News and Update
Alfred and AppLee presented.
Amersfoort
On December 7, we will have an event at the hacker space in Amersfoort in the Netherlands. It will be an informal event where you can pop in and find out more about Ubuntu Touch.
We always make your privacy the top issue
Instead of talking about development this time, we would like to say a bit about OTA 7.
The latest OTA is for Focal and we released it quickly because we found a security issue. The trust store settings in PulseAudio have become corrupted and the protection settings made optional. That includes when an attacker or a malicious app talk or tell to unload the security module, it would have full access to microphones without the user having to agree with that.
In practical terms that meant that a malicious app could turn on the microphone without the phone user being aware of it.
There was some other changes. Confined apps were able to crash PulseAudio on a Bluetooth device when the virtual device was removed.
With the update, if you have the CUPS module installed as a Snap, you will now see the printing interface, the settings configuration and also for those who very often disconnect or reconnect their external monitors on their phone might be happy to know that the display hot plugging and external monitor reconnect issue has been fixed.
With Fairphone 5 we have now enabled hot plugging of external displays.
We always make your privacy the top issue.
OpenStore apps news
We now go to the OpenStore and new stuff there. There are two new apps.
Eintracht Frankfurt is an app for managing your supporter account for the football team. It is a webapp but seems to work very smoothly.
GSforecast is a weather app based on gsmeteo.ru. It contains a lot of information much appreciated by AppLee who is a meteorology buff.
Thanks Siningsoft and Vlad for those.
Rock paper scissors lizard Spock has been updated. It stopped working when Focal was introduced, but now it is working again.
uRSSes was in the same situation. It was working before but has now been updated to work in Focal.
Thank you Joan and Eran.
PureMaps and PureMaps slim have been updated to enable new maps and tiling. It is a great app. Many thanks to Jonathan for the update and to all those who have been helping him.
Also updated was Launcher Modular. In addition to some bug fixes there is a new feature which allows you to carry out some small calculations in the search bar.
Amazfish has seen some tidying up of the UI.
hwpplayers has also had an update. It brings up a page for that community. Credit to Mert.
Random Creature has been rescued and is now working on Focal. Thanks again go to Joan.
Tagatuos is a personal expenses diary. So thanks for this very interesting and very future. It has a very beautiful user interface. A lot of work has been put into new features and refinement. Kugi has done fantastic work on this.
Nymea and TimeManagement apps are very kindly maintained for us by two professional developers. So a big shout out to them.
Sponsors were thanked. We are truly grateful for every donation and making a donation is very easy to do. Select one of our options.
Remember, we have an online shop where you can buy merch and support UBports that way and it is okay also to donate to specific projects within Ubports.
We would like to give our thanks to everyone who watches these webcasts. It is nice to know that we are not here alone!
Questions
The News section of our Forum is the best place to post questions for the Q&A. YouTube live chat, Telegram and Matrix are other places to post a question.
If you didn't know, the Forum questions get priority.
More about PulseAudio issue
Messayisto asked for some clarification of the PulseAudio issue which led to the rapid upload of OTA7. The issue was a possible override of TrustPromp by an unprivileged app. We don’t think that there has been any practical issue. An attacker would have to know about the vulnerability and then design an app to exploit it so we don’t think that anyone has been put at risk.Documentation and repository porting
Kuailexs asked a series of questions about how to upload a port repository. Also, how to apply for the necessary permissions and to add documentation to the website.The answer is easy. Contact us via Telegram in the ut_porting group. Tell us what you want to do and we will make the necessary arrangements. We can arrange for your build to be transferred into our Gitlab.
It was an interesting question because we do have ways of doing it, but we haven’t set that out in any documentation.
Aribk said that they have made extensive updates to the online porting guide and circulated the draft in some groups. What is actually the best way to have it reviewed? They explain that they have been using some AI tools and that makes it even more important that there is detailed feedback.
Alfred will try to find time to read through the changes, but if anyone else out there has some detailed knowledge of porting they are strongly urged to look at the new wording and submit their own observations.
If you are pushed for time as most of us are, it would be very helpful if you could contact Ari directly and at least let him know a time by which you might be able to give some feedback.
Lenovo tablet experience
Ban Jo asked whether the UT experience is as good on the Lenovo tablet as it is on a phone? Depends, of course, what you use a tablet for but generally speaking, it performs very well. Of course not all ports are complete so he would have to check on the details for the particular device but Lenovo should be pretty good.Kristoffer responded that he thinks Lenovo have recently blocked unlocking of the bootloader, in which case it will no longer be possible to load UT.
We are so small that vendors are not really interested in us so the locking of bootloaders continues.
See you next time :-)