07.04.12

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Links 4/7/2012: Blizzard’s Linux PR Crisis, Fuduntu 2012.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why We Still Need the Open Source VLC Media Player

    The Monday Version 2.0.2 release of the free open source VLC media player points out a surprising hole in the age of the Internet video – there is still no universal standard for video formats and players.

    Fortunately, VLC is there to fill in the gaps among proprietary formats and competing ecosystems, playing just about every video in use.

  • .FREE, .OPEN gTLDs may not be open to public

    The applications for new gTLD domains offered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have been made public, and although the .LINUX registry has been unclaimed, other potentially FLOSS-related gTLDs are being vied for in this big Internet land grab that could leave some domains out of public reach and in the hands of corporations.

  • Anubex Successfully Migrates BEZEQ to Open Platform

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • CMS

  • Education

  • BSD

    • Dru Lavigne talks about FreeBSD | Interview

      IT happens to be my third career. I started out as an entrepreneur (co-owner of an independent moving company). Once the company was established, I took a second job as a municipal government worker. After a few years it became obvious that the glass ceiling at that agency was far too short for my liking, so I went back to school to learn telecommunications, networking, and system administration.

    • The State Of Gentoo FreeBSD: Gentoo Sans Linux

      To some surprise, Gentoo FreeBSD — the port of Gentoo running with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel — is progressing.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Glibc 2.16 supports the x32 ABI – Update

      Among the new features of the GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.16, which was released on Saturday, is support for the x32 ABI (Application Binary Interface); the Linux kernel has offered support for the interface since version 3.4. Programs that are compiled for the x32 ABI can now access the 64-bit registers and data paths of 64-bit x86 processors while only using 32-bit pointers and data fields. In general terms, programs that are compiled for the x32 ABI avoid the overhead that comes with full 64-bit operation while making use of some of the most important advantages of x86-64 processors; this is thought to be of particular relevance for low-specification systems in the embedded and mobile markets.

  • Project Releases

    • Computer vision library ccv reaches 0.1 milestone

      After two years in development, ccv 0.1, “a modern computer vision library”, has been released. Ccv began development in 2010 when author Liu Liu, frustrated by problems with image preprocessing for a gesture recognition demonstration, decided to work on a different approach.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • ‘Governments that embrace open data will also switch to open source’

        Public administrations that grasp the benefits of making publicly available their data will also increase their use of free and open source, experts on open data agree. Open data and open source face comparable threats: initial lack of support and a fear for the impact on the organisation.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Free, open ebook offers ideas for rebooting American government

        Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age collects the wide-ranging, provocative, and often blunt responses this question generated. But the book’s title is somewhat misleading. The writers it features aren’t interested in merely rebooting American government — interrupting its core processes, taking it momentarily offline, then restoring it to an earlier, somehow simpler, state. They’re hacking on its principal architectures — its frameworks and principles — sketching mock-ups for a government that embraces open technologies and values to become more transparent, nimble, responsive, and accountable than previous iterations.

    • Open Hardware

      • How Open Source Hardware Is Driving the 3D-Printing Industry

        The potential of 3D printing to transform the way we get things – the market is predicted to hit $3.1 billion in the next four years – gets a lot of press. But not much of that attention has focused on the unique role of open source hardware in enabling 3D printing to realize its promise.

        Open source software has been a key player in all kinds of disruptive technologies – from the Web to big data. Now the nascent and growing open source hardware movement is helping to power its own disruptive revolution.

  • Programming

    • PCC: Portable C Compiler Isn’t Quick To Advance

      The Portable C Compiler 1.0 was released in April of 2011, but since then there hasn’t been many updates out of this open-source compiler that was originally spawned in the late 1970′s.

      The PCC web-site remains rather basic with not much information and the latest news is last year’s 1.0 release. The only information since that I’ve been able to find is that they do have limited C++ support going into PCC for the past few months, but the support is still very limited. The main language for the Portable C Compiler is C99. At the project’s current development pace, don’t expect C11 or C++11 coverage any time soon. And for supporting all of the latest instruction set extensions on the latest ARM and Intel CPUs, guess again.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security vulnerability found in Cyberoam DPI devices

      Last week, a user in Jordan reported seeing a fake certificate for torproject.org. The user did not report any errors when browsing to sites such as Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, which suggests that this was a targeted attack. The certificate was issued by a US company called Cyberoam. We first believed that this incident was similar to that of Comodo and DigiNotar, and that Cyberoam had been tricked to issue a fake certificate for our website.

