04.12.14

Links 12/4/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 12/4/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 3:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 12/4/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Political News: Protests Face a Ban, Covert Actions Continue, Cold War Era Imperialism, Privacy, and War on Justice

Posted in News Roundup at 3:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Spain

• Orwell returns to Spain

  The state aims to criminalize protest with a troubling ‘citizens’ security’ law

Venezuela

• Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone pay tribute to Hugo Chávez

  Hollywood liberals Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have paid tribute to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died on 5 March after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 58.

Other Covert Actions

• German Minister: ‘US Operating Without any Kind of Boundaries’

  In an interview, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, 60, warns that American spying has become “boundless” and expresses sorrow that approval ratings for the United States have plummeted in Germany.

• America’s Coup Machine: Destroying Democracy Since 1953

  Soon after the 2004 U.S. coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, I heard Aristide’s lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He began his talk with a riddle: “Why has there never been a coup in Washington D.C.?” The answer: “Because there is no U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C.” This introduction was greeted with wild applause by a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.

• The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba’s fake Twitter clone

  Not that this is news to PandoDaily readers, of course: Earlier this year, we broke the story about USAID co-investing with Omidyar Network in Ukraine NGOs that organized and led the Maidan revolution in Kiev, resulting in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. That revolution hasn’t turned out so well — thanks to the “success” of the USAID-Omidyar-funded revolution, there’s talk of the West going to war with nuclear-armed Russia, Ukraine is losing entire chunks of territory like the proverbial leper on a waterslide, Kiev is run by a coalition of costume-party fascists and a handful of billionaire Mafia dons—and Vladimir Putin has never been more popular, or more tyrannical.

  [...]

  The truth is, USAID’s role in a covert ops and subversion should be common knowledge—it’s not like the record is that hard to find. Either USAID has developed those Men In Black memory-zappers, or else—maybe we don’t want to remember.

  This selective amnesia doesn’t do anyone else any good however, so I figured it might be useful to offer a brief look back at some of USAID’s darkest, ugliest moments. It’s important to note that not everything USAID does is patently evil — in fact, there are many programs that could even be described as good. But USAID, as with any agency of American power, is fully capable of and will continue to be an instrument of geopolitical and corporate force.

  As Big Tech becomes increasingly intertwined with USAID’s missions around the world — particularly as USAID’s programs and language merge with the lexicon and interests of Silicon Valley (such as “Global Development Lab,” USAID’s new “DARPA-like” research arm) — now’s a good time to refresh our memories about USAID’s dark past.

• Reality check: How costly wars overwhelmed the US empire beyond salvation

  In Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Ukraine, and most recently in Palestine and Israel, too many calamitous scenarios have exposed the fault lines of US foreign policy.

Syria

• Barack Obama pulls a George W. Bush: Lies, misinformation and chemical weapons

  Remember the almost-war in Syria last year? An amazing new report — which our media won’t touch — is a must read

Ukraine

• When Is a Putsch a Putsch? (The US False Narrative about Ukraine Continues)

• News of a Russian arms buildup next to Ukraine is part of the propaganda war

  Any report about Ukraine these torrid days needs to come with a political health warning, even if that report originates from what might be called “our own” side. This includes the latest revelation from Nato about Russian troop deployments on the borders of eastern Ukraine.

  Over the past six months, but especially since the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February and his circuitous flight from Kiev, there has been as much of a propaganda war as – potentially – a real war between Russia and the west. Two distinct, and for the most part mutually exclusive, versions of the truth have been put about, and have found receptive audiences on either side.

• US pays $8 million a month to have its private armies deployed in Ukraine – British press

• Reflections on Ukraine and Regime Change

  This disruption is something we have seen in numerous other countries—at this very time from Venezuela to Thailand. The goal of these western-financed attacks has been to make the world safe for the 1%, the global super rich. Ukraine citizens who think they are fighting for democracy will eventually discover that they are really serving the western plutocracy. They will be left with a new government filled with old intentions. Ukrainians will end up with nothing to show for their efforts except a still more depressed and more corrupt economy, an enormous IMF debt, a worsening of social services, and an empty “democracy,” led by corrupt opportunists like Tymoshenko.

Journalism

• Greenwald returns to US first time since Snowden leaks: Will Obama arrest him?

  The Huffington Post is reporting that Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two US journalists who have played prominent roles in the series of reporting about the classified National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will be in the US on Friday, the first time since the news about NSA surveillance programs first broke in the international media.

  The two journalists met with Snowden and interviewed him in Hong Kong in June 2013 and helped with breaking the news of the leaks.

• Journalists who got Snowden docs arrive in US for first time in months

  Glenn Greenwald says he wasn’t 100 percent sure he wouldn’t be arrested.

