because it wasn't feasible to create an entire fake workflow of products, store, sales, shipping, tracking, customer service, inventory, payments, and return-customer marketing. But going by recommendations, research, and, most of all, the fact that Shopify can work with all of our site-building picks, we think Shopify is the first place to look if you need a system to handle the stuff you sell online.
  
  Shopify's $9-per-month Lite plan allows you to sell items through an embeddable buy button that works in Wix, Weebly, and most any other website-building service. This plan also gives you the ability to sell through your business's Facebook page, take support questions through Facebook Messenger, and (after you buy a $50 hardware setup) sell through a phone or tablet with a mobile card reader. The plan should cover a business that is mostly focused on brick-and-mortar sales but sells online occasionally. If you want to scale up, Shopify's other plans give you an unlimited number of items and infinite image storage, shipping discounts, scaling transaction fees, and the like.
  
  Shopify's item pages and widgets are meant to blend into any website design. Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Shopify powers a lot of online stores, though you often don't see the company's custom-built interfaces and branding because it's hidden or tightly integrated. It's a large enough vendor and focused on one aspect of business, so your store should remain reliably online and offer a quick-and-easy checkout experience. On top of that, Shopify's fees and rates are usually lower than those of our picks' built-in e-commerce tools. Paige Brunton, the Squarespace design specialist we interviewed, told us she recommended Shopify to any client who was "selling more than a few secondary things," and specifically 20 or more items.
  What about Squarespace?
  Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald
  Squarespace creates websites that are heavy on big, high-resolution images, prominent type (often overlaid on images), long pages with multiple sections, and a lot of neutral space around everything. Squarespace bakes good design sense into all its templates, and if your business fits Squarespace's young, ultramodern sensibility, your site will look great. But judging from our testing, and according to the experts we interviewed, people who jump into a Squarespace template without a lot of big, impressive images, or who start moving things around to get the site they want, will end up fighting the app.
  
  Squarespace's editing interface is harder to get comfortable with than those of Wix or Weebly, and moving items around or changing them can introduce tricky page problems. Screenshots: Kevin Purdy and Sabrina Imbler
  "Unless you have a very critical eye, it's too easy to make a template site look not so great," said Brandon Davis of brand and strategy firm Block Club. In our tests, Wirecutter staffers hit frustrating roadblocks when trying to make images link to different internal pages, moving images or text blocks around without rearranging other parts of the template, figuring out how to change the front-page background image (confusingly dubbed the "banner"), and setting up the pages and menus (you have to clone or delete the Demo pages first).
  
  
  If your business does fit one of Squarespace's templates without requiring notable changes, the result can be impressive. Wirecutter staffers described their Squarespace sites as "looking clean and very pretty," "uber-fancy," and "not bad for less than an hour's work."
  
  
  We recommend looking through Squarespace's templates and seeing if your idea for a site and all its pages map over to an example site, and considering whether you have the right images to replace those in the example. If so, Squarespace's support is responsive and helpful, and its pricing is simple, with no storage or bandwidth limits. Small businesses can likely use the Personal plan, unless they need Google-based email or plan to sell online—though we recommend a different tool for online sales.
  The competitionServices we tested
  WordPress powers close to 25 percent of all websites, including Wirecutter. But that's the self-hosted technology; WordPress's own hosted site builder for businesses is a different thing, though it felt similar to our testers—and not in a good way. It seemed to encourage a blog-style setup, with a stream of posts running down the page. Our testers needed to take a while to figure out how to set up some basic things such as menus and navigation, and although the sites looked okay when they were done, the experience made our testers unlikely to recommend WordPress to anyone without a lot of website-making experience. Nobody was sure of the best practices or settings for ensuring SEO-friendly descriptions. Generally, it didn't seem like it was much easier to build a site on WordPress's business-focused platform than it was to build out a WordPress installation with the help of a designer.
  
  Strikingly (first image) and Jimdo (second image) offer very simplified site designs, but neither provides a better value than our top picks.Screenshot: Kevin Purdy
  Strikingly focuses on creating one-page (maybe two-page) sites for businesses that want to tell customers about themselves and maybe link somewhere else. We liked Strikingly's especially simple page tools and small set of options for changing layouts and styles, but the service charges $16 per month to get rid of a persistent purple Strikingly banner at the bottom of your site (both desktop and mobile), making it more expensive than our picks, with less flexibility.
  
  
  Jimdo also provides single-page sites for businesses, using interview-style page creation, with the added convenience of importing information and pictures from your business's Facebook and Google Maps pages (if they exist). Still, most brand-new businesses won't have those set up yet. And Jimdo's templates are more rigid than Strikingly's, often lacking style or color options for a page's content blocks. Regardless, we nearly named Jimdo as a pick for creating very, very simple pages that, while not as refined as our picks' templates, still managed to convey a respectable presence, for an ad-free Pro price lower than most.
  
  Simvoly offers no built-in photo editing or cropping features—or, at least, our tester couldn't find them. It also lacks an undo function, and our tester described the page/menu setup as "mind-boggling." And it doesn't cost less than our runner-up pick.
  
  GoDaddy's GoCentral Website Builder did not provide our tester with many template options or design choices, and left our tester feeling they had created a site that was only "fine, if you don't need much [and] don't ever update it."
  Services we considered but did not test
  Yola received unimpressive reviews from other publications, and it keeps its Yola branding on sites that pay for its Bronze tier. Yola's templates didn't catch our eye at first glance. The main Yola site was also down twice while we were researching this guide, which didn't inspire confidence.
  
  BigCommerce is indeed big, and its cheapest plan starts at $30 per month, with just a 15-day free trial. For a small business looking to set up its own site, that's a big price to pay.
  
  The templates from Duda seemed intriguing, but its cheapest plan for businesses costs more than those of our picks, which have much broader support and plug-in compatibility and more users. The company also places an emphasis on reselling (white-labeling) its site builder through third-party designers.
  
  SiteBuilder, uKit, and Site123 offer no templates or example client sites on their pages. uKit and Site123 provide scant detail on their pricing, and SiteBuilder uses prominent introductory prices to obscure the real cost of its services.
  
  Cargo (aka Cargo Collective) seems dedicated to sites for publications, with a tight focus on artistic and abstract expression.
  
  This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter. To see the current recommendation, please go here.
  
  When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.
  

