People might not think about the Linux kernel all that much when talking about containers, serverless, and other hot technologies, but none of them would be possible without Linux as a solid base to build on, says Greg Kroah-Hartman.  He should know. Kroah-Hartman maintains the stable branch of the Linux kernel along with several subsystems.  He is also co-author of the Linux Kernel Development Report, a Fellow at The Linux Foundation, and he serves on the program committee for Open Source Summit.

In this article, we talk with Kroah-Hartman about his long involvement with Linux, the importance of community interaction, and the upcoming Open Source Summit.

The Linux Foundation: New technologies (cloud, containers, machine learning, serverless) are popping up on weekly basis, what’s the importance of Linux in the changing landscape?

Greg K-H: There’s the old joke, “What’s a cloud made of? Linux servers.” That is truer than most people realize. All of those things you mention rely on Linux as a base technology to build on top of.  So while people might not think about “Linux the kernel” all that much when talking about containers, serverless and the other “buzzwords of the day,” none of them would be possible without Linux being there to ensure that there is a rock-solid base for everyone to build on top of.  

The goal of an operating system is to provide a computing platform to userspace that looks the same no matter what hardware it runs on top of.  Because of this, people can build these other applications and not care if they are running it locally on a Raspberry Pi or in a cloud on a shared giant PowerPC cluster as everywhere the application API is the same.

So, Linux is essential for all of these new technologies to work properly and scale and move to different places as needed.  Without it, getting any of those things working would be a much more difficult task.

LF: You have been involved with Linux for a very long time. Has your role changed within the community? You seem to focus a lot on security these days.

Greg K-H: I originally started out as a driver writer, then helped write the security layer in the kernel many many years ago.  From there I started to maintain the USB subsystem and then co-created the driver model. From there I ended up taking over more driver subsystems and when the idea for the stable kernel releases happened back in 2005, I was one of the developers who volunteered for that.

So for the past 13 years, I’ve been doing pretty much the same thing, not much has changed since then except the increased number of stable trees I maintain at the same time to try to keep devices in the wild more secure.

I’ve been part of the kernel security team I think since it was started back in the early 2000’s but that role is more of a “find who to point the bug at” type of thing.  The kernel security team is there to help

take security problem reports and route them to the correct developer who maintains or knows that part of the kernel best.  The team has grown over the years as we have added the people that ended up getting called on the most to reduce the latency between reporting a bug and getting it fixed.

LF: We agree that Linux is being created by people all over the map, but once in a while it’s great to meet people in person. So, what role does Open Source Summit play in bringing these people together?

Greg K-H: Because open source projects are all developed by people who work for different companies and who live in different places, it’s important to get together when ever possible to actually meet the people behind the email if at all possible.  Development is an interaction that depends on trust, if I accept patches from you, then I am now responsible for those changes as well. If you disappear I am on the hook for them, so either I need to ensure they are correct, or even better, I can know that you will be around to fix the code if there is a problem.  By meeting people directly, you can establish a face behind the email to help smooth over any potential disagreements that can easily happen due to the lack of “tone” in online communication.

It’s also great to meet developers of other projects to hear of ways they are abusing your project to get it to bend to their will, or learn of problems they are having that you did not know about.  Or just learn about new things that are being developed in totally different development groups.  The huge range of talks at a conference like this makes it easy to pick up on what is happening in a huge range of different developer communities easily.

LF: You obviously meet a lot of people during the event. Have you ever come across an incident where someone ended up becoming a contributor or maintainer because of the exposure such an event provided?

Greg K-H: At one of the OSS conferences last year, I met a college student who was attending the conference for the first time.  They mentioned that they were looking of any project ideas that someone with their skill level could help out with. At a talk later that day a new idea for how to unify a specific subsystem of the kernel came up and how it was going “just take a bunch of grunt work” to accomplish.  Later that night, at the evening event, I saw the student again and mentioned the project to them and pointed them at the developer who asked for the help. They went off to talk in the corner about the specifics that would be needed to be done.

A few weeks later, a lot of patches started coming from the student and after a few rounds of review, were accepted by the maintainer.  More patches followed and eventually the majority of the work was done, which was great to see, the kernel really benefited from their contribution.

