• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Asian Penguins middle school Linux club inspires community

What are the Asian Penguins? That’s a simple question that has a complicated answer. Are they a student club? Yes. Are they a tech support group that takes care of some of our school’s computers? Partly, yes. Are they also a movement for change that challenges our students to improve people’s lives through the power of open source technology? Most definitely, yes. Simply put, the Asian Penguins are a Linux users group.

Another School Finds GNU/Linux Desktops Work For Them

It quit working. It slowed down. It collected malware. It re-re-rebooted. Well, schools still find that with “7”.

Desktop

• State of VoIP in Linux

  Like most people, I find myself using the same VoIP options everyone else is using. Thankfully, these days there are far more options available than what we might think. Today, I’ll look at these options and also explore up-and-coming alternatives as well.

• Dell’s Linux PC sequel still “just works”—but it adds 4K screen and rough edges

  Almost two years ago, we closed out our review of Dell’s first Linux-powered Developer Edition laptop with some words of wisdom from my former uber-sysadmin mentor, a fellow named Rick, with whom I worked at Boeing for many, many years. Rick is now retired and living the life of an itinerant world-traveling SCUBA master, but he’s been hacking on Linux since around the time Linus first dropped the kernel on comp.os.minix. I lamented to Rick that I was having a hard time coming up with an angle or hook for the XPS 13 Developer Edition, because it all just worked—Dell got it right, and it was a great piece of kit. It was maybe even a bit boring.

Server

• Docker Inc.’s Acquisitions Aim for Ease of Use and Portability

  Docker, Inc., the corporate sponsor of the popular container technology toolset, has been in the news recently for its acquisitions. Last month, Docker acquired startup SocketPlane, and said that SocketPlance could help add standard networking interfaces to Docker to make multi-container distributed apps easily portable. And Docker, Inc. has also acquired Canadian startup Kitematic and its eponymous, popular open source software tool. “The Docker experience is enhanced through Kitematic and its graphical user interface (GUI)-driven workflow that automatically installs Docker on a user’s Mac to build, ship and run Docker containers in just minutes,” says the announcement.

Kernel Space

• Linux ‘Code of Conduct’ is neither Code nor Conduct

  Much like the Linux kernel development process itself has evolved as a function of development, I suspect the code of conduct will be the same. That is to say it will be self-regulating without some kind of rigid system of policies.

  The simple truth is that the vast majority of Linux kernel development is done by those that work for companies. Since LKML is all in the open, and it’s clear to see who works for whom, I suspect that various corporate masters already have policies in place as well.

• Linux Kernel Developer Work Spaces Video: Stephane Graber, LXC

  Stephane Graber is a software engineer at Canonical Ltd. where he is a project leader for LinuxContainers.org, including LXC. In this video he takes us on a tour of his home office in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and answers our questions about his work space.

• Benchmarks

  • Linux Performance Analysis: New Tools and Old Secrets

    At the last USENIX/LISA conference, I gave a talk on new Linux performance tools: my open source perf-tools collection. These use existing kernel frameworks, ftrace and perf_events, which are built in to most Linux kernel distributions by default, including the Linux cloud instances I analyze at Netflix.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to share a directory with Samba on Fedora or CentOS

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Buzz Buzz!

    With the Sprint behind us and the Freeze coming up next month, the VDG has made it’s agenda for the coming weeks, and I figured I’d share some highlights I’m working on, and a couple I’m personally looking forward to.

  • Now accepting Google Summer of Code student applications

    Attention prospective Google Summer of Code students: the student applications window has begun.

  • Now accepting Google Summer of Code student applications

    If you haven’t contacted the relevant KDE subproject yet (including umbrella projects Kubuntu and Calamares) to submit your proposal for review, it is high time to do so. Take a look at our Google Summer of Code project ideas page, pick one or more of our exciting project ideas, dazzle us with your proposal and hack your way to ultimate glory this summer! A nice paycheck is also part of the deal.

  • Qt 5.5 Alpha Available

    Qt 5.5 is branched from dev and we now have the Alpha packages available. Main focus of Qt 5.5 is to polish and improve existing functionality, but as always there are also some new exciting features to talk about. With Qt 5.5, Canvas 3D is fully supported and a technology preview of long awaited Qt 3D is included. Qt 5.5 also introduces mapping support with a Qt Location technology preview. Qt 5.5 Alpha is the first step towards Qt 5.5 final release planned to be available in May.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Preview of GNOME usability results

    I have been mentoring Sanskriti Dawle as part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Sanskriti has been working on a usability test of GNOME, an update from my own usability testing which I also shared at GUADEC 2014.

    I encourage you to watch Sanskriti’s blog for the final results, but I wanted to share a view into her excellent work. You might treat this as a preview of Sanskriti’s results.

  • GNOME’s Virtual Filesystem Updated for GNOME 3.16, Obsolete ObexFTP Code Removed

    The Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming and anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment will be released later this week, and its developers have already started uploading packages to the main FTP server for testing purposes before the final release gets out.

