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Firefox Lets Users Try New Features With ‘Test Pilot’

Mozilla seeks user feedback with a new project that gives users a chance to take planned features for a test flight.

On Tuesday Mozilla announced a new program for Firefox that allows users to try features that are in the works but not yet ready for prime time. The news of the new program, called Test Pilot, came by way of a Mozilla Blog post by Nick Nguyen, the organization’s vice president of Firefox product. He said that the program will not only allow users an early look at yet to be implemented planned features, but will give Firefox’s developers a chance to get feedback from the community.

Mozilla Firefox Test Pilot logo“When building features for hundreds of millions of Firefox users worldwide, it’s important to get them right,” he wrote. “To help figure out which features should ship and how they should work, we created the new Test Pilot program.”

Slices of Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi Report

Covered in this report: The Pi gets new cameras, another U.S. Picademy, monitoring health conditions with MedPi and the AstroPi in low Earth orbit.

Quite a lot has happened in the Raspberry Pi world since my last article. From new hardware to Picademy, the past couple of weeks have been great, filled with news story after great news story. The month of April ended on a high note, with the release of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for the Pi, and the month of May looks to keep carrying that trend. I realize how hard it is to keep up with the all the Raspberry Pi news, so here are what I consider to be some of the high points.

ImageMagick’s ImageTragick: Exploits Not Yet Widespread

Breaking News: Patched versions of ImageMagick now available.

FOSS Force has now learned that the ImageTragick hole has been patched in versions 7.0.1-2 and 6.9.4-0. Websites using ImageMagick are urged to upgrade.

Security researchers are reporting that cracker/hackers are currently taking advantage of ImageTragick, the easy to exploit security vulnerability in ImageMagick, a popular open source image manipulation tool used by many websites. However, so far the attacks don’t appear to be widespread.

Surprise! Microsoft Ending Free Upgrades to Windows 10

Microsoft announced on Thursday that the end-of-life is coming soon to its free upgrade-to-Windows 10 scheme. Afterwards, the operating system won’t be cheap.

Just because Steve Ballmer is no longer at the helm in Redmond doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t go completely bonkers on occasion. On Thursday, the company announced in a blog that free upgrades to Windows 10 are coming to an end.

Microsoft Windows 10
Windows 10 build 10240 with the Start menu and Action Center open.
While this is a totally expected move — Microsoft always said the free upgrades were for a limited time — it’s not going to happen the way many had anticipated, or in a way that would make sense in today’s market. There’s not going to be a pay-as-you-go subscription model, nor is Windows 10 going to be offered at “attractive” prices. Instead, it’s going to be the same old game. Despite all the talk we’ve heard from Redmond about how Windows in no longer the backbone of the company, the operating system is evidently still seen as a cash cow to be milked for more than it’s worth.

Toronto Getting a Free Meshnet, Six New Distro Releases & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Also: We hear more from DuckDuckGo about its open source donations and welcome Robin “Roblimo” Miller to the FOSS Force team.

While the big news in FOSS media this week was the Ubuntu Online Summit, I wasn’t there. Too far to travel. However, the big news seems to be that Mir and Unity 8 won’t be the defaults when Canonical ships Ubuntu 16.10 on October 20, although both “will be available as an ‘alternative session,’” according to OMG! Ubuntu! Ho-hum. Now on to some real FOSS news…

Toronto
Thanks to two developers, Toronto’s getting a free encrypted Internet meshnet.
By chensiyuan (chensiyuan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The most interesting story this week, to me at least, was a report by Motherboard on efforts underway to bring a free encrypted mesh network to Toronto. A mesh network relies on a series of wireless nodes which only need to be connected to the Internet at a single point. The plan is the brainchild of two local developers, Mark Iantorno and Benedict Lau, who plan to deploy Raspberry Pis as nodes. Meshnets already exist in Barcelona, Berlin, and New York City.

DuckDuckGo Gives $225,000 to Open Source Projects

DuckDuckGo, “the search engine that doesn’t track you,” involves its users in the selection process as it hands out nine $25,000 awards to mostly FOSS projects.

It appears as if people have been using DuckDuckGo’s privacy centered search enough to make the company successful. Certainly not we-control-the-world successful like Google, but successful enough to give it some cash-on-hand breathing room. Also successful enough for the company to give back to the community by handing out $225,000 to some free and open source projects.

DuckDuckGo logoThis isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Last year they handed out $125,000 to five projects — meaning that this year they’ve nearly doubled down on their bet. Last year’s donations included money going to the Electronic Frontier Foundations Privacy Badger — a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other trackers from following users — and Girl Develop It for its Open Source Mentorship program.

Open Source ImageMagick Security Bug Puts Sites at Risk

A security vulnerability in the open source ImageMagick graphics tool used by a large number of websites could allow a malicious payload to be executed onsite.

ImageMagick, an open source suite of tools for working with graphic images used by a large number of websites, has been found to contain a serious security vulnerability that puts sites using the software at risk for malicious code to be executed onsite. Security experts consider exploitation to be so easy they’re calling it “trivial,” and exploits are already circulating in the wild. The biggest risk is to sites that allows users to upload their own image files.

Information about the vulnerability was made public Tuesday afternoon by Ryan Huber, a developer and security researcher, who wrote that he had little choice but to post about the exploit.

Tuesday Is ‘International Day Against DRM’

On Tuesday, May 3, people in communities around the world will gather to take a stand against digital rights management.

Tuesday May 3 is International Day Against DRM, which for ten years has been an annual even to protest and build awareness about digital rights management. The event is sponsored by the organization Defective by Design, the anti-DRM initiative of the Free Software Foundation.

International Day Against DRM

RMS Gets Award, OwnCloud Founder Resigns & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Also: Ubuntu gets ready for Yakkety Yak (don’t talk back), Tails has a new release with an updated TOR browser and Android apps are coming to a Chromebook near you.

Here in the Tar Heel State, MerleFest, featuring performances by John Prine and John Oates sans Daryl Hall, dominates the news. That’s mainly because there are no college hoops being played now that this year’s NCAA March Madness thing has been entered into the record books.

There’s not much talk about this year’s NCAA tourney around here anymore, as “we’re number two” just doesn’t have the proper ring to it. So we talk about other things instead, with how fast the grass is growing topping most people’s list and MerleFest a close second.

Me? I talk about FOSS, and there’s plenty to talk about this week…

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