This year, I ran into the student again at another OSS conference and asked them what they were doing now.  Turns out they had gotten a job offer and were working for a Linux kernel company doing development on new products during their summer break.  Without that first interaction, meeting the developers directly that worked on the subsystem that needed the help, getting a job like that would have been much more difficult.

So, while I’m not saying that everyone who attends one of these types of conferences will instantly get a job, you will interact with developers who know what needs to be done in different areas of their open source projects.  And from there it is almost an easy jump to getting solid employment with one of the hundreds of companies that rely on these projects for their business.

LF: Are you also giving any talks at Open Source Summit?

Greg K-H:  I’m giving a talk about the Spectre and Meltdown problems that have happened this year.  It is a very high-level overview, going into the basics of what they are, and describing when the many different variants were announced and fixed in Linux.  This is a new security type of problem that is going to be with us for a very long time and I give some good tips on how to stay on top of the problem and ensure that your machines are safe.

Sign up to receive updates on Open Source Summit North America:

This article originally appeared at The Linux Foundation.

Mirembe, 24, lives in a rural village in north-east Uganda, where access to healthcare is limited. Mirembe is pregnant and walks, cradling her swollen belly and fanning herself from the heat, 15 kilometres to the closest clinic to check on her unborn child.

Hundreds of expectant mothers, elderly men and women, and sickly children line the corridors of the clinic patiently awaiting medical attention. Midwives and nurses are few, and they wearily dart from patient to patient doing what they can to help. Mirembe will wait six hours to be attended to.

When she’s finally seen, she’s told the clinic doesn’t have an ultrasound machine. If she wants to have an ultrasound, she must travel to the Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda’s largest public hospital, where she must pay 20,000 Ugandan shillings, equivalent to about US$5, for a prenatal visit. In this part of the world, that is a significant amount of money.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about 830 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications around the world every day. It’s estimated that in 2015, roughly 303 000 women died during and after pregnancy and childbirth. Many of these deaths were in low-resource locations like Uganda, and most could have been prevented.

However, technology is helping to eliminate some of the challenges of distance and lack of trained medical staff. Mirembe can now hear her unborn child’s heartbeat from the comfort of her own home through an innovative app call WinSenga, which reassures her that both she and her baby are healthy.

WinSenga is a mobile tool, supported by Microsoft technologies, which helps mothers with prenatal care. The idea was conceived when the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition inspired then-university students Okello and Aaron Tushabe to use their computer science skills to tackle some of Africa’s biggest problems. They were motivated by the plight of mothers like Mirembe who live outside the reach of modern medical care.

The handheld device scans the womb of a pregnant woman and reports foetal weight, position, breathing patterns, gestational age, and heart rate. The app makes use of a trumpet-shaped device and a microphone which transmits the data to a smart phone. The mobile application plays the part of the nurse’s ear and recommends a course of action. The analysis and recommendations are uploaded to the cloud and can be accessed by a doctor anywhere.

This is just one example of how Africa, a continent that bears one-quarter of the global disease burden but only has two percent of the world’s doctors, could outperform developed nations’ healthcare systems by leapfrogging over inefficiencies and legacy infrastructure.

In fact, digital healthcare in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is booming with the proliferation of disruptive solutions underpinned by 21^st century innovations like cloud, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Let’s talk telemedicine

One trend revolutionising the delivery of healthcare in MEA is telemedicine, which is the use of telecommunication and IT to provide clinical healthcare over long distances. Given the region’s high rate of mobile penetration, telemedicine is growing rapidly. In fact, the telemedicine market in MEA was estimated at $2.19 billion in 2015 and is projected to reach $3.67 billion in 2020.

Forward-thinking countries like Botswana are making swift progress when it comes to the implementation of sustainable telemedicine projects.  Microsoft and the Botswana Innovation Hub launched Africa’s first telemedicine service over TV white spaces in 2017. Through this initiative, clinics in outlying areas of Botswana can now access specialised care remotely using TV white spaces, which are unused broadcasting frequencies in the wireless spectrum.

