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Centre news vol. 35 - January 2018

Submitted by Dieter Van Uytvanck on

VLO 4.3 released

A new release of the VLO has been made available. Noteworthy changes include the addition of a ‘similar records’ section to the record page, an improved ‘all facet values’ dialogue (the one that pop ups after clicking the ‘more…’ link below facet values), and the order in which ‘breadcrumbs’ are shown, which now reflects the order in which facet values were selected. Also, a number of bugs have been fixed and the back end has been substantially upgraded.

Note: you may notice that the current version of the is 4.3.2. After the release of 4.3.0 two regressions have been identified and resolved. You may have encountered issues with the VLO’s search form, or retrieved unexpected search results (specifically larger result sets than expected, i.e. low precision) during late December or early January, but this should now no longer be the case. For more information, see the change log.

Security-related maintenance

We will be applying updates to all virtual machines under our control on Friday 12 January 2018, between 10:00 - 16:00 CET in order to mitigate the SPECTRE (CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753) and MELTDOWN (CVE-2017-5754) vulnerabilities. During this maintenance window service availability will only be affected during reboots, which should normally not take longer than 5 minutes.

This means that on Friday 12.1.2018 any service running on our infrastructure is expected to be unavailable for 5 minutes somewhere between 10:00 - 16:00.

If you urgently need availability of a service, please let us know (sysops [at] clarin.eu (sysops[at]clarin[dot]eu)) and we will try to agree on a specific reboot time on Friday 12.1.2018.

Additionally, the data centre hosting the Virtual Language Observatory will be performing similar security updates between Wednesday 10 January, 21:00 and 11 January 09:00 (CET). This will lead to intermittent unavailability of the VLO.

See https://www.clarin.eu/status for up-to-date maintenance information.

If you are administering a CLARIN server yourself, please make sure to install the relevant security updates.

CLARIN-PLUS Deliverables

The following deliverable reports are now available:

Short news

  • There will be a CLARIN metadata hackathon as a satellite-event to the upcoming RDA Plenary in Berlin. This will take place on 19 and 20 March. More information will follow soon, but it might be wise to save the date.

  • The central CLARIN Piwik installation has been migrated to version 3.

  • The footer of the CLARIN website now links to our videolectures channel.

  • has migrated the handles with the shared prefix 11858.

  • After recent issues with Adobe Connect, CLARIN has changed to the Zoom platform for video conferences. Updated information about how to use Zoom is available here. If you sometimes participate in CLARIN video conferences, please make sure to install the Zoom client on your computer.