01.30.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Google’s operating system for desktops and laptops is shaping up, and what can be said about it from a freedom advocate’s perspective
GOOGLE’S Chrome OS, which is becoming one of the world’s most widespread GNU/Linux distributions for the desktop, is receiving more coverage these days [1] (it’s mostly positive and optimistic). Capitalising on the success of Android and increasingly converging with it [2] for development [3] and apps, Chrome OS seems to have a future of relatively high presence if not worldwide domination (Chrome OS is for desktops and laptops, not mobile devices, which is where Android now dominates). Chrome OS very much revolves around the Web browser, which is not surprising given Google’s core business.
Recently, in order to improve perceptions of Chrome security, Google offered cash prizes [4] and tackled allegations of eavesdropping (by accident [5-8]). There are some attempts, including poor ones [9], to discredit Chrome using “security”, especially now that a new release comes out [10-12], eliminating Flash in the process (at least for GNU/Linux and its Free version of Chrome, called Chromium [13]).
Chrome OS and Chrome are proprietary, but they have Free/open source surrogates, Chromium OS and Chromium. They are privacy-infringing, but they are generally more benign than the proprietary software which still dominates in desktops and laptops. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Back in 2012, I did a comparison between Chrome OS and Ubuntu. I examined the areas where each operating system differed and I also touched on a few of their similarities. In this piece, I’ll take it a step further and examine how Chrome OS is close to filling the OS gap, yet might need some improvements in key areas before the masses begin dumping Windows to migrate to it.
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It was back in September of last year that the Google Chrome team delivered an extensive post up heralding “packaged apps” that work with Chrome, which the team obviously felt could become a game-changer for Google’s browser. “These apps are more powerful than before, and can help you get work done, play games in full-screen and create cool content all from the web,” wrote the Chrome team. Many of us have tried some of these apps and experienced how they make the browser feel almost like an operating system underlying applications.
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It’s convoluted and unlikely, perhaps, but there’s a way that websites can trick the Chrome browser into leaving the mic open, allowing who knows whom to eavesdrop.
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Right now I’m glad I never used Chrome.
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Changes in Google Chrome extension ownership can expose thousands of users to aggressive advertising and possibly other threats, two extension developers have recently discovered.
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Today’s Chrome Beta channel release kicks off the new year with a slew of new features for developers ranging from Custom Elements, to web speech synthesis and improved WebFont downloading. Unless otherwise noted, changes apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android.
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Google are to drop support for the ‘Netscape Plugin API’ (NPAPI) – used by Adobe Flash – on Linux builds of Chrome/ium far sooner than was originally planned.
The ageing plugin architecture, which allows for unrestricted access to a computer, is considered inefficient and insecure, with Google calling it ‘the leading cause of hangs, crashes, and security incidents’.
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Posted in OpenSUSE at 3:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The lesser-explored side of SUSE, which is being hosted by freedom-hostile companies including Microsoft
OpenSUSE 12.2 is officially dead now [1] and blogs begin to advertise a new release of the Microsoft-friendly (and funded) distribution, perhaps unknowingly helping Microsoft. One such site says that the new release is now offered in Microsoft-owned servers, demonstrating patent and control issues, not to mention privacy issues. Other reports mention SLE* (SUSE) [2] on Amazon, the CIA’s privacy-infringing special partner. This is the very opposite of what the GNU/Linux world should strive for. At the same time, Microsoft is “openwashing” its datacentre [3] and so does the Microsoft-owned (partially) Facebook [4,5], which is a censorship/surveillance company (users are the products, not the customers, and the business model is brainwashing them, also with pseudo “search” like Microsoft’s). Amazon has already shown us how “open” it is when it started paying Microsoft for GNU/Linux, deleted files (remotely) from people’s devices, and kicked out Wikileaks from its hosting plan at its most critical time (censorship). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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The openSUSE Project has just announced that openSUSE 12.2 has reached end of life (EOL) and it will no longer be supported.