San Diego Comic-Con, the world’s largest comic and pop-culture festival, is coming soon and Xbox is bringing the fun with exclusive gear, panels, celebrity guests, and more! See below for details on everything Xbox at SDCC and join the fun from California or from the comfort of your own couch.

Xbox Booth (San Diego Comic-Con badge required)
Hall A, Booth #100

For the first time ever, Xbox will have exclusive gear available at SDCC! Stop by to pick up exclusive clothing and items from Xbox and your favorite games and then get them customized on the spot with your Gamertag. See some of the items available here.

Visit us on Thursday, July 19 and Saturday, July 21 for signing sessions with some of your favorite developers and designers, but get there early: only the first 100 people to receive passes will be eligible!

Signings (San Diego Comic-Con badge required):

• Brendan Greene (“PlayerUnknown”), Creative Director, PUBG Corp – Thursday, July 19 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT
• Joe Neate, Executive Producer, and Mike Chapman, Design Director, Sea of Thieves – Saturday, July 21 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT

Xbox Gear Comic-Con Sweepstakes

Can’t make it to the booth to pick up the exclusive gear? Retweet @Xbox to potentially win an Xbox Gear Comic-Con prize pack! Four winners will receive a collection of exclusive Xbox Gear, and one grand prize winner will receive the gear and an Xbox One X.

Follow @Xbox or @XboxCanada on Twitter and retweet the following tweet when it goes live at the start of San Diego Comic-Con: “RT and follow for a chance to win exclusive #XboxSDCC #XboxGear! NoPurchNec. Ends 7/22/18. #Sweepstakes Rules: bit.ly/2KV2DQ1.” You have until July 22 to enter. Click through for the Official Rules.

Sea of Thieves Panel (San Diego Comic-Con badge required)
Room 5AB, Saturday, July 21 from 1:30pm – 2:30pm PDT

Special guest and Sea of Thieves fan Freddie Prinze Jr. (“Star Wars Rebels,” “24,” “Scooby Doo,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer”) joins the Rare crew, Joe Neate, Mike Chapman, and Peter Hentze as they discuss the lore and expanded universe of Sea of Thieves. Attendees will also receive a limited-edition Sea of Thieves comic and time-limited exclusive in-game DLC!

Xbox Live Sessions

If you’re not in San Diego but still want to follow along with the fun, we’re hosting two action-packed Xbox Live Sessions that you won’t want to miss.

• PUBG featuring Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene: On Thursday, July 19 at 5:00 p.m. PDT, PUBG Creative Director Brendan Greene (@PLAYERUNKNOWN) and Microsoft Executive Producer Nico Bihary (@nico_bihary) will join Rukari Austin (@rukizzelrukizzel) to get their loot on in PUBG’s Miramar map live from inside of a PUBG Bus created by West Coast Customs. That’s right – Xbox, PUBG Corp., and West Coast Customs have teamed up to create a one-of-a-kind, tricked out PUBG Bus which will be home to the livestream and available to see in-person at The Experience at Comic-Con.
• Sea of Thieves with Freddie Prinze Jr.: On Saturday, July 21 at 5:00 p.m. PDT, Sea of Thieves fan Freddie Prinze Jr. (@RealFPJr) will sail the high seas with members of the Rare team and Major Nelson in an episode of Xbox Live Sessions that’s sure to test the sea legs of the seasoned actor. Fans at home can tune in and watch on http://mixer.com/Xbox  and http://twitch.tv/Xbox.

Xbox at “The Experience at Comic-Con”

Head over to Petco Park where you can play Xbox One games, earn free swag, and win awesome prizes! No Comic-Con badge required.

• Visit the Samsung truck at The Experience at Comic-Con, located in the Lexus Lot at Petco Park. Climb aboard the truck to compete in Forza Motorsport 7 on Xbox One X via Samsung’s 2018 QLED TVs. More information can be found here.
• Come visit the first stop of the Xbox One Summer of PUBG tour. Win prizes, check out the PUBG Bus, and stick around for the Xbox Live Sessions! More information can be found here

For all the SDCC details, visit the Xbox SDCC website. For more Xbox news, follow @Xbox on Twitter and stay tuned to Xbox Wire. See you at San Diego Comic-Con!