• After Math: Redemption songs
  Self-inflicted SNAFUs are an inevitable, albeit cringe-inducing, aspect of life -- whether that's referring to the veteran who helped save a squad of young soccer players as "pedo guy" or wondering aloud if maybe holocaust deniers are simply misunderstood. So yeah, it was a good week for mea culpas as well as countries and companies alike stepping up to do the right thing (for once).
  
  
  
  15 inches: It's not easy squeezing a kid through a flooded passageway barely more than a foot wide and apparently impossible to do if that kid is housed in a miniature submarine that your company threw together from spare parts. But don't tell that to Elon Musk, unless you want to be accused of pedophilia. But at least he apologized for it.
  
  
  
  13 years: Technically, Facebook is only meant for use by adults and proper teenagers. Tweens need not apply thanks to the US Child Online Privacy Protection Act which excludes anyone under the age of 13 from signing up for social media accounts. Facebook announced this week that it would begin enforcing that rule, some 20 years after the passage of the COPPA.
  
  
  
  58 million: It Twitter seems ever so slightly less toxic these days, it probably has something to do with the company knocking nearly 60 million bot accounts offline during the final months of 2017. Or it could be the additional 70 million fake accounts that they've nixed in the past two months.
  
  
  
  6 years: Adidas is going all in on going green. The company announced that by 2024, any plastics used in its shoes and athletic gear will come exclusively from recycled sources. Good on them.
  
  
  
  44.92 Mbps: Residents of Minneapolis rejoice! You've got some of the fastest internet connectivity in the entire country, beating out the likes of San Francisco and Irvine in California, Fort Wayne, Indiana and sister city Saint Paul.
  
  
  
  $0: Not only did Google announce this week that it will be working with the UN to study the impact of human activity on the environment, the company will be doing so at no charge. Because we're all in this together. Yes, even you weirdos who think that climate change is caused by body heat.
  
  
  
  4.5 months: Cuba is finally joining the digital revolution and has announced plans to roll out internet connectivity island-wide by the end of this year. Journalists with the state-run media will get first crack at the service, though there's no word yet on what it will cost everybody else.
  
  
  

• Samsung may have an answer to Apple's AirPower wireless charger
  Whenever Apple releases its AirPower multi-device charger, it might have some fresh competition. Recently discovered images and listings have revealed Samsung's Wireless Charger Duo, which (as the name implies) could offer fast charging to two devices at once. It wouldn't be as flexible as Apple's device since you'd need to place your devices on specific spots. However, you could top up a phone and the upcoming Galaxy Watch at the same time, or even two phones at once if you're using it as a family charging station.
  
  We wouldn't make bets on pricing at this point. Given that the leaks revolve heavily around the Galaxy Note 9 and Galaxy Watch, there's a good chance that Samsung could unveil the Wireless Charger Duo at its August 9th event. It might just be a matter of weeks before you can check one out first-hand.
  This is the Samsung Wireless Charger Duo (EP-N6100) for the Galaxy Note 9. Charges the Galaxy Watch alongside the phone. pic.twitter.com/VnP10xAhvb
  — Roland Quandt (@rquandt) July 21, 2018
  Via: SamMobile
  
  Source: Roland Quandt (Twitter), MobileFun
  

• Ben Heck's Atari 800 handheld, part 2
  
  Will Pie Face be defeated at last? Does the Atari 800 portable work? Do we get to see more soldering? Find out in this episode of The Ben Heck Show where Felix and Ben put the finishing touches to the custom printed circuit board and design a laser-cut and 3D-printed case with the help of Autodesk Eagle and Adobe Illustrator. Let the team know what you think over on the element14 Community.
  

• Apple might have to approve India's anti-spam app in six months
  The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has introduced a new policy to fight spam calls and text that could impact Apple's huge expansion plans in the country. Under the new rule, carriers have to ensure that their subscribers can install TRAI's "Do Not Disturb" app on their phones. Problem is, Apple refuses to allow it on the App Store over privacy concerns, since it needs access to users' call and message logs in order to report spam activities to the agency. Apple has been at odds with the regulator for over a year due to the issue, and this new development could force the tech giant to find a solution once and for all.
  
  Based on the rule's wording as reported by India Today, carriers have six months to make sure the devices they offer are capable of installing the app. If any of the models in their roster still can't install it by then, they'll have to cut off its access to their networks:
  
  "Every Access Provider shall ensure, within six months' time, that all smart phone devices registered on its network support the permissions required for the functioning of such Apps as prescribed in the regulations 6(2)(e) and regulations 23(2)(d).
  
  Provided that where such devices do not permit functioning of such Apps as prescribed in regulations 6(2)(e) and regulations 23(2)(d), Access Providers shall, on the order or direction of the Authority, derecognize such devices from their telecom networks."
  
  Late last year, Apple agreed to help TRAI develop a version of the anti-spam app without some of its most worrisome features, such as its ability access to call logs. It's not entirely clear if the company can release the revised application within the next six months or if it has to think of another way altogether. As India Today notes, though, iOS 12 already has built-in anti-spam capabilities -- Cupertino might be able to use that to its advantage.
  
  Via: 9to5mac
  
  Source: India Today
  

• Harvard's robot arm can grab squishy sea animals without hurting them
  As you might imagine, you can't just grab extra-soft sea creatures like jellyfish or octopuses when you want to study them. Not if you want them to remain intact, anyway. Thankfully, researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute have a far more delicate solution. They've created a robot arm (the RAD sampler) whose petal-like fingers can quickly form a ball shape around an animal, capturing it without risking any harm. It's simpler than it looks -- it uses just a single motor to drive the entire jointed structure, so it's easy to control and easier still to repair if something breaks.
  
  To date, the arm has only been useful for catch-and-release experiments. In the future, though, biologists could outfit the machine with cameras and sensors to collect information about whatever's inside the sphere, whether it's the material composition, size or the genetic sequencing. If that happens, researchers could study fragile undersea critters in their native habitats and glean insights that wouldn't be available above water or with dead specimens.
  