European Privacy

• Back to the coalition agreement: data retention laws should not be revived

  In 2010, the coalition announced that they would roll back the surveillance state including the “Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason”. The coalition is on the threshold of fulfilling that pledge – at least in relation to data held by ISPs. ISPs meanwhile need to clarify what they are doing now that the law is gone.

NSA PRISM

• Facebook receives nearly 2,000 data requests from UK police

  Social network says more than 70% of requests in second half of 2013 in connection with criminal cases led to release of content

• Dropbox Developers Finally Fix Ubuntu Indicator Bug in New Release

• Dropbox 2.7.50 Experimental Version Released with Fixes and Improvements

• Spy-happy Condoleezza Rice joins Dropbox board as privacy adviser

  Dropbox has been hit with a firestorm of criticism after announcing that Iraq war architect Condoleezza Rice has joined its board.

  The cloud-based file-sharing service said it was “honored to be adding someone as brilliant and accomplished as Dr. Rice to our team”.

  However, the internet has lit up with anger over the decision, with many Dropbox users threatening to stop using its services – “Drop Dropbox” in other words.

• Condoleezza Rice, surveillance and torture fan, joins Dropbox board

  Rice joining Dropbox is the insult, not the injury, which is in the firm’s DNA: customer privacy as a feature, not a principle.

Torture

• After 16 years, CIA declassifies new portions of “KUBARK” interrogation manual

  While President Obama forbid via executive order the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding, or confinement in a small box or coffin, the same executive order cemented the use of isolation, forms of sensory deprivation, use of drugs, and sleep deprivation in the Department of Defense’s Army Field Manual 2-22.3, which is now the U.S. standard for interrogation. In that sense, irrespective of the controversies over waterboarding and the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” program approved by John Yoo and other Bush-era government attorneys, much of what was KUBARK lives on.

Rights

• Scathing Report Cites ‘Excessive Force’ by Albuquerque Police

• L.A. deputies shoot, kill the wrong man, age 30

  Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies mistakenly shot to death a hostage who was fleeing from a knife-wielding attacker at a West Hollywood apartment, authorities announced Thursday.

  John Winkler, 30, an aspiring television producer, died at a hospital following Monday night’s confrontation.

  “Taking the life of an innocent person is a police officer’s greatest nightmare,” Interim Sheriff John Scott said at a news conference.

• Judge says prosecutors should follow the law. Prosecutors revolt.

• Receipt clears Brooklyn man after 24 years in jail for murder

  Jonathan Fleming (center) talks with reporters after exiting a courtroom in New York on April 8. Fleming, who spent almost a quarter-century behind bars for murder, was freed on Tuesday and cleared of a killing that happened when he was 1,100 miles away on a Disney World vacation.

• Weev Is Free to Troll Again After Appeals Court Tosses Out Conviction

  Hoards of internet enthusiasts crowed in unison, when Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer was convicted of computer fraud in 2012 and later sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. And on Friday, those cries were justified. A federal appeals panel just overturned the conviction but not for the reasons some activists might’ve hoped for.

• Weev Is Free

  Andrew “weev” Auernheimer is set to be released from federal prison, following a federal appeals court decision to reverse and vacate his conviction and sentence.

  “I’m going to prison for arithmetic,” Weev declared last March. Shortly after, he was incarcerated in the federal prison system, charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that federal prosecutors were invoking against the late Aaron Swartz — a close friend of weev.

• There Are 10 Times More Mentally Ill People Behind Bars Than in State Hospitals

• Greece: Golden Dawn Mob Threatens NGO for Treating Migrants in Perama Clinic

  A neo-Nazi mob affiliated to the Greek Golden Dawn party has intimidated a polyclinic of the human rights organisation Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) because it was providing healthcare services and medication to immigrants.

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Ubuntu News: Themes, Unity 8, Meizu Phone, Ubuntu Touch, and Elementary OS

Posted in News Roundup at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Themes

• Suru Icon Theme Package Lands in Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr)

• Windows XP Theme For Linux Is Ideal For New Users

Unity

• Video: Watch Unity 8 (Mir) And Unity 7 (X11) Running On The Same Time, On Ubuntu 14.04

• Unity 7 X11 Running Together With Unity 8 Mir

  A new video out of Canonical is showing off the Unity 7 desktop with an X11 session running side-by-side with a Unity 8 Mir-powered session.

  Stephen Webb, the engineering manager of desktop Unity at Canonical, posted a video of “A demonstration of Unity 8 (Mir) and unity 7 (X11) running on the same machine at the same time.” They’re in different sessions and showing it’s possible with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS without too many challenges.