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“These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and built to handle the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform. They offer dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times,” Laing said.
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The Open Compute Project officially got started in 2011 as a way to open up Facebook’s server designs and help the broader IT community — it’s an effort that is paying off for Facebook and many others too.
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Facebook is reaping the benefits of designing its own energy efficient servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.”
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Posted in Antitrust, Hardware, Microsoft at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Calls for boycott against UEFI receive supportive proof from journalists who are unable to install GNU/Linux because of Microsoft/Intel locks
WE HAVE already published many articles about UEFI because it is clearly a Linux-hostile plot to remove users’ control over their PCs. It’s about limiting the ability to boot operating systems, usually by giving authorisation powers to some third party like Microsoft. Novell (ex-)employees in particular — suffice to say because of their Microsoft ties — have been friendly towards this agenda and they laid inside Linux some of the endorsing code which weakens antitrust action.
Based on this new report from one who knows his way around GNU/Linux, UEFI is a pain in the neck. To quote his article’s summary: “Opinions vary on whether the UEFI standards are helping or hurting the migration to Linux. Enterprise users can select a Linux distro certified to work with UEFI standards, but not all Linux distros have keys that allow it to install. Despite the intent of the UEFI standards, the process so far is not universally successful. It should “just work,” said the Linux Foundation’s Greg Kroah-Hartman.”
Well, not quite. Novell’s Kroah-Hartman played a key role in pushing Microsoft-serving code into Linux and this includes UEFI restricted boot. UEFI should never have been embraced by Linux; it should be shunned because it’s a patent trap that serves a rapidly-shrinking criminal entity known as Intel as well as its partner Microsoft (they are jointly known as “Wintel”). Intel cannot keep up with mobile revolution according to the latest news [1], so it must be fighting to keep the old abusive duopoly/oligopoly going. To quote more from the above article: “I have extensive practice with installing various Linux distros on older and new computers. I am handy at setting up disk partitions and dual booting to maintain a working Microsoft Windows OS alongside numerous Linux distros. I also have routinely installed Linux on older and new computers by removing the Windows OS and replacing the entire drive with one or more Linux distros.
“However, it was not until I attempted to do a Linux installation on a new Gateway Series DX desktop with Windows 8 installed that I stared that UEFI monster down. At first I nearly ran back to the big box store to return the shiny new Windows box. I was not able to get the BIOS settings for the UEFI and Secure Boot permissions to even see USB and DVD live sessions for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Korora 19 or Puppy Linux. That made routine installation of Linux impossible.
“The current use of UEFI and Secure Boot technologies might all too conveniently lock down the hard drive to lock out the installation of other operating systems — like Linux. Successfully installing Linux on UEFI/Secure Boot hardware controls depends on which computer brand or model you buy. Some of the newest BIOS versions effectively lock down any other OS access.”
Advice to the author: join the effort to enforce antitrust action. The European authorities have already received a formal complaint from lawyers. In the mean time, boycott hardware that comes with UEFI. Voting with one’s wallet is casting a strong vote. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Intel’s deal with Chinese manufacturer Lenovo to supply chips for its smartphones has now ended. The processor giant, however, is reportedly working on other partnerships to replace the deal. Asus also released the Intel-powered Asus Zenfone series at CES. The new line of smartphones—featuring 4-inch, 5-inch and 6-inch models—will be released in March, mainly aimed at the China and Southeast Asia markets.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Core
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Another pull request was already submitted of AMD Radeon DRM graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 3.14 kernel merge window with the DRM pull.
Linux 3.14 Radeon DRM changes were already submitted to drm-next, which includes improved DRM support and various other changes, particularly for the newer AMD GPUs. This latest Radeon DRM pull that was sent in today provides additional fixes.
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The latest version of this kernel branch has received its first update, but it’s a small one with just a few changes and fixes. This is normal for a new kernel, and subsequent versions should pick up the pace.