  
  Via: New Scientist
  
  Source: Wyss Institute, Science Robotics
  

• Magic Leap signs content deal with comics giant Grant Morrison
  Magic Leap has teamed up with Scotland-based Square Slice Studios, which was co-founded by comic book industry veteran Grant Morrison, to create content for its mixed reality headset. You might know the prolific writer for his work with Batman and All-Star Superman, as well as for creating the boundary-pushing sci-fi comics The Invisibles, among many other things. The studio will conjure up interactive experiences for the headset, though it has yet to reveal their exact nature. While we can probably expect some interactive comics, it's worth noting that Morrison co-founded the company with a number of other creatives, including Grand Theft Auto artist Stewart Waterson.
  
  Morrison's statement hints at something big, though:
  
  "Storytelling is my passion and I've found that new platforms allow me to extend my creative boundaries. We see Magic Leap as the next great platform for storytelling and we are excited to collaborate on content that helps bring our wildest dreams to life in the near future."
  
  Magic Leap also has a partnership with Madefire that will make the service's mixed reality comics available on the headset from day one. But by teaming up with Square Slice Studios, it's showing that it's willing to invest in creating good content for its platform in addition to giving users access to existing non-exclusive offerings. The investment could pay off in the future when the company can no longer rely on years of mystery and hype to sell the device. Magic Leap's mixed reality headset -- one of them anyway, since there are supposed to be multiple versions -- will start shipping this summer.
  
  Via: TechCrunch
  
  Source: Deadline
  

• The first 'Overwatch' Nerf blaster arrives in 2019
  So far, replicating the distinctive weapons of partnering with Blizzard on official Overwatch Nerf guns. The first of the bunch, the lengthily-named Nerf Rival Overwatch Reaper Wight Edition, is due in 2019. It mimics Reaper's iconic shotgun in looks, though not in functionality. The toy weapon carries eight of Nerf's Rival rounds and includes both a ready indicator and a safety lock.
  
  Hasbro hasn't mentioned pricing, although this probably won't be the most affordable Nerf gun in your arsenal -- especially not when you'll need two if you're going to be true to the character (very clever, Hasbro). The real question is what comes next. Some guns seem like obvious fits, such as the straightforward guns of D.Va, Soldier 76, Sombra and Tracer, but what about the more exotic weapons, like Mei's freezing blaster or Lucio's sound gun? It's safe to say that you won't see Wrecking Ball's hamster ball of doom or Brigitte's flail, but here's hoping that Hasbro is willing to go beyond the 'safe' choices.
  
  Source: Business Wire
  

• New York officials recognize three Uber drivers as employees
  New York authorities have reached a decision that could change the way Uber drivers are classified -- at least when it comes to unemployment insurance. The New York State Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board has ruled in favor of three former Uber drivers who filed a federal lawsuit against the ride-hailing service after the unemployment insurance (UI) claim they made in 2016 didn't go through. Two of them left Uber after being booted off the platform, while the last one quit because he was making below minimum wage. The board's decision doesn't apply only to them, though, but also to other "similarly situated" Uber drivers.
  
  While Uber had to pay up to settle lawsuits in the past, most plaintiffs' attempts at getting themselves classified as employees ended up in failure. This time, New York authorities have decided that Uber drivers in similar situations as the three who originally filed the lawsuit can be considered employees -- as the New York Taxi Workers Alliance told Politico, the ruling can be broadly precedential. Bhairavi Desai, the group's executive director, said: "It's huge. It's really significant, because it's the first bona fide safety net for drivers in this economy... We now have a decision that reflects the official position of the state, one that the state has to defend and execute."
  
  According to Labor Department spokeswoman Jill Aurora, Uber can appeal the decision. If it doesn't, then the company will be required to make unemployment insurance contributions for similarly situated drivers going forward. Considering it has over 65,000 drivers in NYC alone and paying insurance for everyone who gets kicked out for low ratings or those who quit for making below minimum wage would cost the company a pretty penny, it might appeal the decision.
  
  An Uber spokesperson already told Politico that the company disagrees with the ruling and that it's already reviewing its options: "We are confident that the ruling uniquely applies to the three claimants because many of the practices cited in the opinion never applied to one or more of the claimants, are no longer in place, or never existed at all."
  
  Politico
  

• Tesla's Model 3 Performance has an experimental 'Track Mode'
  Tesla's Model 3 is very quick, especially if you spring for the dual-motor Performance variant, but it's still tame for safety's sake. What if you want to launch an all-out assault on a race course? You might have that option soon. YouTuber Marques Brownlee recently had an opportunity to drive the Model 3 Performance on a track, and he pointed out an experimental "Track Mode" that takes the gloves off. The in-testing feature switches on "stability control and powertrain settings configured for track driving," and it's no secret what that means: you can drift, understeer and otherwise push the electric car past its usual limits.
  
  It's not certain when this will reach customers, or even what the final name will be. And as enthusiasts will tell you, it's not a novel concept -- many sports cars have the option to turn off handholding features. It's still relatively rare among street-going electric vehicles, though, and serves as another signal that Tesla is interested in EV performance beyond straight-line acceleration. The greater challenge may be the "Augmented Mode" for the upcoming Roadster. It's one thing to turn features off in the name of courting experienced drivers, it's another to use them to improve a driver's abilities.
  Taking @Tesla's brand new car to a track and getting some power slides in. Not a bad day.
  A post shared by Marques Brownlee (@mkbhd) on Jul 20, 2018 at 5:00pm PDT
  
  Via: Electrek
  
  Source: Marques Brownlee (Instagram)
  

• Ridesharing livestreams on Twitch raise privacy worries (update: Uber cuts access)
  When you step into a ridesharing car, you probably assume that whatever you do inside the vehicle won't be recorded for posterity. But what if it turned out that you were not only on camera, but live on the internet? Like it or not, that's happening -- and not always with permission. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has cited the example of Jason Gargac, an Uber and Lyft driver who has been broadcasting "hundreds" of trips on Twitch without explicitly obtaining consent. While Gargac has taken steps to protect passengers (such as muting addresses and moderating lewd chat comments), at least some of these customers said they wouldn't have entered the car had they known they were in a livestream -- and it was possible to identify some of them through details in archived videos.
  
  Gargac has asserted that his streams are legal, since Missouri allows one-party recording of conversations. However, it doesn't appear that he's entirely forthright with passengers about what's happening. A sticker on the car tells passengers that they consent to being recorded if they enter the vehicle, but it describes the camera as "for security." There's no mention of the internet stream. And in a sense, it's taking advantage of customers who either aren't aware of the sticker or don't have much choice. If you're entering the car at night or are in a hurry, are you going to give much heed to a sticker as you hop in?
  