Learn how to easily check Linux logs in this article from our archives.

At some point in your career as a Linux administrator, you are going to have to view log files. After all, they are there for one very important reason…to help you troubleshoot an issue. In fact, every seasoned administrator will immediately tell you that the first thing to be done, when a problem arises, is to view the logs.

And there are plenty of logs to be found: logs for the system, logs for the kernel, for package managers, for Xorg, for the boot process, for Apache, for MySQL… For nearly anything you can think of, there is a log file.

Most log files can be found in one convenient location: /var/log. These are all system and service logs, those which you will lean on heavily when there is an issue with your operating system or one of the major services. For desktop app-specific issues, log files will be written to different locations (e.g., Thunderbird writes crash reports to ‘~/.thunderbird/Crash Reports’). Where a desktop application will write logs will depend upon the developer and if the app allows for custom log configuration.

We are going to be focus on system logs, as that is where the heart of Linux troubleshooting lies. And the key issue here is, how do you view those log files?

Fortunately there are numerous ways in which you can view your system logs, all quite simply executed from the command line.

/var/log

This is such a crucial folder on your Linux systems. Open up a terminal window and issue the command cd /var/log. Now issue the command ls and you will see the logs housed within this directory (Figure 1).

Now, let’s take a peek into one of those logs.

Viewing logs with less

One of the most important logs contained within /var/log is syslog. This particular log file logs everything except auth-related messages. Say you want to view the contents of that particular log file. To do that, you could quickly issue the command less /var/log/syslog. This command will open the syslog log file to the top. You can then use the arrow keys to scroll down one line at a time, the spacebar to scroll down one page at a time, or the mouse wheel to easily scroll through the file.

The one problem with this method is that syslog can grow fairly large; and, considering what you’re looking for will most likely be at or near the bottom, you might not want to spend the time scrolling line or page at a time to reach that end. Will syslog open in the less command, you could also hit the [Shift]+[g] combination to immediately go to the end of the log file. The end will be denoted by (END). You can then scroll up with the arrow keys or the scroll wheel to find exactly what you want.

This, of course, isn’t terribly efficient.

Viewing logs with dmesg

The dmesg command prints the kernel ring buffer. By default, the command will display all messages from the kernel ring buffer. From the terminal window, issue the command dmesg and the entire kernel ring buffer will print out (Figure 2).

Fortunately, there is a built-in control mechanism that allows you to print out only certain facilities (such as daemon).

Say you want to view log entries for the user facility. To do this, issue the command dmesg –facility=user. If anything has been logged to that facility, it will print out.

Unlike the less command, issuing dmesg will display the full contents of the log and send you to the end of the file. You can always use your scroll wheel to browse through the buffer of your terminal window (if applicable). Instead, you’ll want to pipe the output of dmesg to the less command like so:

dmesg | less

The above command will print out the contents of dmesg and allow you to scroll through the output just as you did viewing a standard log with the less command.

Viewing logs with tail

The tail command is probably one of the single most handy tools you have at your disposal for the viewing of log files. What tail does is output the last part of files. So, if you issue the command tail /var/log/syslog, it will print out only the last few lines of the syslog file.

But wait, the fun doesn’t end there. The tail command has a very important trick up its sleeve, by way of the -f option. When you issue the command tail -f /var/log/syslog, tail will continue watching the log file and print out the next line written to the file. This means you can follow what is written to syslog, as it happens, within your terminal window (Figure 3).

Using tail in this manner is invaluable for troubleshooting issues.

To escape the tail command (when following a file), hit the [Ctrl]+[x] combination.

You can also instruct tail to only follow a specific amount of lines. Say you only want to view the last five lines written to syslog; for that you could issue the command:

tail -f -n 5 /var/log/syslog

The above command would follow input to syslog and only print out the most recent five lines. As soon as a new line is written to syslog, it would remove the oldest from the top. This is a great way to make the process of following a log file even easier. I strongly recommend not using this to view anything less than four or five lines, as you’ll wind up getting input cut off and won’t get the full details of the entry.