• Canonical Shows Off Unity8 (Mir) and Unity7 (X11) Running at the Same Time on the Same PC

Meizu

• Meizu Shows Its MX3 Running Ubuntu for Phones

  Canonical announced a while ago that it had chosen Meizu and BQ as the first hardware partners for the first Ubuntu-powered phones, and now an official video of Ubuntu running on a Meizu phone has been made public.

• This is Ubuntu running on the Meizu MX3 smartphone (video)

  Later this year the Meizu MX3 will become one of the first smartphone to ship with Ubuntu Linux. An Android version of the 5.1 inch smartphone is already available, but the Chinese phone maker started showing of an Ubuntu version at Mobile World Congress in February.

• Ubuntu Phone Demoed On The Meizu MX3

  Going back to January has been talk about Ubuntu on Chinese smart-phones and in February it was announced that Meizu is one of two Ubuntu Phone launch partners. Meizu dominates the Chinese market while the BQ Ubuntu Phone will target Europe.

More Phones

• The Latest Three Ubuntu Touch Images Got Important Fixes And Enhancements

  Hello Linux Geeksters. Canonical has released yet another three Ubuntu Touch images over the weekend, coming with important fixes for Unity 8, the time zone support has been added to the organizer library, a bunch of boot improvements have been added, an enhanced version of calendar has been implemented, and the latest scopes API changes have been added.

• Ubuntu Phone Pricing Will Fall Within $200-400 Category, Mobile OS Can Run In A Desktop Operating System As Well

  Ubuntu phone: Are you an Android for the past couple of years but recently you have been looking for a fresh take on your smartphone OS experience? If so, then you may want to check out Ubuntu’s phone which would arrive some time this year.

• Ubuntu Touch Gets More Fixes with the Latest Images

  Ubuntu for phones and tablets has confronted with a number of blockers in the development, but that hasn’t stopped its makers from implementing new features and fixing some bugs.

Surveillance-Friendly Computing

• Ubuntu One Shut Down; Here Are Some Alternatives

  Ubuntu One has been shut down and people are seeking alternatives.

  The service is not shut down immediately–Canonical announced that the service will go offline as of June 1.

• Canonical halts Ubuntu One file services

  Canonical – the company behind operating system Ubuntu and founded by open source pioneer Mark Shuttleworth – has discontinued its cloud-based file storage service Ubuntu One.

• Canonical shuts down Ubuntu One cloud service

• 6 Ubuntu One Alternatives

  Canonical has announced that the service in question will go offline in a couple of months. So you have until June 1 to migrate to a new cloud hosting service, while your data will be accessible until the end of July before it gets wiped clean. The reason behind the shutdown is basically due to high competition where other services are providing good amounts of storage for free and it would take huge investments for Canonical to do the same. To help you choose a new storage service, we’ve compiled a list of viable substitutes.

• Canonical to End Ubuntu One Cloud Storage Service for Ubuntu Linux

• Linux Top 3: Linus Lashes out, Linux 3.14 Gets PIE and Ubuntu One is Done.

Ultimate Edition

• Ultimate Edition 3.9 Linux Distro Is a Complete Mess

  The previous version of Ultimate Edition was a more down-to-earth variant that came up with some interesting features. It was one of the few distros out there that chose to keep Unity as a desktop environment, but the current version is a complete mess.

Elementary OS

• elementary OS “Isis” First Details Revealed, It Looks Unbelievably Good – Video

  elementary OS “Isis” is the next iteration of the famous operating system that swooped everyone off their feet with some amazing looks and a new desktop concept. The first details about the new version have been revealed and it is going to be one of the most beautiful Linux distributions in the world.

• A Demo Video Of Elementary OS 0.3 Isis Has Been Released

• elementary OS “Isis” to Feature a Dedicated Podcast App Called Vocal

  elementary OS developers are working to integrate a dedicated application for listening to podcasts and leave the Music app to do what it does best, namely play music.

• Elementary OS 0.3 Isis Will Bring “Vocal”, A New App Designed For Listening To Podcasts

• Linux distro ‘elementary’ grows up, starts paying developers

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Kernel (Linux) News: A Week’s News in a Nutshell

Posted in News Roundup at 3:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Linux

• The Imaging Sources announces Linux supports for its cameras

  The Imaging Source has announced the immediate availability of open source Linux support for all of its cameras.

• Linux Kernel 3.12.17 LTS Officially Released

  If you are using any of the versions released until now in the Linux kernel 3.12.x branch, you should consider an update to this build. Keep in mind that this is an LTS release, which means that it’s going to be around for a very long time. If you feel adventurous, you can ditch this LTS branch and go for the latest 3.14 version.