  There might not be much the ridesharing companies can do, at least not without changes to their policies. Both Uber and Lyft have responded with statements that drivers are required to obey local laws, which technically puts drivers like Gargac in the clear. Uber has offered passengers credit and promised not to pair affected riders with the driver. We've asked Twitch for comment as well. Gargac has taken care to avoid at least some terms-of-service violations, but it's not certain whether these are enough.
  
  Regardless of the legality, streams like this raise plenty of questions about the nature of recording laws in the livestreaming era, not to mention the policies of the companies involved. Although Gargac argues that his car is a public space and thus doesn't have an expectation of privacy, that's clearly not how some passengers see it. They're often holding deeply personal conversations or conducting themselves in less-than-flattering ways, and certainly aren't expecting to have their behavior broadcast online. Stricter policies could ensure that passengers both offer genuine consent and know that their privacy will be protected if they do agree to a livestream.
  
  Update: Uber has shut off Gargac's access to its driver app while it "evaluates his partnership." Although livestreaming might be legal in Missouri, Uber's guidelines bar any kind of "inappropriate or disrespectful behavior," including comments on appearance. The issue isn't so much the on-camera appearances as the creepy sexual observations from viewers. You can read the official statement below.
  
  "The troubling behavior in the videos is not in line with our Community Guidelines. The driver's access to the app has been removed while we evaluate his partnership with Uber."
  
  Update 2: A Twitch spokesperson wouldn't comment on violations by specific people, but pointed out that its guidelines bar anyone from sharing content that infringes on someone else's privacy.
  
  Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  

• Facebook hopes to launch an internet satellite in early 2019
  Facebook has cooperated on internet satellite initiatives (with less-than-ideal results), but there's been precious little word of plans to make its own satellite beyond high-level promises. Now, however, there's something tangible. Both publicly disclosed FCC emails and a direct confirmation to Wired have revealed that Facebook aims to launch an internally developed satellite, Athena, sometime in early 2019. A spokesperson didn't share details, but the shell organization Facebook used to keep filings hidden (PointView Tech LLC) talked about offering broadband to "unserved and underserved" areas with a low Earth orbit satellite on a "limited duration" mission.
  
  This is likely just an experiment rather than a full-fledged deployment. Low Earth orbit satellite internet would require a large cloud of satellites to provide significant coverage, similar to SpaceX's planned Starlink network. However, it shows that the company isn't done building its own high-altitude hardware now that it has stopped work on its internet drone.
  
  Whatever Athena shapes up to be, Facebook's motives likely remain the same. As with Alphabet's Loon internet balloons, there's a strong commercial incentive to connect underserved regions. Even if Facebook doesn't charge a thing for access, it could benefit by adding millions of new users who'd view ads and use services (including through Instagram and WhatsApp). It would also look good to investors, as Facebook would keep its audience growing at a time when there's seemingly no more room to grow.
  
  Source: Wired
  

• Recommended Reading: The accent struggle for Alexa and Google Assistant
  
  The accent gap
  Drew Harwell,
  The Washington Post
  
  Smart speakers (and the virtual assistants they house) offer voice control for so many connected devices it's hard to keep count. Those audio gadgets can also assist with a range of questions -- that is, if they can understand you. Zuckerberg: The Recode interview
  Kara Swisher,
  Recode
  
  The Facebook CEO covered a range of topics, including its evolving approach to fake news and a comment about Holocaust deniers that warranted a clarification afterwards.
  
  For one last night, make it a Blockbuster night
  Justin Heckert,
  The Ringer
  
  News of the one remaining Blockbuster store in the US circulated late last week, and The Ringer examined the end of an era.
  
  The gospel according to Pusha T
  Josie Duffy Rice,
  The Atlantic
  
  An interesting profile on the Kanye West protégé following the release of his latest album Daytona.
  
  My search for the spirit of Prime Day at an Ariana Grande concert in a giant Amazon box
  Hudson Hongo,
  Gizmodo
  
  Just trust me on this one.
  

• The Macallan distillery opens up for 4D virtual reality tours
  Not everyone has the means to travel to Scotland and visit their favorite distillery a la Ron Swanson. To help connoisseurs live out their dreams of traipsing through its facilities, The Macallan has created the Macallan Distillery Experience. Back in 2016, it released a 360-degree video featuring its 12-year double cask liquid. The experience apparently makes use of scents and wind machines to help sell the illusion.
  
  It will debut next week in New York at a private event in Brooklyn on the 23rd, and a few days later it'll take up temporary residence at Grand Central Station, running from the 25th through the 27th, National Scotch Day. Everyone not in New York will have to make do with talking a walkthrough via their home VR devices. Hopefully if Macallan hands out samples it'll happen after you take the headset off. Shooting the spirit is kind of beside the point, VR can make you sick while sober and adding booze to the mix can exacerbate that uneasy feeling.
  
  Source: PRNewswire, VRFocus
  

• The Morning After: Weekend Edition
  Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.
  
  Welcome to the weekend! Before looking back at some highlights from the last few days we'll investigate the foibles of a few tech CEOs and take a ride in Porsche's hybrid wagon.
  
  
  
  Still a work in progress.
  
  Emojiland runs through Sunday as part of the New York Musical Festival, and it endeavors to deal with weightier subjects than you might expect from a musical in which a woman dressed as a poop emoji brings the house down with a brassy, gospel-inspired number in a bathroom stall. But what is it like to actually sit through? Not bad, actually.
  
  
  
  Facebook's founder is *that* guy.
  
  If a podcast interview results in the need to clarify whether or not you're defending Holocaust deniers, then it probably didn't go well.
  
  
  
  We all dreamed of different Musks.
  
  Good luck living up to the notion that an engineer with aspiration and cash can change the world for the better.
  
  
  
  Back to Los Santos.
  
  A little bit of Liberty City is coming to GTA: Online very, very soon. "Gay" Tony Prince, first seen in Grand Theft Auto IV's "The Ballad of Gay Tony" expansion from 2009, is opening up a nightclub in Los Santos and needs your help.
  
  
  
  Equally at home dropping off the kids or hitting the switchbacks.
  
  With a price starting at $104,000, the 2018 Panamera 4 E-Hybrid Sport Turismo checks off a lot of boxes for potential Porsche owners that also have family obligations. The hybrid system adds power and efficiency, all wrapped in styling that makes you realize station wagons can be cool.
  