Distributions

• Watch: MakuluLinux with the Unity Desktop

  Jacque Montague Raymer, the developer of the MakuluLinux computer operating system has published earlier today a new video on YouTube, this time showcasing an upcoming edition of its Linux distribution, MakuluLinux Unity.

• Reviews

  • Strange Bedfellows and Linux Reviews

    Christine Hall at FOSS Force today wrote that Canonical’s deal with the devil may signal Ubuntu’s swan song topping today’s Linux news. Linux Tycoon Bryan Lunduke reviewed the Dell M3800 with Ubuntu and Jamie Watson tested six pre-release distributions. To top that off, we have four reviews and a Linux Mint Debian teaser.

  • KaOS 2015.02 Review: Delivers a Pure KDE Plasma 5.0 Desktop

    ‘KaOS’ supports 64-bit CPU architecture only, and when compared to the previous release, the ISO disc size is actually reduced by around 300MiB and now the total size is around 1.4GiB. Despite the obvious KDE Plasma & Qt 5.0 adaptation, ‘KaOS’ now uses a new installer called ‘Calamares’ which was initially added to ‘KaOS’ in last December.

  • First Impressions of Ubuntu MATE 14.10

    Ubuntu MATE is currently available in two versions. There is long term support release labelled 14.04 and a short term support release with newer software carrying the version number 14.10. I decided to try out version 14.10 for a week. The project provides release notes for the distribution. Essentially, it looks as through the project takes Ubuntu, strips away the Unity desktop and replaces it with MATE. Most applications, apart from those relating directly to configuring the MATE desktop, appear to be the same across both distributions. The version of Ubuntu MATE I downloaded is available in 32-bit and 64-bit x86 builds and the ISO file is 980MB in size.

  • Bodhi Linux 3.0.0 Review: Minimalist distro with superb performance

    Bodhi Linux provides options to download 32-bit, 64-bit, legacy and Chromebook version. I chose 64-bit ISO, about 612 MB in size. I created a live USB using Linux Mint Image Writer on a 4 GB USB drive. First I did a live boot on my laptop and then installed it to a 100 GB drive to understand Bodhi’s performance better.

• New Releases

  • Evolve OS’ New Beta Brings Linux Kernel 3.19.1 and systemd 218 – Screenshot Tour

    The Evolve OS development team, through Ikey Doherty, had the pleasure of announcing earlier today the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta release for the upcoming Evolve OS Linux distributions. Evolve OS Beta 1.1 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.19.1 and systemd 218. In addition, this new Beta release of Evolve OS includes the GCC 4.9.2 and Clang/LLVM 3.5.0 compilers.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 GNOME Silently Released, Here’s What’s New – Gallery

    Some of you noticed that the ROSA company has silently pushed the ROSA Desktop Fresh R5 GNOME computer operating system onto its servers last week without making a public statement about what new features and improvements introduced in the refreshed distribution.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat 7.1 is here, CentOS 7.1 coming soon

    Serious businesses use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its near-twin brother CentOS for their servers. The question today for CIOs using or RHEL and CentOS is: When should they upgrade to RHEL 7.1 and/or CentOS 7.1?

    RHEL 7.1 is the first minor release of RHEL 7, which launched in June 2014. This new version adds improved development and deployment tools, enhanced interoperability and manageability, and additional security and performance features. This release, like all RHEL versions, will be supported for a 10-year life-cycle.

  • Red Hat Receives Consensus Recommendation of “Buy” from Analysts

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) last announced its earnings results on Thursday, December 18th. The company reported $0.42 EPS for the quarter, beating the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.40 by $0.02. The company had revenue of $455.90 million for the quarter. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $0.42 earnings per share. On average, analysts predict that Red Hat will post $1.58 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

  • Overcoming Open Source Misconceptions

    As open source has grown in popularity over recent years (both for private and commercial use), also have the number of misconceptions about open source and its use, particularly in enterprise environments.

  • Red Hat just wants to help tech hipsters and old-school programmers get along

    Now Red Hat is looking to resolve that challenge with its new company vision. On Tuesday, the company announced a new initiative for the mobile enterprise, focusing heavily on helping developers from across both ways of thinking talk to and work with each other, with better tools for building slick mobile software that also meets the needs of the business.

  • Throw your (Red) Hat into the mobile-first economy ring

    Red Hat has announced its vision to help organisations succeed in the mobile-first economy.

  • Red Hat formulates a plan for enterprise mobile apps

    Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 22 Alpha LXDE Screenshot Tour

      The LXDE Spin of the Fedora Linux distribution is the last in our screenshot tours for the Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 22 computer operating system based on the Linux kernel and various other open-source technologies.

    • Fedora 22 Alpha Cloud Edition Is a Superb Choice for Running Linux in the Cloud

      Fedora 22 Alpha was officially unveiled on March 10 and until now we gave you detailed information about each of its Spins, including screenshot tours for the Workstation (GNOME), KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and MATE/Compiz editions. It is now time to talk a little about the Cloud Edition of the upcoming Fedora 22 Alpha.