There are other tools

You’ll find plenty of other commands (and even a few decent GUI tools) to enable the viewing of log files. Look to more, grep, head, cat, multitail, and System Log Viewer to aid you in your quest to troubleshooting systems via log files.   

Advance your career with Linux system administration skills. Check out the Essentials of System Administration course from The Linux Foundation.

In the last two decades, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown from a very small community of data scientists to something that is woven into many people’s daily lives. Machine learning, computer vision, and other AI disciplines—supported by the cloud—are helping people achieve more, from mundane tasks, like avoiding a traffic jam, to revolutionary breakthroughs, like curing cancer.

Over the past year, Microsoft has been on a journey to apply these transformative technologies to the world’s biggest environmental challenges. On July 12, 2017, Microsoft launched AI for Earth as a $2 million program in London, with a goal of providing AI and cloud tools to researchers working on the frontlines of environmental challenges in the areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity, and climate change.

Since that time, AI for Earth has grown into a $50 million over five-year program, with 112 grantees in 27 countries and seven featured projects. People are using machine learning and computer vision to learn more than previously possible about our planet and how it’s changing, and increasingly using these insights to chart a better future.

These are big goals, but we’re confident in our ability to get there because we know how advanced our tools like machine learning and computer vision already are. Consider machine learning. We have come a long way from the simple pattern-matching of ELIZA. Fifteen years ago, when I got my degree in artificial intelligence, problems like facial recognition, machine translation, and speech recognition were dreams of the field, and now they are solved problems. Among other things, machine learning can group similar items together, detect unusual occurrences, and construct mathematical models of historical data to make future predictions.

These techniques are incredibly helpful for sorting through large amounts of data. Today, we’re excited to share a new story about the power of this technology that also helps answer a basic question: what is the value of AI when we don’t have massive amounts of data already waiting to be processed? This is an issue for many individuals and organizations working in the field of biodiversity, especially when the species are very small, travel great distances, and are hidden from public view.

That’s precisely the challenge we set out to address recently at the most magical place in the world – Walt Disney World Resort. Purple martins are yearly visitors to Disney, nesting at the park before returning their journey to the Brazilian Amazon. Disney scientists have been working with the purple martin community and have provided homes for the families for the past 20 years, studying the conservation of the species with more than 170 nests each year. Despite their annual visits, there is still lots to be learned about nesting behavior of these birds, in part because they nest in enclosed structures known as gourds. Some of what is known is troubling – the species is in decline, with an estimated population drop of 40 percent since 1966.

How do you close this data gap quickly to better understand the species to protect their future? Enter AI. Tiny connected homes, including cameras and cloud-connected sensors were installed, and those combined with computer vision began to deliver data on behaviors that were infrequently observed, like hatching, the caring for and growth of purple martins. External factors, like temperature, humidity, and air pressure were also recorded. Disney and Microsoft hope to expand this work, and AI will help pull all this data together to deliver insights in hopes of inspiring the next generation of conservationists to protect the purple martins for the future.

While this is our newest story, this work is happening across the world. We’re proud to support AI-enabled solutions for biodiversity, including:

PAWS: Machine learning to predict poaching. Spearheaded by a team of researchers at USC, an AI for Earth partner, with additional work being done by a member of the team now at Carnegie Mellon University, an AI for Earth grantee, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) processes data about previous poaching activities in an area and creates optimized routes for rangers to patrol based on where poaching is most likely to occur. These routes are also randomized to keep poachers from learning and adapting to patrol patterns. Currently, the PAWS algorithm is being improved so that it can incorporate new information that rangers see while on patrol—such as human footprints—to alter the proposed patrol route in real-time.

Access to ranger patrol data is key. That’s why PAWS partnered with the Uganda Wildlife Authority at Queen Elizabeth National Park. They had collected 14 years of patrol data and more than 125,000 observations on animal sightings, snares, animal remains, and other signs of poaching. PAWS is now being used in several parks, and the system has led to more observations of poacher activities per kilometer than were possible without technology.