  
  
  Big and small at the same time.
  
  Toshiba has started building prototype sample flash memory with the highest capacity yet, 1.33 terabits (166GB) per chip. The 96-layer 3D NAND flash chips have four bits per cell, as compared to its current-gen three-bit tech, which allowed for chips with "only" 32GB. A typical package for flash storage, containing 16 of the chips, would have an astonishing 2.66 TB capacity, opening up new possibilities for faster, higher density SSDs and memory cards.
  
  
  
  Season two kicks off in 2019.
  
  At Comic-Con Discovery executive producer and co-creator Alex Kurtzman revealed four "Short Treks" will arrive throughout the fall, as 10 - 15 minute standalone episodes. Rainn Wilson's character Harry Mudd will be featured in one, Aldis Hodge as Craft in another, while the other two follow characters Saru and Tilly. Oh, and there's a new trailer for season two.
  But wait, there's more... Netflix and Shonda Rhimes reveal eight exclusive series in the works First 'Stranger Things' season 3 teaser is a perfect '80s mall ad Apple's MacBook eGPU is a step toward winning back creative pros Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter unite to simplify data transfers What you need to know before building a HiFi system Smart record presses promise consistent audio quality at a global scale Nathan Fillion is a fitting star for an 'Uncharted' fan film Hey Google, Android actually does stifle competition How 'Mission: Impossible' made the leap to 4K and HDR Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now the richest person in recent history You can legally download 3D-printed gun designs next month
  
  The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't Subscribe.
  
  Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.
  
  Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.
  

• Netflix and Shonda Rhimes reveal eight exclusive series in the works
  On Friday Netflix revealed the first eight series in the works as a result of its alleged con artist Anna Delvey, as well as an adaptation of the 2010 Pulitzer prize-winning book The Warmth of Other Suns. Another series will stem from former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao's memoir Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change that detailed her life, career and gender discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins.
  
  In a statement, Rhimes said: "I wanted the new Shondaland to be a place where we expand the types of stories we tell, where my fellow talented creatives could thrive and make their best work and where we as a team come to the office each day filled with excitement...Ted (Sarandos) and Cindy (Holland) and everyone at Netflix have been incredible partners in making that happen. This is Shondaland 2.0."
  Untitled Shonda Rhimes Project']
  [-Based on the New York Magazine article How Anna Delvey Tricked New York's Party People by Jessica Pressler. Manhattan makes a new friend like no other. But is she the stuff American dreams are made of or is she New York's biggest con woman? Is it a con if you enjoy being taken?
  
  * Shonda Rhimes (EP) will create the series.
  ['Untitled Bridgerton Project']
  Based on Julia Quinn's best-selling series of novels, this smart feminist take on Regency England romance unveils the glittering, wealthy, sexual, painful, funny and sometimes lonely lives of the women and men in London's high society marriage mart as told through the eyes of the powerful Bridgerton family.
  
  * Scandal veteran Chris Van Dusen (EP) will adapt and showrun the series.
  ['The Warmth of Other Suns']
  Based on Pulitzer-Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson's award-winning book of the same name, this powerful groundbreaking series tracks the decades-long migration of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South in search of a better life in the North and the West between 1916 and 1970.
  
  *National Humanities Medal recipient, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and 2-time Drama Desk winning playwright Anna Deavere Smith (EP) is set to adapt.
  ['Pick & Sepulveda']
  Set in the 1840s against the surreal and sensual backdrop of the then-Mexican state of California, the series tracks the end of an idyllic era there as American forces threaten brutality and war at the border to claim this breathtaking land for its own.
  
  *Emmy-award writer Janet Leahy (EP) will create the series.
  ['Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change']
  Netflix and Shondaland have acquired the rights to Ellen Pao's groundbreaking memoir detailing her life and career, including the lawsuit she brought against her former employer that sparked intense media scrutiny, shook Silicon Valley to its boys' club core and pre-saged the Time's Up movement.
  ['The Residence']
  Netflix and Shondaland have acquired the rights to Kate Andersen Brower's brilliant nonfiction book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, which offers a vividly accurate insider's account of White House residence staffers and the upstairs downstairs lives they share with the First Families at one of the most famous homes in history.
  ['Sunshine Scouts']
  In this darkly comedic half-hour series, an apocalyptic disaster spares a rag-tag group of teenage girls at sleepaway camp who must then summon their moxie and survival skills to weather the fallout and ensure all that remains of humanity abides by the Sunshine Scout Law.
  
  *Writer/actress Jill Alexander (Co-EP) will create the series.
  ['Hot Chocolate Nutcracker -]
  This documentary offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy's award-winning reimagining of the classic ballet, The Nutcracker. This staged contemporization – with its inclusive cast of all ages and its blend of dance traditions – has further cemented Debbie Allen's legacy as one of the greatest forces for good in dance.
  
  *Oliver Bokelberg (DP/Director Scandal) will serve as director, cinematographer and producer.
  
  Source: Netflix
  

• 'Ghost Recon Wildlands' adds a hardcore permadeath mode
  Ubisoft isn't just relying on cameos from aliens and iconic game characters to inject extra life into Ghost Recon Wildlands. When the Special Operation 2 pack arrives on July 24th, it'll include a Ghost Mode that adds some high-stakes realism. For one, death is permanent -- if your character falls in battle and isn't revived in time, all your hard work will amount to nothing. Friendly fire is also a real risk. And you'll want to be conservative with your shots, since you'll only have one primary weapon (you have to swap at ammo boxes or when looting) and will lose any unspent ammo in a given clip when you reload. If regular Wildlands seemed too soft, you won't have that problem from now on.
  
  The mode is available for every difficulty setting and will be available to everyone for free, although Year 2 Pass holders will get first crack. You'll have to wait until July 31st if you don't want to pay extra.
  
  There's more than just a no-forgiveness option, of course. Ubisoft is adding two player-versus-player maps, and it's revamping its Prestige economy to both let you earn credits in the regular campaign (not just Ghost War) and spend it on Prestige Packs that include customization. You'll also find an eSports- and stream-friendly Observer Mode for watching custom matches, a new victory screen to let you celebrate your triumphs and a True Solo mode that turns off AI teammates.
  
