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Links 12/4/2013: Jolla With Wayland, Mozilla CEO Leaves





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux





  • Kernel Space

    • My Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Picks and Details on Live Video Access to Keynotes
      For The Linux Foundation, April is not the cruelest month: it's one of the busiest. Every year, we hold our Collaboration Summit in mid-April to bring together our members, Linux and open source community developers, open source legal minds, and large scale Linux and open source users in an intimate setting. Even as The Linux Foundation has expanded its event lineup to include LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Automotive Linux Summits, and more throughout the world, this remains our original event, and because of that, as well as it's small size and unique format, it's special to many of us in the community.




  • Applications



    • Games

      • Indie Royale Spring Sun Bundle Released
        Indie Royale is back with a brand new sale called the Spring Sun Bundle. The bundle contains Nifflas’ Games’ complex platformer Knytt Underground, Kitty Lambda Games’ Zelda meats Ultima mash up The Real Texas, Uber Entertainment’s MOBA meets third person shooter Monday Night Combat, ASTRO PORT’s side scrolling shooter Satazius, and Phr00t’s Metroid inspired FPS Gentrieve 2. The bundle also contains the soundtracks for Gentrieve 2 and The Real Texas. Those who pay more than $8.00 for the bundle will also receive Ben Landis’ comic book meets music album Adventures in Pixels.






  • Desktop Environments/WMs



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • hackweek9: Lightweight KDE Desktop project - updated
        It's Hack Week 9 at SUSE, and I'm working on a cracking project this time around. I've codenamed it 'KLyDE', for K Lightweight Desktop Environment, and it's an effort to point KDE at the lightweight desktop market. Surely some mistake, you say? KDE and lightweight kan't fit in the same sentence. I think they can.

        This project has been bouncing around my head for a couple of years now, starting on a train ride back from the KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück in 2010, then I presented it at COSCUP 2012 in Taiwan last August. But work commitments and family always got in the way of completing/finishing it. SUSE's hack week gives me 40 hours to throw at it and this time I wasn't going to tackle it alone, so I enlisted my bro(grammer)s Jos and Klaas.






  • Distributions



    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Product President Talks OpenStack, Public Cloud
        Cloud computing is driving many disruptions to traditional technology business models these days, and open source technology is a big part of it. Through participation in initiatives such as OpenStack as well as its own deep roots with Linux, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has been an open source trail blazer. To get a better sense of both the trends in cloud computing and the momentum behind public cloud migrations, we spoke with Paul Cormier EVP at Red Hat and president of the companies technologies and products division. Here's what he had to say about his philosophy of open source and the state of the market today.


      • Tech firm Red Hat uses social media to ‘listen’
        When asked about the most important part of social-media engagement, Red Hat Inc.’s Stephanie Wonderlick offers a simple answer:

        “Listening.”

        Wonderlick, corporate communications director for Raleigh-based technology firm Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), says companies shouldn’t use social media just as a way to get out their own messages. They also should use it as a way to gauge how their customers are feeling.






  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • In Pictures: 13 hot new open source projects


  • Create your own apps for free with open-source LiveCode 6.0
    Application development may have once been the exclusive domain of professional programmers, but today a growing number of amateur-friendly development environments invite just about anyone with an app idea to bring it to life.

    In the past few years we've seen the arrival of BuildAnApp and Google's App Inventor for Android on the mobile side, for example. An even longer-standing contender, however, is RunRev's cross-platform LiveCode, a recently renamed version of the HyperCard-inspired "Revolution" development system born in the early 2000s.

    [...]

    LiveCode 6.0 is released under the GPL3 license


  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Grizzly showing maturity says development team
      This week sees the arrival of OpenStack Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

      Global contributors to OpenStack have now grown 45 percent in the last six months. This figure sits alongside a total of 230 new features now recorded to support cloud production operations with broad Software-Defined Networking support.


    • Open Source Cloud Computing: Riak Cloud Storage Offers AWS-S3 Compatibility
      Basho was founded in 2008 by a group of executives and software engineers from Akamai Technologies. Over the last five years, the team has received $26 million ($39 million based on GigaOm’s estimates) in venture funding. While the company name may have been selected for other reasons, it seems likely that there was inspiration from Matsuo Basho, a famous Japanese poet who lived during the 1600’s. This connection to Japan may have proved useful to help the American company achieve funding from Japanese companies IDC Frontier and Tokyo Electron Device Limited, along with quite a few American ones chipping in too. The Basho logo features a face with hair styled in a Japanese-style topknot, not too unlike the look that Basho’s CTO Justin Sheehy sports.




  • Licensing



  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming

    • GitHub Turns 5 - Open Source Code Rejoices
      When I first started aggressively using open source code , freshmeat and sourceforge.net were typically the first places I'd go to look.

