04.16.14

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Links 16/4/2014: Red Hat PR, Ubuntu LTS Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 2:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Code Has Fewer Defects Than Proprietary Software

    The latest Coverity Scan Open Source Report suggests that the quality of programming in free C and C++ projects is improving

  • Coverity finds open source software quality better than proprietary code

  • Web Browsers

    • Tor Browser: An Ultimate Web Browser for Anonymous Web Browsing in Linux

      Most of us give a considerable time of ours to Internet. The primary Application we require to perform our internet activity is a browser, a web browser to be more perfect. Over Internet most of our’s activity is logged to Server/Client machine which includes IP address, Geographical Location, search/activity trends and a whole lots of Information which can potentially be very harmful, if used intentionally the other way.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • IBM Debuts New Big Data Software-Defined Storage Platform for the Cloud

      Big Data is placing new storage demands on enterprises, and IBM is aiming to address their needs with a new software-defined storage platform for the cloud called SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center (VSC).

    • Dell and Red Hat’s OpenStack Partnership Deepens

      Dell has unveiled a series of upgrades and announcements focused on the datacenter this week, and is deepening its cloud computing ties with Red Hat, as the firms focus on OpenStack. Dell and Red Hat recently announced that Dell will effectively become an OEM for Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform by selling systems that run the platform. Dell has also joined the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network as an Alliance Partner.

    • Giving rise to the cloud with OpenStack Heat

      Setting up an application server in the cloud isn’t that hard if you’re familiar with the tools and your application’s requirements. But what if you needed to do it dozens or hundreds of times, maybe even in one day? Enter Heat, the OpenStack Orchestration project. Heat provides a templating system for rolling out infrastructure within OpenStack to automate the process and attach the right resources to each new instance of your application.

    • Leading Linux Players Rapidly Shift Their Emphasis to the Cloud

      This week, not only is Red Hat touting its success at getting a number of notable enterprises to choose its Linux platform and OpenStack offering for deployments, but Canonical is rolling out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and highlighting it as the best way to build out an OpenStack cloud environment. These efforts underscore that leading Linux platforms and cloud computing are going to be joined at the hip going forward, and the players behind them will need to offer top-notch support and compatibility. .

  • Education

  • Business

    • Open Source Big Data Vendor Talend Adds SaaS Analytics Partner

      Talend and Blue Yonder have partnered on a new solution for streamlining Big Data analytics using SaaS and open source software.

    • Box launches Box Open Source

      In a tweet, chief Executive Aaron Levie announced the project. “Box couldn’t exist without open source projects. We’re announcing Box Open Source to now give back our own,” he said. The firm also detailed the project in a blog post.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.9.0 release candidate available

      GCC 4.9.0 Release Candidate available from gcc.gnu.org

    • Financial transparency: where your money goes with MediaGoblin

      Okay! Now that’s a bit easier to read. From the chart it’s easy to see that the vast majority of money went toward development itself. Actually, if you combine this with travel (ie, reimbursement for myself and another contributor speaking about MediaGoblin or participating in MediaGoblin hackfests), that’s over 80% of the budget right there directly to the most important part of the project… developing the project itself! (We’ll come back to the development section in a moment… but first let’s get the smaller slices of the chart out of the way.)

  • Public Services/Government

    • EU countries ‘prefer open specifications’

      The EU member states that are working on interoperability and alignment of e-government services say open specifications are crucial to building European public services. Open specifications allow the EU’s public administrations to align their approaches to interoperability, according to an analysis of the interoperability programmes in 19 member states. The study flags the need to monitor the use of open technical specification and standards.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Open data hackathon tackles cultural preservation

        More and more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are digitizing their collections to make them accessible online and to preserve our heritage for future generations. By January 2014, over 30 million objects have been made available via Europeana—among which over 4.5 million records were contributed from German institutions.

  • Programming

    • April 2014 Project of the Month, Free Pascal

      For our April Community Choice Project of the Month, our community has selected Free Pascal, an advanced open source compiler for Pascal and Object Pascal. The project founder, Florian Klaempfl, tells us about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.