  Ubisoft is still keeping some details close to the vest (such as player-versus-environment missions, new themes and new classes). However, it's evident that the developer is following a strategy like the one that Ubisoft
  

• Vivaldi's New Qwant Privacy-Focused Search Engine, Microsoft Makes PowerShell Core a Snap, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 Now Available, Apache Software Foundation's Annual Report and More
  
  News briefs for June 20, 2018.
  
  Vivaldi Technologies has added a new privacy-focused search engine called Qwant to its Vivaldi web browser. Qwant doesn't store cookies or search history. Softpedia News quotes CEO and co-founder of Vivaldi Jon von Tetzchner: "We believe that the Internet can do better. We do not believe in tracking our users or in data profiling." You need version 1.15 of Vivaldi in order to enable Qwant.
  
  Microsoft has made its PowerShell Core available in the Snap Store as a Snap application, OMG Ubuntu reports, allowing "Linux users and admins on various distros to run the latest version of PowerShell securely and safely across desktop, laptop and IoT."
  
  Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 is now available. According to the press release, this new version "adds new content for automating across hybrid and multicloud environments, along with simplified connections to network APIs and updates for Ansible deployments overseeing Windows environments". It allows users "to more rapidly expand their infrastructure, without expanding manpower" and focuses on three areas of automation: multicloud, network and Windows.
  
  Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook announced the Open-Source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability. Phoronix reports that the initiative "is to enable consumers to transfer data directly from one server to another, without the need for downloading/uploading of the content". See also the Google Open Source blog for more information.
  
  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) released its annual report last week, which announced that the Foundation received open-source code worth more than $600 million by volunteer project contributors over a 12-month period. According to the post on IT Web, the report also covered one of the biggest crises for the ASF: "the Equifax data breach that affected 143 million consumers in the US and Canada as a result of a vulnerability in Apache Struts".
        News  Privacy  Vivaldi  Web Browsers  Microsoft  Snap  Red Hat  Ansible  Cloud  Apache                   

• Atomic Modeling with GAMGI
  by Joey Bernard   
  For this article, I'm moving back into the realm of chemistry software—specifically, the General Atomistic Modelling Graphic Interface, or GAMGI. GAMGI provides a very complete set of tools that allows you to design and visualize fairly complex molecules.
  
  GAMGI has the special ability to make creating repeating structures much easier, which is handy when you're trying to create crystalline structures.
  
  GAMGI should be available in the package repositories of most Linux distributions. For example, on Debian-based distros, you can install GAMGI with the following command:
    sudo apt-get install gamgi  
  There are also data and documentation packages (gamgi-data and gamgi-doc), and when you first start to use GAMGI, it's a good idea to install those packages as well.
  
  Once the packages are installed, you can start GAMGI from the command line or from your desktop environment's menu system. When it starts up, you get a blank canvas to begin your work.
  
  Figure 1. When you start GAMGI, you get a minimal set of tools to help begin your project.
  
  This interface is probably one of the more minimal ones of the chemistry packages that you are likely to use, but it hides all of the functionality that is present within GAMGI. It is object-oriented, in that all of the main elements are treated as independent objects, with properties and relationships to other objects. These elements include atoms, bonds, molecules and crystal planes. Each of them are built up of a number of the earlier ones. One extra piece that GAMGI has is the ability to work with orbitals. Let's walk through an example of a salt crystal (NaCl) to show how you can use GAMGI to do graphical analysis.
  
  When looking at a crystalline structure, you'll want to start by creating a cell in the window. You do this by clicking the Cell→Create menu item. Then you'll get a pop-up window where you can set several properties of the new cell.
  
  Figure 2. When you create a new cell for crystal structures, you can set several different properties on how it will be constructed.
  
  Since salt is a cubic crystal, you'll want to set the system value to c (for cubic), and set the lattice value to F (for face-centered). For each of these, you can get a full set of allowed values by clicking the associated "List" button. Clicking Ok creates the cell.
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• System76's New Manufacturing Facility, Ubuntu 17.10 Reaches End of Life, Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, Stranded Deep Now Available for Linux and Cutelyst New Release
  
  News briefs for July 19, 2018.
  
  System76 has moved into its new manufacturing facility in Denver, Colorado. The company will begin making computers in the US, rather than just assembling them. See the System76 blog post for photos of the new digs.
  
  Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" has reached end of life today, so there will be no more security updates for that version. If you're running Ubuntu 17.10, you need to upgrade to 18.04 now. See the post on It's FOSS for more information and instructions on how to upgrade.
  
  Google has rebranded its Cloud Launcher platform, and it now will be called the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace (or GCP Marketplace). LinuxInsider reports that "it will offer production-ready commercial Kubernetes apps, promising simplified deployment, billing and third-party licensing."
  
  Single-player survival game Stranded Deep is now available for Linux, GamingOnLinux reports, although users were reporting a few issues earlier this week. Stranded Deep is available on Steam.
  
  Cutelyst, a C++ web framework based on Qt, has a new release. The update includes several bug fixes and some build issues with buildroot. See Dantti's Blog for all the details. Cutelyst is available on GitHub.
        News  System76  Ubuntu  Google  Kubernetes  gaming  qt                   

• Using the Best CPU Available on Asymmetric Systems
  by Zack Brown   
  Dietmar Eggemann posted a patch from Quentin Perret to take advantage of energy-efficient CPUs on asymmetric multiprocessor (AMP) systems. AMP is distinguished from SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) systems in that an SMP system uses several instances of only one type of CPU, while an AMP system might use CPUs of differing speeds, feature-sets and so on.
  
  Quentin's patch was an effort to take advantage of differences in power consumption between the CPUs on an AMP system. It attempted to identify the most efficient CPU that was not already saturated with processes and assign newly awakened processes to it. If no CPUs fit the bill, standard SMP-type methods of processor assignment would be used instead.
  
  Dietmar explained, "The selection of the most energy-efficient CPU for a task is achieved by estimating the impact on system-level active energy resulting from the placement of the task on each candidate CPU. The best CPU energy-wise is then selected if it saves a large enough amount of energy with respect to prev_cpu."
  
  He acknowledged that this algorithm was a brute-force approach that could work well only on systems with a relatively small number of CPUs. He said, "This patch is an attempt to do something useful, as writing a fast heuristic that performs reasonably well on a broad spectrum of architectures isn't an easy task."
  
