News briefs for July 5, 2018.
The EU has rejected the controversial "Copyright Directive" legislation. Mozilla's head of EU public policy stated "The European Parliament has today heard the voice of European citizens and voted against proposals that would have dealt a hammer blow to the open internet in Europe. The future of an open internet and creativity in Europe depends on it." Those in favor of the Directive said "rejecting it further entrenches the power of large US tech companies, while hurting individual artists and creators." The legislation now returns to the drawing board and will be sent in for another vote in September. See The Verge[1] for details on the provisions and hopes for an "open debate".
Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released[2] this week and are "trending stable" with major version packages. The packages updated include FFmpeg, KDE Plasma, GNOME Builder, Krita and a kernel update.
An infosec researcher who goes by Capt. Meelo has modified the NSA hacking tool called DoublePulsar (which was stolen last year and leaked online by a group called the Shadow Brokers) to work on the Windows IoT operating system. This could affect systems like IoT devices, point-of-sale kiosks and ATMS. BleepingComputer reports[3] that "the only way to protect against having these devices corraled into a botnet via DoublePulsar is to apply the security updates included in MS17-010, the security bulletin that contains patches against the hacking tools and exploits leaked online by The Shadow Brokers last year, including DoublePulsar."
Kdenlive needs your feedback[4]. You can help by downloading the Appimage[5] and trying it on your computer: "just download the file, make it executable through your file manager and run it". New features include clips with both video and audio are now separated automatically when dropped in the timeline, you can now easily enable/disable all clip types in the timeline, slow