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Just a matter of weeks after the lead Btrfs file-system developers joined Facebook after leaving the Fusion-io data storage company, another key Linux kernel developer has left his post at Fusion-io to join the social network company.
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Back in November the networkd service gained support for network bridging and now with the latest code rework there is network bonding support. Network bonding is combining two or more network adapters for network redundancy or greater throughput.
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Here are the main branches for arm-soc for the 3.14 merge window. We’ll have a few more patches towards the end, but this is the bulk of it.
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* Improved crypto_memneq helper.
* Use cyprto_memneq in arch-specific crypto code.
* Replaced orphaned DCP driver with Freescale MXS DCP driver.
* Added AVX/AVX2 version of AESNI-GCM encode and decode.
* Added AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor (CCP) driver.
* Misc fixes.
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The open source libferris project is a virtual file system that aims to provide a single file system interface for all data. I have been advancing libferris towards that goal over the last ten years. Over that time, libferris has gained support for mounting relational databases; physical devices like printers, webcams, and scanners; composite files like Berkeley DB and XML files; applications like Amarok, Firefox, emacs, pulseaudio, XWindow, dbus, and evolution; and more recently web services like GDrive, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr, as well as many other things.
Graphics Stack
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With a fresh round of Mesa Git commits on Monday morning the support landed for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 within Nouveau’s NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers.
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Announced today to Wayland developers was SWC, a new Wayland compositor framework designed to be taken advantage of by window managers targeting Wayland.
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Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that’s been in development now for the better part of a decade, is working brilliantly for some NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while for other NVIDIA GPUs the experience is a sloppy mess. Using the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1-devel Gallium3D driver code installed on top of Ubuntu 13.10, here’s what the experience is like when trying a number of GeForce graphics cards with this latest open-source driver code.
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SimpleDRM is aiming to be a rather generic and simple DRM driver for the mainline Linux kernel. SimpleDRM doesn’t do hardware acceleration but can replace multiple existing frame-buffer drivers like efifb, vesafb, simplefb, and other code. This basic DRM driver can then work with the xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver but there isn’t yet any support for using this DRM driver on Wayland-based systems.
Benchmarks
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Besides the interesting but disappointing AMD Kaveri Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Linux driver benchmarks published this morning, here’s some more AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” benchmarks for your Sunday viewing pleasure.
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The latest benchmarks to share with you all are some tests done of all major Linux kernel releases from Linux 3.8 through Linux 3.13 and including the latest drm-next code that will land in the Linux 3.14 kernel. Here’s a look at whether Intel Haswell HD Graphics users can expect any more performance improvements out of Linux 3.14 on the graphics front.
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After this weekend carrying out a 25-way open-source Linux graphics driver comparison featuring AMD Radeon, Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, the tables have now turned to look at nearly the same assortment of hardware but when using the high-performance, proprietary Linux graphics drivers. We’ve also upped the demanding OpenGL benchmarks used — including the Source Engine — as we see how the AMD and NVIDIA binary graphics drivers are doing to start 2014.
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As alluded to in days earlier after finding major open-source Radeon driver improvements — including the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver — I’ve been conducting a fresh graphics card comparison spanning many graphics processors and looking at the latest open-source driver performance on the Intel, NVIDIA, and Radeon fronts under Ubuntu Linux. In this article is a 25-way Intel Haswell HD Graphics vs. AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics comparison from Ubuntu 13.10 with the upgraded Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 development driver code to provide a very bleeding edge look at what the open-source drivers have to offer the Linux desktop users.