    • Lightweight Virtual Environments in Python 3.4

      Customizing Python’s virtual environments for projects with conflicting library requirements or different Python versions is now easy in Python 3.3 and 3.4.

Leftovers

  • These Abandoned, Half-Demolished Towers Look Too Pretty to Destroy

    This colorful scene isn’t a view of a new luxury loft. It’s Rabot Towers, an abandoned public housing project in Ghent, Belgium. When the first stage of demolition removed the building’s exterior walls, the former blight became an unexpected beauty, captured here by photographer Pieter Lozie.

  • Hardware

    • Wintel Sinks Further

      As expected, Intel has raised prices in an attempt to maintain profits as long as possible rather than trusting the market to yield them a reasonable living. This will hasten the demise of Wintel as consumers see greater advantages to switching to */Linux on ARM.

  • Security

    • Akamai Admits Its Heartbleed Patch Was Faulty, Has To Reissue All SSL Certs And Keys

      The web is a dangerous place these days. Akamai, which many large companies rely on for hosting as a CDN, has admitted that its Heartbleed patch was faulty, meaning that it was possible that the SSL keys “could have been exposed to an adversary exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability.” Akamai had already noted that it was more protected against Heartbleed than others, because of custom code it had used for its own OpenSSL deployment. However, as researchers looked through that custom code, they found some significant defects in it. Some people have been arguing that the Heartbleed bug highlights a weakness in open source software — but that’s not necessarily true. Pretty much all software has vulnerabilities. And, sometimes, by open sourcing stuff you can find those vulnerabilities faster.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Attack on Russia is Mounting

      Washington’s plan to grab Ukraine overlooked that the Russian and Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine were not likely to go along with their insertion into the EU and NATO while submitting to the persecution of Russian speaking peoples. Washington has lost Crimea, from which Washington intended to eject Russia from its Black Sea naval base. Instead of admitting that its plan for grabbing Ukraine has gone amiss, Washington is unable to admit a mistake and, therefore, is pushing the crisis to more dangerous levels.

      If Ukraine dissolves into secession with the former Russian territories reverting to Russia, Washington will be embarrassed that the result of its coup in Kiev was to restore the Russian provinces of Ukraine to Russia. To avoid this embarrassment, Washington is pushing the crisis toward war.

    • How Native Americans were crucial to defeat the Nazis and Japan in WW2

  • Finance

    • Mt. Gox Files for Liquidation

      Mt. Gox’s website, on Feb 26, posted a statement showing that the company had gone offline.

    • Why No Sustained Protests (Yet)?

      True, little is gained from sterile debates over whether program or organization is the “more” important object for activists. The point is that disorganization is now a major weakness. The United States left fell victim to recurring repressive demonizations of programs, individuals and especially organizations with anti-business and anti-capitalist objectives. To revive left protest on a scale comparable to the 1930s would require rebuilding the multiple, complex layers of connection among diverse components of the left (including those with such objectives).

    • This is Not an ‘Economic Recovery’, This is Plunder

      Everything you need to know about Cameron’s idea of economic recovery was summed up by the front page the Mirror this morning. 1 million food parcels have been handed out to hungry Britons, in the world’s sixth largest economy, and at a time that the economy is growing. What price economic ‘recovery’?

    • Toronto Star hiring 8 digital journalists at “market-based salaries”

      The Toronto Star announced it will hire eight digital journalists who will be paid less than other journalists in the newsroom and it is considering another round of editorial buyouts. The newspaper also laid off 11 full-time page editors and eight staff in the circulation department.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Quiz your MEP candidates on digital rights

      Europe makes many of the laws that are shaping privacy and restricting surveillance. Data Protection, for instance, should guarantee that interception is lawful, rather than arbitrary.

    • Help us to re-start the debate about internet filters

      At times the campaign to prevent default internet filters has bordered on the surreal, such as when the Deputy Children’s Commissioner Sue Berelowitz said, ‘no one should be panicking – but why should there not be a moral panic?’ Or the time when Helen Goodman MP thought parents weren’t capable of switching in filters themselves because, ‘the minute you talk about downloading software, my brain goes bzzzz’. And who can forget Claire Perry MP dismissing overblocking as, ‘a load of cock’?

