Facebook quietly dropped support for Oculus Go games and apps from the Oculus Quest 2’s feature set, essentially cutting an entire library of games made for the mid-tier Go headset off from any new VR adopters moving forward.

There wasn’t much of an official announcement. Instead, Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack noted the end of support in tweet spotted by the Road to VR team today. In that tweet, Carmack said that he “totally lost the internal debate over backwards compatibility” and that the Quest 2 doesn’t offer Go emulation because of it.

Oculus-parent Facebook announced plans to bring Oculus Go emulation to the original Quest headset last year, and started to wind down support for the standalone Oculus Go headset just a few months back. With all that in tandem, Go game developers might have had some peace of mind that their apps could live on through emulation on still-supported headsets, but it looks like that won’t be the case.

Given that the Quest 2 is Oculus’ official, and really only, entry point for new VR users, this means that any new adopters won’t be able to purchase or download apps for a system that Oculus just last year called “a game-changer” that “opened up VR to many more people” and “helped redefine immersive entertainment.”

What you need to know:

• Combining Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge network with Microsoft Azure can bring more computing power even closer to end customers, allowing businesses to create extremely low lag experiences
• Ice Mobility is already using 5G and mobile edge computing (MEC) to help with quality control in their pick and pack process by using computer vision to drive efficiencies

NEW YORK and REDMOND, WA – Verizon is joining forces with Microsoft Corp. to create new ways for enterprises to accelerate the delivery of fast and secure 5G applications, benefiting from reliable and low-latency connections. Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge network integrated with Azure edge services can enable ultra-low latency, many times faster than the blink of an eye, which can help businesses tap into real-time data analysis and delivery. Applications incorporating computer vision, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, digital twins or machine learning can be enhanced with 5G and MEC on the customer premise, helping transform the way industries such as retail, transportation, and logistics operate.

Think of automated high-precision asset localization, tracking and positioning in manufacturing. In healthcare, the increased speed, reduced latency and high bandwidth connectivity of 5G networks could enable real-time precision medicine leveraging mixed reality and AI capabilities as well as seamless and fast sharing of large files to improve patient care.

The collaboration brings Azure cloud and edge capabilities together with Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge, a mobile edge computing platform designed to enable developers to build applications for mobile end-users and wireless edge devices with ultra-low latency. By utilizing on-site private 5G, businesses will be able to realize increased power efficiencies and reduced costs of end user devices while addressing their privacy and security needs.

“We have built a network that provides real-world, 5G-enabled solutions TODAY,” said Rima Qureshi, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Verizon. “By bringing together Verizon’s 5G network and on-site 5G Edge platform with Microsoft’s expertise in cloud services, we will enable the development of the next generation technologies everyone has been envisioning.”

Logistics and supply chain solutions company Ice Mobility is already testing on Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge platform, integrated with Microsoft Azure. The company is using 5G and MEC to help with computer vision assisted product packing. By gathering data in near real-time on product packing errors, the company has the potential to improve on-site quality assurance and save 15% to 30% in processing time.

“We are especially excited to join Verizon and Microsoft to test how 5G and MEC can improve the quality assurance process,” said Mike Mohr, CEO of Ice Mobility. “They truly have listened to our needs to provide automated real-time quality oversight and feedback, which will enable us to cost-effectively launch unique new products, while maintaining the highest execution standards, significantly increasing throughput and reducing costs. And, this is just the beginning.”

“By leveraging Verizon’s 5G network integrated with Microsoft’s cloud and edge capabilities, developers and businesses can benefit from fast, secure and reliable connections to deliver seamless digital experiences from massive industrial IoT workloads to precision medicine,” said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president Azure for Operators at Microsoft.

Moving forward, Verizon will explore opportunities to co-innovate with Microsoft to deliver new value to industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare.

Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network enables throughput at least 25 times faster than today’s 4G networks*; delivers ultra-low latency; and offers very high bandwidth. Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband is expected to eventually enable 100 times larger data volumes than 4G; and the ability to connect more than a million devices per kilometer. Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service is available to people in 55 cities and its 5G Nationwide service is available to more than 200 million people in more than 1,800 cities around the U.S.

Learn more information about Verizon 5G Edge, Verizon’s 5G technology and explore how Microsoft is working with operators.

About Verizon

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) was formed on June 30, 2000 and is celebrating its 20th year as one of the world’s leading providers of technology, communications, information and entertainment products and services. Headquartered in New York City and with a presence around the world, Verizon generated revenues of $131.9 billion in 2019. The company offers data, video and voice services and solutions on its award winning networks and platforms, delivering on customers’ demand for mobility, reliable network connectivity, security and control.