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All drives were tested from an Intel Core i7 Haswell system while running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.13 kernel. The tested assortment of drives used (based upon their availability within our labs) included:
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For the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of playing with CompuLab’s Utilite Computer. The Utilite is a miniature ARM desktop computer powered by Freescale’s i.MX6 SoC and is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This is a speedy little Linux system that for some workloads can blow past Intel’s original Atom Z530 “Poulsbo” SoC system.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 12:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Conferences and other upcoming events that revolve around Free/Open Source software
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From museums to monuments, from parks to shopping boutiques, Brussels is a charming city of contrasts. The place offers enormous amount of diversity when it comes to things to do and places to see. No wonder that Brussels, the capital city of Belgium is quite popular with travellers. While the list of places to see in Brussels is quite exhaustive, we bring you some must see places in Brussels. After all, a tourist has to start somewhere… right…
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Sarah Kiden had never used Linux before she landed a job four years ago as a Web and E-learning Administrator at Uganda Christian University in Kampala. There she is in charge of maintaining the university’s information systems on servers that largely run Linux.
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Michael Davies, a part of the Linux.conf.au (LCA) conference talk review committee, spent a session at this year’s conference talking about how they review talk submissions and choose which ones to accept for this large Australian open source conference. While he spoke specifically about LCA, his tips are largely applicable to those interested in submitting a talk proposal to any conference.
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Pizza and coding go together like pap en sous, and served with a side order of booze only makes the partnership sweeter. Which is why one of the highlights of the Joburg developers calendar is the quarterly Free Beer Sessions organised by programming powerhouse Obsidian.
Partly this is because the beer and the pizza, like the software discussed at such sessions, is free. Also because there’s always a panel of interesting speakers who’ve got unique insights and experience in the world of Free and Open Source Software to chat to and learn from.
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Opensource.com will highlight the efforts of women in open source from January 27 through February 7. We will be focusing some of our content specifically on women working in free and open source software fields and collaborating on projects ranging from open knowledge to open hardware.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Free/Open Source software (FOSS) triumph in the UK and 100 recent news items about FOSS
WE COMPLETELY lost track of the need to post Free/Open Source software news (especially in recent weeks), simply because there had been too much of it piling up and it takes a while to organise, categorise, etc.
Yesterday we posted an opinion about the latest great news and later we saw that it flooding news sites all over the world (not just in the UK). To give some examples, see [1-19]. It’s far from a complete list, but these are just some of the news sites (not blogs) which covered it. It’s high-impact news.
For those who are interested in other recent news about Free/Open Source software, see [20-119] which are more or less chronologically ordered, with more recent articles appearing first. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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HP is sticking to its storage management guns in the face of the Aperi open source consortium IBM launched last week.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company has released Storage Essentials 5.0, the latest version of its storage resource management (SRM) software, as an alternative to Aperi, a group formed to work on a common storage software management platform.
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In 2013 we learned in detail how our digital freedoms were violated. That awareness holds promise for a brighter year ahead, and open source plays a crucial role
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The solitary genius, closeted in a lab or garage, creating the next big thing is largely a myth. Important innovation almost always builds upon what came before it. The automobile would not exist if the horse-drawn carriage had not been invented first. We would not be using laser pointers now if early humans had not fashioned torches in experiments with fire.
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What applications do you use every day? Your operating system and browser are almost definitely on the list. Maybe it also includes office productivity software, a music or video player, photo editor or certain games. Maybe you need accounting, security, POS and server software for your small business. Or maybe you have a larger business that needs ERP, CRM, ecommerce and content management tools.
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What does one do when quality, quantity, and complexity collide? For that is the conundrum of large enterprises facing the vast resources available in the world of open source software (OSS). GitHub, the largest online code-hosting site, lists 10.2 million repositories, and Black Duck, the company for which I work, tracks 30 billion lines of open source code.
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The biggest impact that open source software offers small business in 2014 takes place in the cloud. Open source software powers the cloud—where you can take advantage of both hosted software and services, and hosted IT infrastructure (e.g., servers). We’re already used to hosted services such as Web and mail hosting. They’re convenient and cheap, and they prevent headaches.
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Amazon is one of the most technically influential companies operating today – but you wouldn’t know it, thanks to a dearth of published research papers and negligible code contributions to the open-source projects it relies on.