      In 2006, Google shook up the open source code repository market with Google Code and I started to find great stuff there.

      Today, the VAST majority of all open source code that I seek, use and play with is all found on GitHub.






Leftovers

  • You know, Google, the web already had this feature.
    I used to be a Google fan. I must have tried most of their services as early as possible.

    But lately, they are pushing towards a version of the WWW that I don’t like. A WWW where things only happen if you use the “right” browser, where URLs are second class web citizens, where you have to have a Google account, you have to have Google+ enabled, you must be logged in and you have to notify Google of your every move and then Google decides what goes and what not.


  • Security



    • Hacker uses an Android to remotely attack and hijack an airplane
      The Hack in the Box (#HITB2013AMS) security conference in Amsterdam has a very interesting lineup of talks [pdf]. One that jumped out was the Aircraft Hacking: Practical Aero Series presented by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs in Germany. According to the abstract, “This presentation will be a practical demonstration on how to remotely attack and take full control of an aircraft, exposing some of the results of my three years research on the aviation security field. The attack performed will follow the classical methodology, divided in discovery, information gathering, exploitation and post-exploitation phases. The complete attack will be accomplished remotely, without needing physical access to the target aircraft at any time, and a testing laboratory will be used to attack virtual airplanes systems.





  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



  • Cablegate



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife





  • Finance

    • Royal Bank apologizes to outsourced workers
      The Royal Bank of Canada will make a public apology to the workers affected by the bank’s outsourcing arrangement with a foreign company.

      The apology comes at the end of a week of drubbing from RBC customers and labour critics after the bank’s outsourcing plans were disclosed in media reports. RBC should have been more sensitive and helpful to the affected employees, chief executive officer Gord Nixon says in a letter to be published in newspapers Friday.


    • Why New York City is writing Occupy Wall Street a six-figure check
      N ew York City's raid on Occupy Wall Street that cleared the group's Zuccotti Park encampment will cost the city more than $350,000 — and that total could still rise.


    • Could a Patent Lawsuit Take Down the Bitcoin Exchanges Like MtGox?
      In a free market capitalist system 'price signals' are everything. Prices are determined by buyers and sellers in the free market and these prices are broadcast from the exchanges reaching all corners of the economy -- where they are used to transact business. In a centrally planned economy, prices are set by fiat and implemented in a 'top down' approach organized by a committee; rather than by the bottoms-up, animal-spirits-driven, self-interested, individualistic, free market approach.

      But we have a problem with free market capitalism. Where free markets have failed over the past few decades is in maintaining fair and equitable 'price discovery' on various exchanges to compliment those animal spirits. Instead of buyers and sellers coming together and letting the 'invisible hand' of self-interest determine prices; more and more we see the dead hand of Wall Street monopolists and their market-rigging determining prices.


    • Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Received Fed Minutes Early
      Banks including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., along with congressional staff members and trade groups, received potentially market-moving Federal Reserve information 19 hours before the public in a release the central bank called accidental.

      Brian Gross, a member of the Fed’s congressional liaison staff, distributed the March 19-20 minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting at 2 p.m. yesterday Washington time, according to an e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Gross referred questions to Fed spokeswoman Michelle Smith.

      Distribution List





  • Censorship



  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights

    • What We’re Up Against: Software Lobby SIIA Spends Big to Stop CFAA Reform
      To date, thousands of people have sent messages to Congress demanding reform of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act through EFF alone, not counting the ones sent through our friends at Demand Progress and elsewhere. But the citizens of the Internet will need to shout even louder if we’re going to drown out the corporate interests that have already dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence lawmakers to change the CFAA for the worst.



    • 8-year-old follows Tenn. lawmaker around Capitol until he drops welfare bill
      A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol.

      On his way to vote on Thursday, state Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) was confronted by 8-year-old homeschooler Aamira Fetuga, who presented him with a petition signed by people opposing his welfare bill, according to the Tennessean. Nearby, a choir of about 60 activists sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”


    • Clashes erupt in Chile as students protest over education reform
      Violence has broken out in Chile following a massive rally in support of calls to reform the country’s education laws.

      The clashes erupted after thousands of students, teachers and their supporters took to the streets to demand free and fair access to education for all, and not just for the rich and well-off.


    • California bill to nullify NDAA unanimously passes committee
      California lawmakers are pushing a bill that would exempt the state from federal laws authorizing indefinite detention of citizens.

      The California Public Safety Committee voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of the California Liberty Preservation Act, which was introduced by Republican Assemblyman Tim Donnelly.


    • Valerie Plame, outed CIA spy, urges people to hold government accountable
      Famously outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame said Thursday she is not bitter despite being "betrayed" by the government officials who exposed her identity.

      But people need to "continually hold our government to account," she said at the Conference on World Affairs discussion.






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