VERIZON’S ONLINE MEDIA CENTER: News releases, stories, media contacts and other resources are available at www.verizon.com/about/news/. News releases are also available through an RSS feed. To subscribe, visit www.verizon.com/about/rss-feeds/.

* Source: Based on analysis by Ookla® of Speedtest Intelligence® data median download speeds from Verizon 5G results compared to the median 4G LTE speeds of top U.S. carriers combined in Q2 2020. Ookla trademarks used under license and reprinted with permission.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Microsoft Media Contact:

Microsoft Media Relations

WE Communications for Microsoft

(425) 638-7777

rrt@we-worldwide.com

Media Contact:

Chris Ashraf

christina.moon.ashraf@verizon.com

201.320.4259

Twitter: @ChrisMoonPR

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Make your plan to vote here: https://t.co/Btygx6QJOr pic.twitter.com/FAN8G45hOJ

— NBA 2KTV (@NBA2K_2KTV) October 16, 2020

Roblox, the popular programmable sandbox video game, have just announced their intentions to go public, seeking an initial valuation of 8 Billion dollars. After their most recent round of venture capital, Roblox is currently valued at half that, with a 4B$ valuation.

Interestingly according to Reuters Roblox may go public in a very non-conventional way.

Roblox is weighing whether to go public through a traditional initial public offering or a direct listing, the sources said, cautioning that the plans are subject to market conditions.

The sources requested anonymity as the plans are private. Roblox declined to comment.

In a direct listing, no new shares are sold and underwriting banks do not weigh in on the pricing, unlike in an IPO.

By not selling new shares, companies do not dilute the ownership stakes of existing shareholders and the public listing allows current investors to sell shares easily.

Direct listings are relatively rare. Workplace software maker Asana Inc and data analytics company Palantir Technologies on Wednesday became only the third and fourth companies to go public on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct listing.

So why is this of interest to game developers? Game developers are making a lot of money on the Roblox “platform”, with 2020 earnings expected to reach about 1/4 Billion dollars according to MarketWatch:

Roblox announced in July that it had more than 150 million monthly active users on its platform, which topped the latest numbers from a similar game, “Minecraft.” Microsoft Corp.’s  Xbox division announced in May that 126 million people were playing that title each month.

Roblox also offers tools for developers and said in July that its developer community was on pace to earn $250 million in 2020, up from $110 million in 2019.

Games on the Roblox platform include “Adopt Me!,” a virtual-pet title that had over 10 billion plays as of late July, and “Piggy,” which launched in January and had nearly 5 billion visits in just over six months from its launch date.

If you are interested in learning more about Roblox’s developer program, the developer portal is available here. You can learn more about the Roblox IPO in the video below.

The previous article looked at how the Web of Trust works in concept, and how the Web of Trust is implemented at Fedora. In this article, you’ll learn how to do it yourself. The power of this system lies in everybody being able to validate the actions of others—if you know how to validate somebody’s work, you’re contributing to the strength of our shared security.

Choosing a project

Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+. It aims to be useful for system administrators and travelers who need to work with lots of remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks. In the current age, where many people must work remotely or at least manage remote servers, the security of a program like Remmina is critical. Even if you do not use it yourself, you can contribute to the Web of Trust by checking it for others.

The question is: how do you know that a given version of Remmina is good, and that the original developer—or distribution server—has not been compromised?

For this tutorial, you’ll use Flatpak and the Flathub repository. Flatpak is intentionally well-suited for making verifiable rebuilds, which is one of the tenets of the Web of Trust. It’s easier to work with since it doesn’t require users to download independent development packages. Flatpak also uses techniques to prevent in‑flight tampering, using hashes to validate its read‑only state. As far as the Web of Trust is concerned, Flatpak is the future.

For this guide, you use Remmina, but this guide generally applies to every application you use. It’s also not exclusive to Flatpak, and the general steps also apply to Fedora’s repositories. In fact, if you’re currently reading this article on Debian or Arch, you can still follow the instructions. If you want to follow along using traditional RPM repositories, make sure to check out this article.

Installing and checking

To install Remmina, use the Software Center or run the following from a terminal:

flatpak install flathub org.remmina.Remmina -y

After installation, you’ll find the files in:

/var/lib/flatpak/app/org.remmina.Remmina/current/active/files/ 

Open a terminal here and find the following directories using ls -la:

total 44

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 bin

drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 etc

drwxr-xr-x. 8 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 lib

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 libexec

-rw-r--r--. 2 root root 18644 Aug 25 14:37 manifest.json

drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 sbin

drwxr-xr-x. 15 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 share

Getting the hashes

In the bin directory you will find the main binaries of the application, and in lib you find all dependencies that Remmina uses. Now calculate a hash for ./bin/remmina:

sha256sum ./bin/*

This will give you a list of numbers: checksums. Copy them to a temporary file, as this is the current version of Remmina that Flathub is distributing. These numbers have something special: only an exact copy of Remmina can give you the same numbers. Any change in the code—no matter how minor—will produce different numbers.