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Companies are beginning to move away from the ‘closed’ or proprietary software model to an enterprise-ready open source model, where they acquire solutions that fulfil specific business needs, according to Linux Warehouse MD Jan-Jan van der Vyver.
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OSS has reinvented itself with the Niazi 1.618 Middleware System, which allows organisations to shift to open source IT without losing their proprietary investments
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When I founded my first startup in 2008, I was a programming newbie. A degree in economics from Oberlin College hadn’t prepared me for a career writing production-ready code. Despite my best efforts at slapping together crude HTML and CSS Django templates, my ability to contribute to our codebase was limited at best. So I started slowly teaching myself to code with online tutorials and lessons. After many disheartening starts and stops, I realized why I was having problems sticking with it: code lessons and videos felt like school to me, and I had no interest in returning to the classroom.
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The creator of NPM has started a company called NPM, Inc. that he said will focus on offering products and services related to the popular package manager for Node.js.
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When software is open, its strengths and weaknesses are visible to everyone.
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The developers I work with now aren’t so different from the bands I listened to back in my record store days. Linus Torvalds created and shared something catchy, which, with the help of countless other individuals, has grown into a philosophy with ripple effects well beyond the borders of Linux and open source technologies. If Linux is a song, a vast network of musicians, backup singers, producers, promoters, disc jockeys, graphic artists, record store clerks, and listeners help make it a hit.
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I also started working on an open source web-based IRC client with some of my friends from IRC. I enjoyed doing that, but I wasn’t as passionate as I am now about open source software although I loved using it. It wasn’t until a few years later, in 2011, when I started being on freenode, an IRC network dedicated to open source, more actively and participating there that I got to really absolutely love open source and want to contribute more. I now contribute to both smaller projects, and bigger projects such as firefox, and to me it’s a lot of fun and I constantly learn new things!
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In March 2013, a Japanese student by the name of Daiyuu Nobori set up VPN Gate, a free VPN service that he hoped would be used by Internet users who wish to avoid their country’s online content restrictions but don’t have the necessary funds to use a paid VPN service.
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The Apache CloudStack project is pleased to announce the 4.2.1 release of the CloudStack cloud orchestration platform. This is a minor release of the 4.2.0 branch which released on Oct 1, 2013. The 4.2.1 release contains more than 150 bug fixes. As a bug fix release, no new features are included in 4.2.1.
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Linux and FOSS have a lot of energy going into great big projects: cloud, mainframe, supercomputing, and large-scale distributed computing. So bigtime projects like OpenShift, OpenStack, Hadoop, Xen, KVM, and enterprise offerings from Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical are getting all the glory.
But there is a lot happening at the other end of the spectrum, in small-scale specialized projects that anyone can play with for cheap. After wading through endless Ubuntu and Backtrack re-spins I found these 7 interesting, useful, and unique projects that were launched in 2013.
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Today Light Table is taking a huge step forward – every bit of its code is now on Github and along side of that, we’re releasing Light Table 0.6.0, which includes all the infrastructure to write and use plugins. If you haven’t been following the 0.5.* releases, this latest update also brings a tremendous amount of stability, performance, and clean up to the party. All of this together means that Light Table is now the open source developer tool platform that we’ve been working towards. Go download it and if you’re new give our tutorial a shot!
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Twill makes it easier to write programs that can take advantage of YARN. Twill uses a simple thread-based model that Java programmers will find familiar. YARN can be viewed as a compute fabric of a cluster, which means YARN applications like Twill will run on any Hadoop 2 cluster, including Cloudera’s CDH 4, explained Tom White, an engineer at Cloudera.
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The developers of the Rygel open source UPnP media server software have announced a new development version, 0.21.2, which adds several new features and fixes many bugs.
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These are full-featured open source software products, free as in beer and speech that I started to use recently. Vivek Gite picks his best open source software of 2013.
