12.16.12

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Measuring Linux’s Success in 2012

  With barely two weeks left in 2012, the inundation of “year-in-review” blog posts, podcasts, videos and–if we’re really lucky–songs has begun. This week, the Linux Foundation did its part by releasing a video celebrating major accomplishments over the last year in the Linux channel. What did the Foundation think were the most important developments? Read on for a look.

• Kernel Space

  • There’s A New Linux CPU Scheduler Based Upon BFS

    A new CPU scheduler for the Linux kernel was announced on Saturday. This new scheduler is based upon the controversial “Brain Fuck Scheduler” scheduler but attempts to support multiple run-queues for better CPU scaling.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Forcing Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing With Gallium3D

      With the recent improvements to MSAA Gallium3D support, if you have been wanting to benefit from anti-aliasing with the open-source Gallium3D drivers but your game/application doesn’t have options to toggle the MSAA level, it’s now a bit easier to configure.

    • Trying Out DRM-Next With Intel Sandy Bridge

    • What’s Holding Up The Free NVIDIA Tegra Driver

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • ZFS Administration, Part IX- Copy-on-write

    • How To Install XScreenSaver And BSOD Screensaver On Ubuntu 12.10

    • How to Share Files Between Linux Systems

    • Let’s Learn Latex: Part 5

    • 8 Vim Plugins to Enhance Your Productivity

    • Schedule Alarms Or Reminders Under GNOME Shell With Remindor Shell

    • External HDD utilities, Backup Software, and Linux

    • Python script to monitor a file for changes and then mail the report with the file attached.

    • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On CentOS 6.3 (Initiator And Target)

  • Games

    • Forsaken Fortress, a Cross-Platform (PC, Mac, Linux) Survival RPG Comes to Kickstarter

    • NetGore – Open-source online RPG engine

      NetGore is a free, open-source 2D online RPG engine written in C#. It is cross-platform and supports both top-down and sidescroller games. NetGore comes with a large amount of the fundamental MMORPG components built in which allows you to focus more on designing your game.

    • GemRB Is Still Advancing As An Open Infinity Engine

      The open-source GemRB engine is an open implementation of Bioware’s Infinity Engine to handle running the game assets from Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. GemRB is GPL-licensed and works on Windows, OS X, BSD, Android, iOS, and other platforms while being nearly feature-complete with the original closed-source engine. Various improvements over the original Infinity were also made like providing touch input support.

    • THQ Is Looking At Bringing Their Games To Linux

      THQ, the American game company responsible for a great deal of computer games and was the company behind the recent controversial Humble Bundle, is currently evaluating the market for bringing their titles to Linux.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Migration season has started

      After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical adds photo functions to Ubuntu One

        • Canonical Is Feeding on the Decaying Corpse of Windows XP

          Canonical is stopping at nothing when it comes to promoting their latest operating system, Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), and the Windows platforms from Microsoft seem to be the perfect target.

          When Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) launched, Canonical used Windows 8 as a target practice and actually asked the users to avoid the pain of owning a Windows 8 operating system.

        • Mark Shuttleworth Answers Your Questions

Free Software/Open Source

• A Pillar Of The Indian FOSS Community, Raj Mathur, Passes Away

  Raj Mathur (aka OldMonk), one of the leading figures of the Indian FOSS (free and open source software) community, passed away on 12.12.12. The cause of his death was a massive heart attack. This is the second major loss for the Indian FOSS world another notable figure, Kenneth Gonsalves passed away in August this year.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla in 2012

      2012 was an incredible year for Mozilla. We mobilized. We did a better job than I have ever seen us do identifying the places where we needed to have impact, and then we focused and delivered. There’s a lot for us all to be proud of in 2012; I’ve gathered up a few of my favourites.

• Project Releases

  • GoOSe Linux 6.0 Beta Release Candidate 4 (RC4) Now Available!

  • Suricata 1.4 released!

Leftovers

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • U.S.: Toss lawsuit over al-Awlaki’s death

  • US wants suit over US-born cleric’s killing tossed

  • Why We Torture

    The last several years have found us in the midst of more catastrophes than we could ever, in our worst nightmares, have dreamed of. We could never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass the destruction and distortion of fundamental Anglo-American legal and political constitutional principles in place since the 17th century.

    Habeas corpus has been abandoned for the outcasts of the new order in both the US and the UK, secret courts have been created to hear secret evidence, guilt has been inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified (in the UK our government’s lawyers continue to argue positively for the right to use the product of both) and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War – the Geneva Convention, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention – have been deliberately avoided or ignored.

  • Egyptian protesters claim they were tortured by Muslim Brotherhood

    Opponents of President Morsi say they were detained for hours and beaten while security forces chose not to intervene

  • ‘Zero Dark Thirty’: Likely US Blockbuster Slammed for Glorifying CIA Torture

  • Why Does Obama Want to Spend $8 Trillion on Defense in the Next Decade?