Like Fedora’s Koji and Bodhi build and update services, Flathub has all its build servers in plain view. In the case of Flathub, look at Buildbot to see who is responsible for the official binaries of a package. Here you will find all of the logs, including all the failed builds and their paper trail.

Getting the source

The main Flathub project is hosted on GitHub, where the exact compile instructions (“manifest” in Flatpak terms) are visible for all to see. Open a new terminal in your Home folder. Clone the instructions, and possible submodules, using one command:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/flathub/org.remmina.Remmina

Developer tools

Start off by installing the Flatpak Builder:

sudo dnf install flatpak-builder

After that, you’ll need to get the right SDK to rebuild Remmina. In the manifest, you’ll find the current SDK is.

 "runtime": "org.gnome.Platform", "runtime-version": "3.38", "sdk": "org.gnome.Sdk", "command": "remmina",

This indicates that you need the GNOME SDK, which you can install with:

flatpak install org.gnome.Sdk//3.38

This provides the latest versions of the Free Desktop and GNOME SDK. There are also additional SDK’s for additional options, but those are beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Generating your own hashes

Now that everything is set up, compile your version of Remmina by running:

flatpak-builder build-dir org.remmina.Remmina.json --force-clean

After this, your terminal will print a lot of text, your fans will start spinning, and you’re compiling Remmina. If things do not go so smoothly, refer to the Flatpak Documentation; troubleshooting is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Once complete, you should have the directory ./build-dir/files/, which should contain the same layout as above. Now the moment of truth: it’s time to generate the hashes for the built project:

sha256sum ./bin/*

You should get exactly the same numbers. This proves that the version on Flathub is indeed the version that the Remmina developers and maintainers intended for you to run. This is great, because this shows that Flathub has not been compromised. The web of trust is strong, and you just made it a bit better.

Going deeper

But what about the ./lib/ directory? And what version of Remmina did you actually compile? This is where the Web of Trust starts to branch. First, you can also double-check the hashes of the ./lib/ directory. Repeat the sha256sum command using a different directory.

But what version of Remmina did you compile? Well, that’s in the Manifest. In the text file you’ll find (usually at the bottom) the git repository and branch that you just used. At the time of this writing, that is:

 "type": "git", "url": "https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina.git", "tag": "v1.4.8", "commit": "7ebc497062de66881b71bbe7f54dabfda0129ac2"

Here, you can decide to look at the Remmina code itself:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina.git cd ./Remmina git checkout tags/v1.4.8

The last two commands are important, since they ensure that you are looking at the right version of Remmina. Make sure you use the corresponding tag of the Manifest file. you can see everything that you just built.

What if…?

The question on some minds is: what if the hashes don’t match? Quoting a famous novel: “Don’t Panic.” There are multiple legitimate reasons as to why the hashes do not match.

It might be that you are not looking at the same version. If you followed this guide to a T, it should give matching results, but minor errors will cause vastly different results. Repeat the process, and ask for help if you’re unsure if you’re making errors. Perhaps Remmina is in the process of updating.

But if that still doesn’t justify the mismatch in hashes, go to the maintainers of Remmina on Flathub and open an issue. Assume good intentions, but you might be onto something that isn’t totally right.

The most obvious upstream issue is that Remmina does not properly support reproducible builds yet. The code of Remmina needs to be written in such a way that repeating the same action twice, gives the same result. For developers, there is an entire guide on how to do that. If this is the case, there should be an issue on the upstream bug-tracker, and if it is not there, make sure that you create one by explaining your steps and the impact.

If all else fails, and you’ve informed upstream about the discrepancies and they to don’t know what is happening, then it’s time to send an email to the Administrators of Flathub and the developer in question.

Conclusion

At this point, you’ve gone through the entire process of validating a single piece of a bigger picture. Here, you can branch off in different directions:

• Try another Flatpak application you like or use regularly
• Try the RPM version of Remmina
• Do a deep dive into the C code of Remmina
• Relax for a day, knowing that the Web of Trust is a collective effort

In the grand scheme of things, we can all carry a small part of responsibility in the Web of Trust. By taking free/libre open source software (FLOSS) concepts and applying them in the real world, you can protect yourself and others. Last but not least, by understanding how the Web of Trust works you can see how FLOSS software provides unique protections.