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Open computing has been steadily growing in enterprise acceptance and, in 2013, that trend accelerated sharply. Many factors contributed to the upward trajectory of open computing in the last year. However, there were three notable developments that, in retrospect, were the critical game-changers.
Here’s a look at the three key developments in open source in 2013…
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A few weeks ago, we open sourced Flanker, our MIME parsing and email validation library.
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Jack Wallen lists 10 reasons why he believes 2014 will be a banner year for Linux and open source.
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Jack Wallen highlights 10 of the most disappointing developments for open source in 2013.
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In an effort to expand open-source PDF conversion options, the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2006 to encourage greater government openness and transparency, is hosting what it calls the PDF Liberation Hackathon, dedicated to improving open-source tools for PDF extraction. The Hackathon will run from January 17-19, 2014 at Sunlight offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and around the world.
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For the fifth year in a row, Datamation is closing out the year with a big, big list of all the software we’ve featured on our monthly open source software guides. This year’s list is the longest ever with 1,180 projects in 143 different categories from Accessibility to Wine and Beer.
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Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen posits, but open-source software seems to be eating itself. And at a far faster clip. While the software world has grown used to products and their vendors dominating for long stretches (think: Microsoft in operating systems and Oracle in databases), the new world of open source is moving at an accelerated, Darwinian pace, leaving no project to rest on its laurels.
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Open source software (OSS), unlike proprietary software, is software that keeps the code open so IT professionals can alter, improve, and distribute it. Although it has been around since relatively early in the history of computers, in the past several years OSS has truly taken off, in what some might see as a surprising example of a successful communal collaboration.
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What is Forked? It’s a site that resurrects abandoned open source projects. And that’s a welcome thing.
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In November, we gave you the ultimate open source gift guide for the holidays just in time to start preparing and brainstorming for a great gift for the tech and open source enthusiasts in your life.
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Nowadays we see beautiful design everywhere in our daily life. The digital world is no exception. Many of the websites we visit and the desktop and mobile apps that we use started to be so beautifully designed, that user perceptions on design started to change. As a result, everybody is becoming more design savvy. Users who didn’t care about contrast, button color or responsiveness in the past now critique companies whenever they make a user interface or experience update.
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Basing your new project on open source comes with a host of benefits, and a few risks. The risks are rarely, if ever, technical, but can often be political. When you choose to start a project based on open source tools, as opposed to proprietary solutions that come with a phone number to call when there is trouble, you are telling the company that you are competent enough to be the only support they need. Of course, with open source, you have the support of thousands behind you, but that can be difficult to convince senior management of. You will run into some road blocks, here’s how to avoid them and keep the project moving.
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Software development is a huge and growing industry, and there are likely to be far more jobs in the future than there are folks to do them. But today, there’s a paucity of blacks and Latinos in software development positions.
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Open source is different things to different people: software licensing scheme, business model, development model or community model. However we choose to think about it, though, across the board clever people are using open source to disrupt or change how markets behave.
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INDUSTRY STALWART and Skype co-founder David Gurle has told The INQUIRER that his new venture Perzo will be released as open source software.
Gurle explained that is the only way to prove his software product’s secure credentials.
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Security Innovation, a company that specializes in application and crypto security, has announced availability of its NTRU public key cryptography system for free use in the open-source software community.
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No, as I see it, open source led to more innovation and took over the data center because of the basic ground rules that were laid down from the beginning with the intent of creating an ecosystem that espoused the four freedoms as enumerated by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
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One sometimes unrealistic expectation is that software should be free. All of it.
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Epic Systems Corp. will build two laboratory installations of its EpicCare electronic health record at Oregon Health & Science University for medical informatics education and research purposes. On the research side, the school will have access to Epic’s source code.
This is Epic’s first partnership with an academic informatics program and possibly an important turning point for the company. While Epic does release its source code to commercial customers, it historically has conducted research and development almost exclusively on its sprawling campus in Verona, Wis., where all of its employees are based.
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Petition to save Winamp or its source code initiated by software developers.