  Patrick Bellasi and Joel Fernandes had no serious objections to the patch and offered some technical suggestions. The discussion delved into various technical issues and specific ways of addressing them, with no one raising any controversial issues.
  
  This is the type of situation with a patch where it might look like a lack of opposition could let it sail into the kernel tree, but really, it just hasn't been thoroughly examined by Linux bigwigs yet. Once the various contributors have gotten the patch as good as they can get it without deeper feedback, they'll probably send it up the ladder for inclusion in the main source tree. At that point, the security folks will jump all over it, looking for ways that a malicious user might force processes all onto only one particular CPU (essentially mounting a denial-of-service attack) or some such thing. Even if the patch survives that scrutiny, one of the other big-time kernel people, or even Linus Torvalds, could reject the patch on the grounds that it should represent a solution for large-scale systems as well as small.
      Go to Full Article          

• Google Fined by EU for Antitrust Violations, Qt Creator 4.7.0 Now Available, New ownCloud Version 10.0.9, pfSense Gold to Be Free with the 2.4.4 Release, Kobol Relaunches Helios4
  
  News briefs for July 18, 2018.
  
  Google is being fined $5 billion USD for Android antitrust violations, The Verge reports. The EU Commission claims Google has abused Android dominance in three ways: "Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also allegedly blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and 'made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators' to exclusively bundle the Google Search app on handsets." It has 90 days to bring its "illegal conduct to an end in an effective manner". Google plans to appeal this decision.
  
  Qt Creator version 4.7.0 is now available. The release announcement notes that with this release, the Clang code model now is on by default to keep up with developments in C++. In addition, "the Clang code model provides much better information about issues in code without going through the edit-compile-analyze cycle explicitly." You can download the open-source version here.
  
  ownCloud's new version 10.0.9 includes improved password policy, S3 Object Storage integration and pending shares feature. According to the ownCloud press release, this new version increases security as "password policies can now be defined for all users, and a password history prevents previously used passwords from being set and the ability to accept or reject pending shares of received files provides additional control and security." You can download ownCloud here and its corresponding apps here.
  
  Netgate announces that pfSense Gold will be free with the 2.4.4 release, including all services previously offered under the pfSense Gold subscription, such as the pfSense Book and monthly online Hangouts (video conferences). In addition, AutoConfigBackup (ACB) also will be free and will conform to GDPR best practices. The 2.4.4 release is planned for September 2018.
  
  Kobol is relaunching Helios4 via its own funding campaign. The open-spec NAS SBC and fanned system "runs Debian on a Marvell Armada 388 SoC with 2GB ECC RAM and offers 1x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, and 4x SATA 3.0 ports for up to 48TB". According to the Linux Gizmos post, "So far, the Full Kit is half funded while the Basic Kit has drawn little interest. Kobol says that it will refund the money if the campaign doesn't reach its 500-unit goal by Aug. 5. Shipments are due in October."
        News  Google  Android  EU  qt  OwnCloud  pfSense  Security  Hardware  Embedded                   

• At Rest Encryption
  by Kyle Rankin   
  Learn why at rest encryption doesn't mean encryption when your laptop is asleep.
  
  There are many steps you can take to harden a computer, and a common recommendation you'll see in hardening guides is to enable disk encryption. Disk encryption also often is referred to as "at rest encryption", especially in security compliance guides, and many compliance regimes, such as PCI, mandate the use of at rest encryption. This term refers to the fact that data is encrypted "at rest" or when the disk is unmounted and not in use. At rest encryption can be an important part of system-hardening, yet many administrators who enable it, whether on workstations or servers, may end up with a false sense of security if they don't understand not only what disk encryption protects you from, but also, and more important, what it doesn't.
   What Disk Encryption Does
  In the context of Linux servers and workstations, disk encryption generally means you are using a system such as LUKS to encrypt either the entire root partition or only a particularly sensitive mountpoint. For instance, some Linux distributions offer the option of leaving the root partition unencrypted, and they encrypt each user's /home directories independently, to be unlocked when the user logs in. In the case of servers, you might leave root unencrypted and add encryption only to specific disks that contain sensitive data (like database files).
  
  In a workstation, you notice when a system is encrypted at rest because it will prompt you for a passphrase to unlock the disk at boot time. Servers typically are a bit trickier, because usually administrators prefer that a server come back up after a reboot without manual intervention. Although some servers may provide a console-based prompt to unlock the disk at boot time, administrators are more likely to have configured LUKS so that the key resides on a separate unencrypted partition. Or, the server may retrieve the key from the network using their configuration management or a centralized secrets management tool like Vault, so there is less of a risk of the key being stolen by an attacker with access to the filesystem.
  
  The main thing that at rest encryption protects you from is data loss due to theft or improper decommissioning of hard drives. If someone steals your laptop while it's powered off, your data will be protected. If someone goes into a data center and physically removes drives from a server with at rest encryption in place, the drives will spin down, and the data on them will be encrypted. The same goes for disks in a server that has been retired. Administrators are supposed to perform secure wiping or full disk destruction procedures to remove sensitive data from drives before disposal, but if the administrator was lazy, disk encryption can help ensure that the data is still protected if it gets into the wrong hands.
      Go to Full Article          

• Open Source at 20
  by Doc Searls   
  Open source software has been around for a long time. But calling it open source only began in 1998. Here's some history:
  
  Christine Peterson came up with the term "open source software"��in 1997 and (as she reports at that link) a collection of like-minded geeks decided on February 3, 1998 to get behind it in a big way. Eric S. Raymond became the lead evangelist when he published Bruce Perens led creating the Open Source Initiative later that month. Here at Linux Journal, we were all over it from the start as well. (Here's one example.)
  
  "Open source" took off so rapidly that O'Reilly started OSCON the next year, makingthis year's OSCON, happening now, the 19th one. (FWIW, at the 2005 OSCON, O'Reilly and Google together gave me an award for "Best Communicator" on the topic. I was at least among the most enthusiastic.)
  
  
  
  Google's Ngram Viewer, which searches through all scanned books from 1800 to 2008, shows (see above) that use of "open source" hockey-sticked quickly. Today on Google, "open source" gets 116 million results.
  