  • Finance

    • MMT: A Doubly Retrospective Analysis

      *We’re going to take a break from the regularly-scheduled MMP this week. In its place, I’m posting the keynote talk I gave at Bill Mitchell’s annual Coffee conference in Newcastle. As most of you know, Coffee is the sister center to UMKC’s CFEPS. Some of the participants asked for copies of my talk and I figured some of you might also enjoy it, so am posting it here. It has some of the history of the development of MMT—although it is based on my faulty memory so should not be taken too seriously!

    • Wall Street banks angling for Dodd-Frank loophole

      While all eyes were on the Supreme Court and Obamacare, a quieter battle was being waged against the president’s other major initiative, the Dodd-Frank financial reform act. Wall Street has already watered down or delayed most of Dodd-Frank. Now it wants to create a giant loophole, exempting its foreign branches from the law.

      ‌

      Yet the overseas branches of Wall Street banks are where the banks have done some of their wilder betting. Four years ago, bad bets by American International Group’s London office nearly unraveled the U.S. financial system.

      One advantage of being a huge Wall Street bank is you get bailed out by the federal government when you make dumb bets. Another is you’ve been able to choose where around the world to make the dumb bets, thereby dodging U.S. regulations. It’s a win-win. Wall Street wants to keep it that way.

  • Civil Rights

    • US Government Wants Access To Your Data

      US is becoming one of the most restrictive and invasive countries in the world. The recent Twitter transparency report, inspired by Google, shows that US government is topping the chart with maximum number of request to gain access to user data.

  • Copyrights

    • Kim Dotcom: Joe Biden Ordered the Megaupload Shutdown

      Kim Dotcom says he knows who ordered the shutdown of his company and related sites. The Megaupload founder informs TorrentFreak that he has insider information which reveals that none other than Vice President Joe Biden directed attorney Neil MacBride to target the site. Biden is known to be one of the best friends of former Senator Chris Dodd, who’s now heading the MPAA.

    • ACTA

      • ACTA Is DEAD After European Parliament Vote

        The battleground wasn’t some administrative office, but the representatives of the people – the European Parliament – which decided in the end to do its job beautifully, and represent the people against special interests.

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DecorWhat Else is New

  1. Links 29/11/2021: Linux 5.16 RC3 and Lots of Patent Catch-up

    Links for the day

  2. By 2022 0% of 'News' Coverage About Patents Will Be Actual Journalism (Patent Litigation Sector Has Hijacked the World Wide Web to Disseminate Self-Promotional Misinformation)

    Finding news about the EPO is almost impossible because today’s so-called ‘news’ sites are in the pockets of Benoît Battistelli, António Campinos, and their cohorts who turned the EPO into a hub of litigation, not science; this is part of an international (worldwide) problem because financial resources for journalism have run out, and so the vacuum is filled/replaced almost entirely by Public Relations (PR) and marketing

  3. Trying to Appease Those Who Never Liked Free Software or Those Who Blindly Loved All Patent Monopolies to Begin With

    It’s crystal clear that trying to appease everyone, all the time, is impossible; in the case of the EPO, for example, we hope that exposing Team Battistelli/Campinos helps raise awareness of the harms of patent maximalism, and when speaking about Free software — whilst occasionally bashing the alternatives (proprietary) — we hope to convince more people to join the “Good Fight”

  4. Links 28/11/2021: Laravel 8.73 Released, GitHub Offline for Hours

    Links for the day

  5. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 27, 2021

    IRC logs for Saturday, November 27, 2021

  6. Links 27/11/2021: Nvidia’s DLSS Hype and Why GNU/Linux Matters

    Links for the day

  7. [Meme] Linus Gabriel Sebastian Takes GNU/Linux for a (Tail)'Spin'

    If you’re trying to prove that GNU/Linux is NOT Windows, then “haha! Well done…”

  8. GNU/Linux is for Freedom and It'll Gain Many Users When (or Where) People Understand What Software (or Computing) Freedom Means

    Software that respects people's freedom (and by extension privacy as well) is an alluring proposition; those who choose to try GNU/Linux for the wrong reasons are likely the wrong target audience for advocates