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MenuetOS – the open source, GUI-equipped operating system written entirely in assembly language – may be as little as a year away from hitting 1.0. And while 12 months may still seem like a long time, it’s taken some 13 years of work by the Menuet team to get to this point.
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Open-source software can be an effective technology solution for the intrepid IT professional in search of a customizable product. This type of software, which allows users to modify its source code free of charge, can be used to manage websites, email, desktop productivity—you name it. And because it’s less structured than many proprietary or commercial software programs, open source provides IT professionals with a chance to play and experiment. “It’s very much an adventure,” says Moira Edwards, CAE, president, Ellipsis Partners.
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Capital market institutions are stepping up their adoption of open-source software, as cost pressures force an increasingly collaborative approach to IT operations.
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As an alternative to the standard Java API the Cascading open source project has been steadily gaining momentum among developers of Big Data applications largely because Cascading makes it easier to isolate the data processing and data integration elements of an application.
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How often have you thought of a way to improve a piece of software or hardware? How many times have you wondered why companies invest millions of dollars to produce a product that is obviously lacking from the moment it launches? Have you ever wished you were in a position, or had the skills, to change that?
Chances are if you’ve typed ‘open source’ into your search engine then you’ve heard about SourceForge and OpenHatch. If you’re not familiar with these sites, I’d absolutely recommend checking them out. They present an amazing platform where you can get involved with a variety of high-quality, open source projects.
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First, I must say how honored, humbled and excited I am to join the OSI community in our mission, to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source, and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community. While the OSI is recognized around the globe as the stewards of the Open Source Definition and the authority on open source licenses, it is the open source community—all of you—that truly drives development, promotes adoption and encourages participation. It is my sincere desire, and my highest priority, to meaningfully contribute to and promote your efforts in my new role as GM.
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What started as an uphill battle in Burlington, Vermont on the National Day of Civic Hacking in June 2013, transversed into an understanding between local government, non-profits, the media, and the community four months later. What they came to understand was that we can grow stronger when we work together. When we partner. When we work on stuff that matters.
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This year, the Libresoft research group encourages anyone involved in a FLOSS project (not only developers) to participate in the survey. As open source and free software communities have changed and grown to to be more diverse—in project types as well as to include people of various skillsets and backgrounds—a survey to reflect today’s community must include all of these unique responsibilities and contributions to open source and free software projects.
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After many years of using traditional desktop environments like Gnome 2 and KDE and XFCE, I recently spent a few months with Ubuntu 13.04. Overall, my experience with the Unity desktop was fairly positive after I tweaked and configured it to my liking. Since then, I’m using a different non-Ubuntu based distribution, so I’m currently using Mate 1.6. Probably the feature that I most miss from Unity is the launcher. Frankly, I’m surprised that the Unity launcher was so useful and intuitive for me, since I have never been particularly fond of keyboard navigation. Although I still don’t use the keyboard much for window management or within the applications, now that I’m back on Mate I find myself really missing the convenience of searching and launching both apps and files from one unified interface with just a few keywords. With the online results all disabled, Unity’s launcher learns from the user’s habits and quickly becomes uncannily accurate at suggesting relevant local files and applications based on a few letters of input. It really did significantly add to my productivity. The only problem is that the Unity desktop environment, apart from its launcher, is not what everyone wants in a desktop. Additionally, despite a few efforts to port it to other distributions with varying degrees of success, Unity continues to be an option almost exclusively for Ubuntu based systems. So, what other options are available for users who want a launcher like Unity’s, but in a different desktop environment and/or distribution? That’s what I set to find out.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Hardware, IBM, Microsoft at 11:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Shortly after Lenovo was confirmed to have taken IBM’s x86 server business it is also confirmed that Google’s hardware business is to be devoured by Lenovo
A LOT OF PEOPLE may not remember this, but Google explained that it bought part of Motorola because it could not afford to let Microsoft and Apple (which had reportedly put a bid in) get yet more Android-hostile patents after they got most of Novell’s and all of Nortel’s, among others’ (AOL’s and other smaller companies). Patent stacking is an abusive, obvious collusion against software freedom in this case.