  But interest has been trailing off, as we see from Google Trends, which follows "interest over time."Here's how that looks since 2004:
      Go to Full Article          

• IBM's New Security-First Nabla Container, Humble Bundle's "Linux Geek Bundle", Updates on the Upcoming Atari VCS Console, Redesigned Files App for Chromebooks and Catfish 1.4.6 Released
  
  News briefs for July 17, 2018.
  
  IBM has a new container called Nabla designed for security first, ZDNet reports. IBM claims it's "more secure than Docker or other containers by cutting operating system calls to the bare minimum and thereby reducing its attack surface as small as possible". See also this article for more information on Nabla and this article on how to get started running the containers.
  
  Humble Bundle is offering a "Linux Geek Bundle" of ebooks from No Starch Press for $1 (or more—your choice) right now, in connection with It's FOSS. The Linux Geek bundle's books are worth $571 and are available in PDF, ePUB and MOBI format, and are DRM-free. Part of the purchase price will be donated to the EFF. See the It's FOSS post for the list of titles and more info.
  
  More information on the upcoming Atari VCS console due to launch next year has been released in a Q&A on Medium with Rob Wyatt, System Architect for the Atari VCS project. Rob provides more details on the hardware specs: "The VCS hardware will be powered by an AMD Bristol Ridge family APU with Radeon R7 graphics and is now going to get 8 gigabytes of unified memory. This is a huge upgrade from what was originally specified and unlike other consoles it's all available, we won't reserve 25% of hardware resources for system use." In addition, the Q&A covers the Atari VCS "open platform" and "Sandbox", compatible controllers and more.
  
  Google's Chrome OS team is working on redesigning its Files app for Chromebooks "with a new 'My Files' section that promises to help you better organize your local files, including those from any Android and Linux apps you might have installed." See the Softpedia News post for more information on this redesigned app for Android and Linux files and how to test it via the Chrome OS Canary experimental channel.
  
  Catfish 1.4.6 has been released, and it has now officially joined the Xfce family. According to the announcement, it's "lightweight, fast, and a perfect companion to the Thunar file manager. With the transition from Launchpad to Xfce, things have moved around a bit. Update your bookmarks accordingly!" Other new features include an improved thumbnailer, translation updates and several bug fixes. New releases of Catfish now can be found at the Xfce release archive.
        News  IBM  Containers  Nabla  Security  Books  gaming  Google  ChromeOS  Chromebooks  Catfish  XFCE                   

• A Look at Google's Project Fi
  by Shawn Powers   
  Google's Project Fi is a great cell-phone service, but the data-only SIMs make it incredible for network projects!
  
  I have a lot of cell phones. I have iPhones (old and new), Android phones (old, new, very old and funny-shaped), and I have a few legacy phones that aren't either Android or iPhone. Remember Maemo? Yeah, and I still have one of those old Nokia phones somewhere too. Admittedly, part of the reason I have such a collection is that I tend to hoard nostalgic technology, but part of it is practical too.
  
  I've used phones as IP cameras for BirdTopia (my recorded and streamed bird-feeder collection). I've created WiFi-only audiobook devices that I use when I'm out and about. I've used old phones as SONOS remotes, Plex players, Chromecast initiators and countless other tasks that tiny little computers are perfect for doing. One of the frustrating things about using old cell phones for projects like that though is they only have WiFi access, because adding multiple devices to a cell plan becomes expensive quickly. That's not the case anymore, however, thanks to Google's Project Fi.
  
  Most people love Project Fi because of the tower-hopping features or because of the fair pricing. I like those features too, but the real bonus for me is the "data only" SIM option. Like most people, I rarely make phone calls anymore, and there are so many chat apps, texting isn't very important either. With most cell-phone plans, there's an "access" fee per line. With Project Fi, additional devices don't cost anything more! (But, more about that later.) The Project Fi experience is worth investigating.
   What's the Deal?
  Project Fi is a play on the term "WiFi" and is pronounced "Project Fye", as opposed to "Project Fee", which is what I called it at first. Several features set Project Fi apart from other cell-phone plans.
  
  First, Project Fi uses towers from three carriers: T-Mobile, US Cellular and Sprint. When using supported hardware, Project Fi constantly monitors signal strength and seamlessly transitions between the various towers. Depending on where you live, this can mean constant access to the fastest network or a better chance of having any coverage at all. (I'm in the latter group, as I live in a rural area.)
  
  The second standout feature of Project Fi is the pricing model. Every phone pays a $20/month fee for unlimited calls and texts. On top of that, all phones and devices share a data pool that costs $10/GB. The data cost isn't remarkably low, but Google handles it very well. I recently discovered that it's not billed in full $10 increments (Figure 1). If you use 10.01GB of data, you pay $10.01, not $20.
      Go to Full Article          

• Debian "stretch" 9.5 Update Now Available, Red Hat Announces New Adopters of the GPL Cooperation Commitment, Linux Audio Conference 2018 Videos Now Available, Latte Dock v0.8 Released and More
  
  News briefs for July 16, 2018.
  
  Debian "stretch" has a new update, 9.5, the fifth update of the Debian 9 stable release. This version addresses several security issues and other problems. You can upgrade your current installation from one of Debian's HTTP mirrors.
  
  Red Hat announced that 14 additional companies have adopted the GPL Cooperation Commitment, which means that "more than 39 percent of corporate contributions to the Linux kernel, including six of the top 10 contributors" are now represented. According to the Red Hat press release, these commitments "reflect the belief that responsible compliance in open source licensing is important and that license enforcement in the open source ecosystem operates by different norms." Companies joining the growing movement include Amazon, Arm, Canonical, GitLab, Intel Corporation, Liferay, Linaro, MariaDB, NEC, Pivotal, Royal Philips, SAS, Toyota and VMware.
  
  The Linux Audio Conference announced that all videos from the 2018 conference in Berlin are now available. You can find the links here.
  
  Latte Dock v0.8 is now available. New features include multiple layouts simultaneously, smart dynamic background, unify global shortcuts for applets and tasks, and much more. Latte v0.8 is compatible with Plasma >= 5.12, KDE Frameworks >= 5.38, Qt >= 5.9. You can download it from here.
  
  Ubuntu has improved the user interface of its Snap Store website. It's FOSS reports that the updates make "it more useful for the users by adding developer verification, categories, improved search".
        News  Debian  Audio/Video  multimedia  licensing  Red Hat  Ubuntu  Snap  open source  Desktop  KDE