  9. Amid Reports of Microsoft's Competition Crimes in Europe...

    European companies are complaining, but they seem to overlook the principal aspect of an imperialistic system with bottomless pockets (almost 30 trillion dollars in debt already; US national debt soared again last month); Microsoft is shielded by a political system with military (“defence”) as bailout budget to help cushion international expansion for data grab and technical leverage, as we've seen in the case of EPO (this is all political, not technical, and should thus be treated as a political/corruption issue)

  10. Is Linus Trolling the GNU/Linux Community?

    This new video responds to what many sites have been provoked into amplifying

  11. Links 27/11/2021: Tux Paint 0.9.27 and SeaMonkey 1.1.19 in EasyOS

    Links for the day

  12. [Meme] Keeping Our Distance From Microsoft

    The OSI is the dagger, the Linux Foundation is the knife, and many others are the sword by which Microsoft tries to get into the very heart of GNU/Linux and extinguish the Free software movement

  13. Microsoft Edge Encourages Indebted Americans to Guilt-spend Just in Time for Christmas

    Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission

  14. IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 26, 2021

    IRC logs for Friday, November 26, 2021

  15. 38+ Years of GNU and 19+ Years of FSF Associate Membership

    “On November 25, 2002,” Wikipedia notes, “the FSF launched the FSF Associate Membership program for individuals.” As the above video points out, it all started almost 40 years ago.

  16. Gemini as a Platform for Gamers

    Contrary to what people often assume (or are led to assume), even without client-side scripting Gemini can accomplish a great deal; early adopters, many of whom are technical, test the limits of the very minimalistic (by design and intention) specification

  17. Improved Workflows: Achievement Unlocked

    Today we've completed a bunch of small projects that can make us more efficient (e.g. more Daily Links per day, more articles); the above video was recorded many hours ago to accompany the outline below

  18. Links 26/11/2021: New Complaint About Microsoft Competition Crimes in Europe, EuroLinux 8.5, GhostBSD 21.11.24, and Kiwi TCMS 10.5 Released

    Links for the day

  19. Links 26/11/2021: F35 Elections, Whonix 16.0.3.7, OSMC's November Refresh With Kodi 19.3

    Links for the day

  20. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 25, 2021

    IRC logs for Thursday, November 25, 2021

  21. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 24, 2021

    IRC logs for Wednesday, November 24, 2021

  22. Links 25/11/2021: PHP 8.1.0 Released and Linux 5.15.5

    Links for the day

  23. IBM as Master of Hypocrisy

    Free software projects and Free software developers have long been humiliated by corporations of Western misogynists, falsely claiming that the Free software community isn’t inclusive enough (these are shameless projection tactics; as a matter of public record, the exact opposite is true) and even the eradication of supposedly offensive language isn’t something IBM takes seriously

  24. Links 25/11/2021: LibreOffice 7.2.3 and Mesa 21.2.6 Released

    Links for the day

  25. [Meme] So Desperate That Edge Cannot Even Exceed 4% That They Block Rival Web Browsers

    Linux/Android/Free Software/GNU (they go by very many names/brands) may continue to grow to the point where Windows is as irrelevant as Blackberry; this means that Microsoft’s grip on the Web too has slipped — to the point where Microsoft frantically uses 'bailout' money to hijack LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. (it also rebrands almost everything as "Azure" or clown to fake a perception of growth)

  26. Windows Vista Service Pack 11 (Vista 11) Has Failed to Curb the Growth of GNU/Linux

    Windows market share continues to decrease in spite of billions of dollars spent bribing the media for fake hype, especially in light of a new Windows Service Pack (SP), Vista SP 11

  27. Links 25/11/2021: Proton 6.3-8 and Linux Mint Compared to Ubuntu

    Links for the day

  28. 3.5 Years Later the 'Master' of Fedora is Still Microsoft and IBM Cannot Be Bothered to Alter Git Branch Names (Refuting or Ignoring Its Very Own Directive About Supposedly Racially-Insensitive Terms)

    Today we demonstrate the hypocrisy of IBM; years after telling us that we should shun the term "master" and repeatedly insisting it had a racist connotation at least 65 Fedora repositories, still controlled by Microsoft, still use "master"

  29. Changing the Arrangement While News is a Bit Slow(er)

    I've made it easier for myself to keep abreast of things like IRC channels and networks (incidentally, a day ago Freenode reopened to anonymous logins) and I've improved monitoring of the Web sites, Gemini capsule etc. (this video is unplanned and improvised)

  30. Links 24/11/2021: Alpine Linux 3.15 and Endless OS 4.0 Released

    Links for the day

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