    • Free speech victory as Wonga backs down on parody copyright claim

      The Streisand effect occurs when an attempt to remove or cover up information leads to it gaining significantly more attention than it would have done otherwise.

    • Twitter bows to Turkey’s demands to silence accounts

      After weeks of political tussle, Twitter has agreed to close some accounts the Turkish government considers harmful and implement a system for investigating those accounts Turkish courts flag up in the future, a report in Reuters has said.

  • Privacy

    • FBI’s nationwide facial recognition system to have 52 million photos by 2015

      We first heard about the FBI’s national facial recognition system in 2012. The high-tech Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, as part of which surveillance images are checked out with photos of known criminals, is primarily aimed at transforming how the organization fights crime. The Bureau should be able to achieve a fully operational facial recognition database (including mug shots, iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification) this summer, says an EFF report.

    • Google may favor encrypted sites in its search ranking: Report

      Google is mulling over boosting search rank of websites that use encryption. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Google distinguished engineer Matt Cutts “hinted” at the possibility at a recently held conference.

    • La Quadrature Joins the Legal Struggle Against Mass Surveillance

      In October 2013, Big Brother Watch, Open Rights Group, English Pen and Constanze Kurz launched a legal challenge1 to the UK’s internet surveillance activities before the European Court of Human Rights arguing that the unchecked surveillance through programmes such as PRISM and TEMPORA is a breach of our Right to Privacy. La Quadrature du Net joined a coalition formed to support this legal challenge.

    • Snowden’s Email Provider Loses Appeal Over Encryption Keys

      A federal appeals court has upheld a contempt citation against the founder of the defunct secure e-mail company Lavabit, finding that the weighty internet privacy issues he raised on appeal should have been brought up earlier in the legal process.

    • NETmundial: let’s get to work

      I will soon be travelling to Sao Paulo to attend NETmundial, the Multi-stakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance. The purpose of NETmundial is to develop principles of Internet governance and a roadmap for the future development of this ecosystem.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Most Bizarre Response To The Pulitzers Yet, From The Guy Who Authorized CIA Torture

      So, the Guardian and the Washington Post won the Pulitzer for “public service” for their coverage of the NSA’s surveillance activities. We mentioned how this should really end the debate over whether or not Ed Snowden was a whistleblower or not, but knew that would never happen. We’d already covered Rep. Peter King’s incensed response, but an even more amusing response has to be the one from John Yoo. You may recall Yoo as the guy in the George W. Bush administration who basically shredded the Constitution in “authorizing” the CIA’s torture program. He’s weighed in a few times about the NSA stuff, arguing that the NSA shouldn’t have to obey the Constitution because it takes too long and insists that the courts have no role in determining if something violates the 4th Amendment.

    • Countries Where Journalists’ Killers Go Free

      Syria isn’t just the most deadly country for journalists — it’s also one of the countries where journalists’ murders are most likely to go unpunished, according to the Committee To Protect Journalists’ new study.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Apple, Samsung and Microsoft commit to anti-theft smartphone kill switch

      TECHNOLOGY GIANTS Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, among others, have committed to introducing anti-thief kill switches on smartphone devices, enabling users to easily lock and wipe a handset if it gets stolen.

      Starting in July 2015, all smartphones made by the companies onboard with the initiative – a list that also includes Google, Nokia, HTC and Huawei – will come with free anti-theft tools preloaded on the devices or ready to be downloaded, wireless association CTIA announced on Tuesday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • High Court: Kim Dotcom Can Have His Cars, Millions in Cash Returned

        The High Court in New Zealand today ruled that police may not keep possession of assets seized in a 2012 raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion. This means that a potential appeal aside, Dotcom may soon be reunited with millions of dollars in cash, his luxury car collection, artwork, and other assets seized by the authorities.

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