Wildbook: Machine learning and computer vision to identify species. One of our newest featured projects, Wild Me, is showing what is possible by pushing the limits of computer vision, with an AI tool that smartly identifies, captions, and moderates pictures. Researchers often have little meaningful data on species. But computer vision makes it possible to tap into an explosion of images, available for free or at a low cost from camera traps, drones, professional photographers, safari-goers, and citizen scientists. Wild Me is not only using computer vision to identify images of zebras, for example, but is also identifying the individual animals in photos—helping to address a fundamental problem in conservation. If we can identify individual animals, then this eliminates the need for physically tagging them, which can harm the animal.

This new data on animals then goes into Wildbook, the platform developed by Wild Me. Using machine learning, it’s possible to either match an animal within the database or determine that the individual is new. Once an animal is identified, it can be tracked in other photographs. Wildbook stores information about the animals, such as their location at a specific time, in a fully developed database. This combination of AI tools and human ingenuity makes it possible to connect information about sightings with additional relevant data, enabling new science, conservation, and education at unprecedented scales and resolution. With a much more detailed and useful picture of what is happening, researchers and other decision-makers are able to implement new, more effective conservation strategies.

We see incredible potential and tremendous progress in our grantees’ work and in the explosive pace at which new algorithms are being built, refined, and made publicly available. And these are just a few of the grantees, featured projects, and partners we’re working with in the area of biodiversity; there’s equally exciting work in water, agriculture, and climate change that we look forward to sharing in the near future on this blog. Check out the amazing organizations and individuals we’re supporting, apply for a grant to join us or our new partnership with National Geographic Society, or just follow our progress on Twitter by following @Microsoft_Green, or me at @jennifermarsman.

Tags: AI for Earth, biodiversity, conservation, Microsoft

By Malcolm Owen
Wednesday, July 18, 2018, 12:14 pm PT (03:14 pm ET)

Apple is continuing to increase the number of autonomous vehicles it has on the roads for testing, reportedly registering more vehicles with the Californian Department of Motor Vehicles to bring the fleet up to 66 self-driving cars operating in the state.

In a recent filing with the state DMV spotted by Macreports, the 66 cars being used by Apple are being controlled by 111 registered drivers. This is an increase in both vehicles and drivers since May 14, when Apple had 55 test vehicles and 83 authorized drivers.

The increases suggest Apple is adding more vehicles to the fleet at a steady rate. The previous update on March 20 claimed there to be 45 Apple-owned self-driving cars, which would put Apple at introducing roughly ten more cars to the collection every two months.

Despite the increases, Apple still does not operate the most autonomous test vehicles in the state. California’s records indicate Apple’s fleet to be the third-largest, behind the 117 cars and 333 drivers for GM Cruise, as well as the 72 cars and 411 drivers of Waymo. Tesla has 39 cars and 92 registered drivers in its own project.

California has issued 56 autonomous vehicle testing permits, with 468 approved vehicles operated by 1,677 approved drivers. Notably, Apple has yet to apply for a driverless car permit from the DMV, suggesting it would prefer to continue with driver-assisted testing for the moment.

Worked on under the “Project Titan” name, Apple’s autonomous vehicle technology was originally thought to be part of a branded car, but the focus reportedly changed to just the self-driving vehicle system in late 2016. It is unclear what the current goal for Apple’s work is, but it is thought to be the autonomous platform itself rather than an entire vehicle, with the potential of partnering with an outside firm to create a ridehailing service.

A connected self-driving project intending to shuttle company employees between facilities was reported in May to use Volkswagon T6 Transporter vans, after attempts to negotiate with BMW to work on the project allegedly failed. Running from Palo Alto to Infinite Loop, the PAIL program will include specialized dashboards, seats, and extensive modifications made to the vehicles, and will still be operated by a back-up driver and co-pilot, in case the self-driving element fails.

Apple is also expanding the self-driving car team with senior Waymo engineer and NASA JPL engineer Jamie Waydo, who was responsible for checking the safety of prototype vehicles and coaching the autonomous competitor ahead of real-world road tests in Phoenix. Before Waymo, Waydo’s time at NASA included working on one of the agency’s Mars rovers.

Project Titan has also been the subject of attempted trade secret theft, with one former Apple employee entering a plea of not guilty on July 16, after being accused of stealing a 25-page detailed schematic of a circuit board intended for use in an autonomous vehicle.