  • Iraq abuse inquiry was a ‘cover-up’, whistleblower tells court

  • Journalist held in Syria faces execution by her kidnappers

    The captors of a journalist in Syria are threatening to execute her tomorrow (13 December) unless their demands for a $50m ransom are met.

  • Government pays Libyan dissident’s family £2.2m over MI6-aided rendition

  • CIA Rendition & Torture Victim Wins European Human Rights Case

• Cablegate

  • Abandoning Private Manning

  • Assange to make embassy appearance

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • China and US hold the key to a new global climate deal

  • Shale gas: a burning carbon issue

  • Texas Energy Institute Head Quits Amid Fracking Study Conflicts

    The head of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin resigned following an investigation that found conflicts of interest in a study on the risks of natural gas drilling.

    Raymond Orbach, 78, resigned as director of the institute last month, the university said in a statement released today. The study’s lead investigator, Charles Groat, 72, also retired from his faculty position, according to the statement.

  • Illegal wildlife trade ‘threatening national security’, says WWF

    Group says organised crime syndicates are ‘outgunning’ governments, leading to sharp rise in elephant and rhino deaths

  • Mother Nature belongs at bargaining table

    Throwing the nation over the climate cliff will make our current fiscal challenges look like a minor bump in the road.

    As the highly scripted stagecraft of the presidential campaign fades from the headlines, there’s a new show in Washington. ”Fiscal Cliff” stars President Barack Obama, who urges Republicans and Democrats to agree on a ”grand bargain” that would soften the economic shock of the impending across-the-board tax and spending cuts. But that bipartisan handshake would be nothing to celebrate.

  • Fracking for shale gas gets green light in UK

    The government has lifted restrictions on the controversial practice of fracking, a method of extracting gas from shale rock, giving a green light to drilling that could produce billions of pounds worth of gas.

• Finance

  • INFOGRAPHIC: We Could End Homelessness With The Money Americans Spend On Christmas Decorations

  • Wanna Smuggle Money out of Afghanistan?

    You may have heard that Afghanistan has something of a corruption problem, with billions of dollars flowing out of the country annually even as the US and international community pour money into reconstruction efforts. Instead of curbing the exodus of illicit cash, however, the Afghan government is apparently making it easier to smuggle money out of the country, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

  • Are Financial Blogs Trustworthy?

  • Dr. Al explains the so-called “so-called fiscal cliff”

  • The Case Against Taxing the Rich: Still Shaky

    The political friends of America’s rich aren’t aiming to convince us that higher taxes on the nation’s highest incomes make no sense. They’re just hoping to keep us distracted.

  • Federal Reserve Takes Another Step Toward Rule-Based Monetary Policy

    The Federal Reserve made a big announcement today, promising to keep interest rates near zero until either the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent or the inflation rate rose above 2.5 percent. The Fed had already promised to keeping interest rates near zero until 2015, so why was this announcement important?

  • Republicans complain of little progress in effort to strike fiscal cliff deal

    Republican members of Congress expressed dismay on Wednesday about the prospect of reaching a deal with the White House to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis before Christmas.

  • Robots and Robber Barons

    The American economy is still, by most measures, deeply depressed. But corporate profits are at a record high. How is that possible? It’s simple: profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

  • States Need to Stop Giving Subsidies to Corporations

  • Pakistan politicians engulfed by tax evasion storm

    Majority of ministers have not paid into national coffers beyond contribution taken from state salaries, alleges tax report

  • HSBC Case: Are Huge Banks Now Too Big to Indict?

    The New York Times reports this morning: “State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system. … While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict.”

  • Three arrested in Libor manipulation investigation

    A former UBS and Citigroup banker and two others had their homes raided early on Tuesday morning and were taken in for questioning as part of the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the manipulation of Libor interest rates.

    The intervention came amid mounting speculation that the Financial Services Authority is preparing to take action against a number of banks in relation to Libor setting.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Saudi-Led Oil Lobby Group Financed Dark Money Attack Ads

    The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Investigative Fund and The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.

• Censorship

  • India awakes

    This TV program is a breakthrough. CNN IBN, a leading English-language channel, started a campaign for the freedom of Sanal Edamaruku. “Does a rationalist deserve to be jailed for questioning a religious miracle?”, asked firebrand moderator Sargarika Ghose on 4th December in CNN IBN’s flagship program Face the Nation, calling upon the public to take a stand. The response was impressive: people from all walks of life expressed unequivocal support for Sanal, on camera, on twitter and on facebook. The wave keeps running… And 87% of the viewers who participated in a public internet ballot answered the question “Are blasphemy laws out of place in a secular democracy?” with a clear Yes! The blasphemy law should go.

  • Israel must explain targeting of journalists in Gaza

    The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned that Israeli airstrikes targeted individual journalists and media facilities in the Gaza Strip between November 18 and 20. Journalists and media outlets are protected under international law in military conflict.