Moreover, as we pointed out before (in our many posts about Motorola), Google automatically inherited a patent case that determines the future of Android. Microsoft later sued Google over patents, simply because Motorola was no longer independent (at least the mobility part).
For Google, using Motorola to produce actual phones was not necessarily a good idea; it would alienate OEMs/partners at OHA, notably Samsung (which started to explore other operating systems like Tizen as an insurance policy). By stopping to explore the hardware side of things, Google would appease some partners, and even some regulators (notably the Chinese regulators, who gave Google a hard time at the time). Rather than develop nothing using Motorola’s skills and facilities, Google should pass the development side to real producers. And Google did the right thing!
Google is now offloading much of Motorola and the substance goes to a giant hardware company [1,2,3]. As Muktware put it, “All’s not lost” because “Lenovo has risen from the ashes to become the biggest pc vendor for a few years running, and we hope that they continue the ingenious path that Motorola has embarked on while under Google’s care. In the mean time, we anxiously wait to see what other crazy ideas Dugan and her team will come up with.”
Lenovo also took another chunk of IBM earlier this month. This demonstrates the “China Rising” trend and there’s not much one can do to resist it (many phones these days are made in Taiwan, mainland China, Korea, and so on). In a way, the news about Motorola and Google means not much will change when it comes to patents and litigation. Google may need those patents to create a strong enough deterrence against the cartel which includes CPTN, Rockstar, Nokia (becoming part of Microsoft), etc. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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In a strange twist, it has just been reported that Google is set to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for a sum of 3 billion dollars. Google purchased Motorola in 2012 for a sum of 12.5 billion. From the surface, it seems like it’s a loss of 9.5 billion if the deal does go through, but there’s more to it. Lenovo has purchased patents and parts of IBM in the past, and have been linked with a bid for Blackberry among others as recently as last year. This news in particular comes as a major shock to us because Motorola was just turning things around with the Moto X, G and their wide variety of customizations.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of yesterday’s and today’s news about the NSA
New Leaks
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The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”
Illegal Collection of ‘Evidence’
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A man charged with aiding a terrorist organization has asked a U.S. court to throw out information collected by the National Security Agency, saying the NSA’s surveillance of his Internet communications violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecuting Anonymisers
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In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of a three-judge panel at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication.
In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit’s SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit’s users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit’s users.
War on Journalism
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James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his “accomplices” to return leaked documents during a hearing on Wednesday.
Europe
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A former Ukrainian president warned on Wednesday that the country is now on “the brink of civil war,” and Russia added to the gloom by announcing the suspension of its financial aid package, which was all that had been keeping Ukraine solvent.
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Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.
Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.
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Former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Edward Snowden will be invited to the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), APA’s Europe bureau reports.
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Chancellor says Germany and US still ‘far apart’ on sweeping surveillance and spying activities revealed by Edward Snowden
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Berlin and Washington are still “far apart” in their views on the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
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The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE COMMISSIONER has spoken out on Data Protection Day about national security agency surveillance.
US Politics
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Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
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Senator Patrick Leahy questioned how the Constitution allows the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records and repeated his calls for President Barack Obama’s administration to end the program during a hearing Wednesday.
The Obama administration should heed the recent advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and end the phone records collection program, said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
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The NSA’s new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at “nullifying” the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center’s much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Angry Birds
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Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website late Tuesday were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text “Spying Birds.” The U.S. National Security Agency’s logo was also visible in the image.
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Reacting to recent revelations that smartphone apps such as Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) to spy on their users, the Application Developers Alliance has condemned the NSA for damaging the industry.
BBC
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When the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of Edward Snowden’s NSA-GCHQ leaks in June, it unleashed a stream of abbreviations, acronyms and jargon describing the cyberspies’ activities.
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