• Torvalds Is Unconvined By LTO’ing A Linux Kernel

• Hamachi Graphical Frontend Haguichi 1.0.24 Now Has Systemd and Upstart Support

  This is not the big update that everyone has been waiting for, but at least there are a few things that will definitely catch your eye. For example, support has been added for systemd and upstart to control the Hamachi service, the network list is now immediately updated after going online or offline in a network, and the update interval count is now reset after each manual update.

File Systems

• Upcoming Btrfs Features for Linux Containers

• Reiser4: Different Transaction Models

Linux 3.15

• ACPI & Power Management Get More Updates In Linux 3.15

  A second Git pull request has been made for the ACPI and power management code within the kernel for Linux 3.15.

• Realtek RTL8723AU Support Added To Linux 3.15

• LTO Support Coming To Linux 3.15, Making For A Faster Kernel

  Earlier in April I wrote about link-time optimization support for the kernel nearing reality. LTO support for the Linux kernel has been in the works since 2012 but only with Linux 3.15 will it become a mainline possibility. Link-Time Optimizations via GCC and other compilers allow for various compile-time optimizations to be applied across the binary as a whole. Enabling link-time optimizations can yield some significant performance improvements but results in much slower compile times and with large programs can cause problems due to the size of optimizing the complete binary at once.

Graphics Stack

• Nvidia Releases 337.12 Beta Driver, Brings Back Over-clocking

• Upgraded Kernel & Mesa Yield A Big Boost For Athlon R3 Graphics

  With OpenArena the frame-rate went from just 8 FPS on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 19 FPS when using the Linux 3.14 kernel. Linux 3.14 allows for the R3 Graphics to re-clock to their highest performance state compared to Linux 3.13 where DPM isn’t enabled by default for GCN GPUs. When going to Mesa 10.2-devel that will be officially released in about one month, the frame-rate rose to 25 FPS… That’s over a three-fold performance improvement when pulling in the bleeding edge latest code.

Wayland

• Wayland & Weston 1.5 Gear Up To Be Released

• Intel Developers Continue Work On The Weston RandR Protocol

  Intel developers continue experimenting with a Resize and Rotate protocol extension for Wayland’s Weston compositor that was originally designed for the X.Org Server.

Intel

• Intel Publishes Full Linux Driver Support For Cherryview

  The “Cherryview” Atom processors feature “Gen8″ graphics (Broadwell) capabilities, there’s three display pipes, three HDMI/DisplayPort/EmbeddedDisplayPort ports, two MIPI DSI display ports, and VGA support has been dropped from Cherryview.

AMD

• Updated AMD Microcode Fixes The R7 260X, Other “SI” GPUs

  Alex Deucher sent out a set of three patches today to update the microcode used by the AMD “Southern Islands” graphics processors.

• AMD Releases The Radeon R9 295X

  As expected AMD unveiled the Radeon R9 295X graphics card this morning as the “world’s fastest” for those with $1500 USD to spare.

• AMD Athlon 5150 & Sempron 2650/3850 APUs On Linux

• AMD Brings Back Semprons & Athlons With The 2014 AM1 Platform

  After much information being made public in March concerning AMD’s AM1 platform that delivers socketed APUs for low-cost desktop systems, the first of these new socketed APUs are shipping today under the restored Athlon and Sempron branding. We’ve been fortunate enough to have one of the new Athlon AM1 APUs at Phoronix for a few days of testing.

• AMD Athlon 5350 APU On Linux

Gallium3D

• Gallium3D’s HUD Gains More Features For R600g, RadeonSI

  The Gallium3D HUD has gain some new reporting capabilities for the Radeon Gallium3D R600 and RadeonSI drivers.

X.Org

• X.Org Server 1.16 Merge Window Closes, Pre-Release Issued

  Keith wrote on the mailing list, “With this, the 1.16 merge window comes to a close. Thanks to everyone who contributed a huge pile of fixes and new features! We’re a week behind schedule; Kristian was a bit late with Xwayland, and that included a driver-visible API change that needed fixing (this appears to have been my fault originally).”

NVIDIA

• NVIDIA Might Be Working On G-SYNC Linux Support

• NVIDIA Releases 337 Linux Driver With Overclocking, Better EGL

• NVIDIA Releases First Linux Driver with Overclock Features

• NVIDIA 331.67 Stable Linux Driver Officially Released

  This latest driver update arrives only a day after the previous Beta release, which caused quite a stir because it featured the option to overclock the video card. It may not seem like much but, in fact, this is actually great progress for the NVIDIA drivers.

• NVIDIA GeForce 337 Beta Driver Linux Overclocking Trials

Benchmarks

• Gallium3D LLVMpipe Performance In Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

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