  • Possible censorship of Putin and Medvedev’s names on Russian television

    Here’s a somewhat curious story: The Russian TV channel NTV showed a performance by the rock band “Leningrad”, which is famous for incorporating many Russian expletives in its lyrics. The expletives were censored by beeping, which is the usual and expected practice, comparable to beeping on words like “fuck” in American TV. The surprise in this performance, however, was that the names of president Putin and prime minister Medvedev, who were mentioned in the song, were censored the same way. The name of the the Church of Christ the Savior, which recently became famous as the stage of Pussy Riot’s notorious performance, was partly censored as well, although the name “Pussy Riot” itself was not censored.

  • Peers vote to remove law banning insulting language

  • ANC tries to muzzle media coverage of leadership conference

    Security will be rigid at the African National Congress’s (ANC) elective conference in Mangaung. Most sessions are closed to the media and the party has said it will use phone-jamming technology to prevent interruptions. Journalists who stray where they shouldn’t will be given short shrift.

  • Son of Anna Politkovskaya criticises murder trial deal for policeman

• Privacy

  • Heart Gadgets Test Privacy-Law Limits

    A recent swell of digital-medical data collected on devices outside of a doctor’s office is raising some thorny questions: Who owns the rights to a patient’s digital footprint and who should control that information? WSJ’s Linda Blake reports.

    The small box inside Amanda Hubbard’s chest beams all kinds of data about her faulty heart to the company that makes her defibrillator implant.

  • Private By Default

    Depending which browser you’re using, you should see a little lock or some such in the address bar. On the right are readouts from (top down) Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You can click on that readout to get some information on the privacy/security settings.

• Civil Rights

  • The rape victims who helped free their alleged attacker

  • Hacker Gary McKinnon will not face UK charges

    Computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the US was blocked, will not face charges in the UK, bringing to an end a 10-year legal battle.

  • Protests should be restricted in Hong Kong, says Jackie Chan

    Action star says Hong Kong residents ‘scold China, scold leaders, scold anything’ and calls for regulations against dissent

  • The Surveillance State Grows Another Tentacle

    After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of 2009, a Senate investigation concluded that the National Counterterrorism Center had received information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be underwear bomber, but had failed to query other government agencies about him. This allowed him to board his flight to the U.S. and nearly detonate his bomb. President Obama responded by ordering all agencies to send their leads to NCTC, which was ordered to “pursue thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads.”

  • Jeremy Irons speaks out for the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner

  • As criminal borders fade, U.S. attorney brings world into Virginia’s Eastern District

• DRM

  • Sony’s New German Ebookstore Features Thousands Of DRM-Free Books

    DRM is becoming less and less prevalent these days as more companies are realizing that the backlash from crippling the purchases of paying customers far outweighs any perceived prevention of infringement. It’s not a wholesale conversion, but new DRM-free converts are appearing more frequently, including some surprising holdouts.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Are The Old Enablers Becoming The New Gatekeepers?

    We’ve argued, for a long time, that just railing against “middlemen” misses the point. There are always middlemen. But not all middlemen are created equal. The distinction, that we’ve discussed multiple times, is the difference between enablers and gatekeepers. That is, historically, many middlemen came to power because they were gatekeepers. If you wanted to do something — be a musician, write a book, sell a new product — you effectively had to get “approval” and support from a gatekeeper who had access to those markets. Being a gatekeeper gave them enormous power, such that the gatekeepers often became central to the market, rather than the people/companies they were working with and it also allowed them to craft ridiculous deals that were incredibly favorable to themselves, at the expense of those they were working with. That, of course, is why there tends to be so much inherent antipathy towards traditional gatekeepers.

  • Copyrights

    • French Hadopi Scheme Gutted; Other Bad Ideas To Be Introduced Instead

      France’s Hadopi graduated response approach, also known as “three strikes”, occupies a special place in the annals of copyright enforcement. It pioneered the idea of punishing users accused of sharing unauthorized copies of files, largely thanks to pressure from the previous French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who seems to have hated most aspects of this new-fangled Internet thing. Sadly, other countries took up the idea, including the UK with its awful Digital Economy Act, New Zealand, Spain and, more recently, the US.

      Hadopi hasn’t been going too well. Despite putting out some dodgy statistics, the Hadopi agency hasn’t really been able to show that the three-strike approach is doing anything to reduce the number of unauthorized downloads. In the two years that Hadopi has been running, only one person has been brought to court — and he was innocent, but fined anyway.

    • How Copyright Criminalization Threatens Online Innovation

      I’m excited that my friend Jerry Brito has pulled together an edited collection of copyright reform essays by libertarians (and one from a pair of libertarian-leaning conservatives) called Copyright Unbalanced. Several recent developments have suggested growing sympathy for copyright reform on the political right. Jerry’s book promises to be a handbook for free-market copyright reformers, pointing to some of the most serious problems with the present system and explaining how Republicans could capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the status quo.

    • It’s Not “Getting” Or “Downloading” A Copy. It’s “Making” Or “Manufacturing” One.

      In the political fight for civil liberties and sharing culture, language is everything – which can be observed by the copyright industry’s consistent attempts at name-calling, hoping the bad names will stick legally. Therefore, all our using precise language is paramount for our own future liberties.