Month: December 2019

Enlarge / You want receipts? I got receipts. (credit: Jim Salter)

As of this morning, Linux network stack maintainer David Miller has committed the WireGuard VPN project into the Linux "net-next" source tree. Miller maintains both net and net-next—the source trees governing the current implementation of the Linux kernel networking stack and the implementation of the next Linux kernel's networking stack, respectively.

This is a major step forward for the WireGuard VPN project. Net-next gets pulled into the new Linux kernel during its two-week merge window, where it becomes net. With WireGuard already a part of net-next, this means that—barring unexpected issues—there should be a Linux kernel 5.6 release candidate with built-in WireGuard in early 2020. Mainline kernel inclusion of WireGuard should lead to significantly higher uptake in projects and organizations requiring virtual private network capability.

Normal, day-to-day Linux users probably won't see in-kernel WireGuard until late 2020. Ubuntu is one of the faster-moving mainstream distributions, and its next Long Term Support (LTS) release is in April 2020. But the Linux 5.6 kernel and Ubuntu 20.04 will likely be in release candidate status at the same time, so its inclusion in 20.04 seems unlikely. The interim 20.10 Ubuntu release seems like a much safer bet for Canonical's first use of a 5.6 or later kernel. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) inclusion will likely be a year or more beyond that; the current RHEL 8.1 shipped in May 2019 with the 4.18 kernel, which was already 9 months old.

Enlarge / The JEDI contract is central to DOD's efforts to rapidly adopt cloud technology. But the winner-take-all contract offer has been controversial from the start—and now Amazon claims President Trump put a whole lot more than a finger on the scales to ensure AWS lost. (credit: Department of Defense)

In a redacted filing released today by the US Federal Court of Claims, attorneys for Amazon asserted that Amazon Web Service's loss of the Department of Defense Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract to Microsoft's Azure was the result of "improper pressure from President Donald J. Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy—Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and CEO of AWS' parent company, Amazon.com, Inc. ("Amazon"), and owner of the Washington Post."

The suit cites Trump's instructions to former Secretary of Defense James Mattis to "screw Amazon" out of the contract, as recounted by Mattis' former chief speechwriter, and numerous other incidents of direct interference by Trump in the contract competition, including ordering an "independent" review of the contract by Defense Secretary Mark Esper in August of 2019.

JEDI was awarded to Microsoft in October. The $10 billion contract is for a DOD-wide enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) program providing compute and storage services—including delivering them to the "tactical edge," giving troops in the field access to critical data. The initial expenditure, scheduled for the first year of the contract, would be just $1 million—but it would be followed by a base two-year ordering period and up to eight years of optional extensions out to 2029, with a capped value of $10 billion.

It has been more than 30 years since Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd first strapped on their proton packs to battle a ghostly infestation in Manhattan in the 1984 blockbuster comedy Ghostbusters. Now the legacy continues. Sony Pictures just dropped the first trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a sequel directed by Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking), featuring a whole new team.

Reitman is a fitting choice to direct, as he's the son of Ivan Reitman, director of the 1980s films. You may have glimpsed Jason, his mother, and his sister in the original Ghostbusters as residents who are fleeing their haunted skyscraper. Reitman resisted following in his father's footsteps for years before finally succumbing to the call. “I’ve always thought of myself as the first Ghostbusters fan, when I was a 6-year-old visiting the set,” Reitman told EW back in January. “This is the next chapter in the original franchise. It is not a reboot. What happened in the ’80s happened in the ’80s, and this is set in the present day.”

Vanity Fair offered a first look at the latest film last week, featuring several stills—including one showing the original Ghostbusters tricked-out ambulance. Per the official synopsis, "A single mother and her two children move to Summerville, Oklahoma, after inheriting property from a previously unknown relative. They discover their family's legacy to the original Ghostbusters, who have become something of a myth, as many have long since forgotten the events of the 'Manhattan Crossrip of 1984'"—i.e., the events of the original film. Carrie Coon (The Leftovers) plays mom Callie, while Mckenna Grace (The Haunting of Hill House) plays her science-loving daughter Phoebe. Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) plays son Trevor.

Enlarge / The Yahoo Groups home page (for now). (credit: Yahoo)

An ad-hoc group scrambling to archive as much content as possible from Yahoo Groups ahead of the site's final demise next week is running into trouble as more than a hundred volunteer archivists say Yahoo's parent company, Verizon, has banned their accounts.

Yahoo Groups has been on the wane for years, but Verizon announced its official date of death two months ago. Users were blocked from uploading or posting new content to the site as of October 28, and all content currently on the site is slated to be deleted on December 14—less than one week from now.

Members of the Archive Team have been working rapidly to preserve content from as many groups as possible in that six-week time frame. The volunteers have been using "semi-automated" scripts to join groups rapidly and are using a third-party tool known as PGOffline to access messages, photos, and files not captured by Verizon/Yahoo's data download or export tool. They estimate that as a result of this weekend's blocks, they have now lost access to 80 percent of the material they were attempting to preserve.

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  The new OnePlus midranger. It has a hole punch for the front camera. [credit: OnLeak x 91Mobiles ]

2020 will bring all the usual yearly updates from all the usual phone vendors, but one interesting new addition is a cheaper smartphone from OnePlus. The king of value flagship smartphones is making what looks like a midrange device.

The news come to us from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, which have whipped up CAD-based renders of the device. OnLeaks says there's no name for the device yet, but for now, the report is going with "OnePlus 8 Lite." The render shows a device with a flat display measuring somewhere around 6.4-inches and a front camera that lives in a hole punch in the middle of the display, just like a Samsung device. The hole-punch camera is apparently the design OnePlus will go with across its lineup—OnLeaks has released "OnePlus 8 Pro" renders earlier, featuring this same Samsung-y front camera design.

Other features on the render include two cameras and a lot of sensors on the back, a USB-C port and speaker on the bottom, and a physical mute switch on the side. It's hard to imagine an Android phone shipping without a fingerprint reader (unless you're Google, I guess), so an in-screen fingerprint reader is probably included. There's no headphone jack, which is a shame for a mid-range device.