    • Linux Top 3: Fedora 22, Robolinux 7.8.3 and Makulu 8.0

      After the long delay between Fedora 20 and Fedora 21, the hope is that Fedora 22 will restore the traditional release cadence. Last week the first alpha for Fedora 22 was release, starting the countdown toward general availability in May.

    • Fedora 22 Workstation’s new notifications

      Fedora 22 Workstation will include the new GNOME 3.16 release. This release has a new notification design that’s less intrusive and easier to use.

    • Fedora GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts

      To get the very best out of the GNOME desktop environment, within Fedora, you need to learn and remember the keyboard shortcuts required to navigate the system.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Betsy past QA, going for RC

          LMDE 2 “Betsy” just got approved for an RC release. So if you could go ahead and NOT find tons of bug in it that would be great

        • Blueberry: Linux Mint’s new bluetooth setup tool

          Linux Mint has always been at the forefront of making elegant tools for users. Now the Linux Mint developers have come up with a better bluetooth configuration utility called Blueberry. Blueberry will ship first in Linux Mint Debian 2 before being added to other versions of Linux Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• MIPS Creator CI20 v Raspberry Pi 2

  Imagination Technologies is a British company that has recently entered full production of a board based on MIPS computer architecture. The single-board computer has been designed to allow developers to create applications for mobiles, gaming, Internet of Things, and wearables.

  The MIPS Creator CI20 is billed as a high-performance, fully featured Linux and Android development platform. The board includes an Ingenic JZ4780 SoC which is built around a dual-core MIPS32 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, and Imagination’s PowerVR SGX540 GPU. The Creator CI20 comes with a price tag of or £50, which is significantly more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 2. CI20 is an open platform with technical manuals, schematics and source code freely downloadable. You might be interested in my Raspberry Pi 2 review together with this article.

• Freescale i.MX6 SoloX SoC gains embedded Linux support

  The Timesys LinuxLink tool suite now supports Freescale’s i.MX6 SoloX SoC, including support for Freescale’s MQX RTOS that runs on the SoC’s Cortex-M4 MCU.

  Timesys, which has long supported Freescale’s i.MX6 system-on-chip family with its LinuxLink embedded Linux development platform, has now added support for the new SoloX variant. Freescale’s i.MX6 SoloX combines a 1GHz Cortex-A9 core with a Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit (MCU) specializing in real-time processing. As Timesys explains it, the combination enables the SoC to “run a UI-rich OS while still benefitting from fast real-time responsiveness.”

• Tiny SBC runs Android and Linux on Snapdragon 410

  Qualcomm’s Raspberry Pi-sized “DragonBoard 410c” SBC runs Android or Linux on the quad-core Cortex-A53 based Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, and GPS.

  Qualcomm Inc. subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies has unveiled the second single board computer to comply with 96Boards Consumer Edition hardware specification from Linaro’s new 96Boards.org community project and standards organization. Qualcomm’s DragonBoard 410c follows 96Boards.org’s flagship, CircuitCo-built HiKey board. The HiKey, which similarly supports Android and Linux, was the world’s first 64-bit, ARMv8 hacker board. The DragonBoard 410c won’t ship until summer, so it’s unlikely to be the second. At 85 x 54mm, both SBCs are nearly identical in size to the 85 x 56mm Raspberry Pi.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Take a look at the Tizen User Interface and User Experience

      It’s now time for you to get better acquainted with the Tizen Samsung Z1 Smartphone, its User Interface (UI) and also the User Experience (UX). The Z1 benefits from running Tizen, which means it is a smooth fluid experience that can be customised to suit your specific needs.

  • Android

    • Apple Watch app development pales in comparison to Android Wear

      Android Wear consists of Android with the addition of wearable user interface (UI) extensions. It’s a complete operating system capable of autonomous app execution. The Apple Watch, on the other hand, acts more like a dumb terminal connected to an iPhone host. At this point, WatchKit apps seem to be designed for presenting and interacting with notifications.

    • A look at Android 5.1: speed, security, tweaks

      5.1 also makes many small interface changes, documented in the gallery above. Notification and volume controls have seen improvement, and the OS has been tweaked and polished all over.

      In addition, 5.1 brings built-in support for dual SIMs (previously something OEMs had to add) and HD Voice support.

      Android 5.1 is one of the smaller minor version Android updates, down there with versions 4.2 and 4.3. But it brings a few nice changes and thankfully seems to solve many of the Nexus 6 performance problems.

    • 5 Best Android Phones [March, 2015]

      Right now is a horrible time to buy a new Android phone though we realize that there are many people that simply can’t wait for the new crop of devices to arrive. With those people in mind, we take a look at what we think represent the five best Android phones money can buy during the month of March.

      Earlier this month, Samsung and HTC announced successors to the Galaxy S5 and One M9, two of the biggest smartphones from 2014. Those successors are the Samsung Galaxy S6 (and Galaxy S6 Edge) and HTC One M9. Both are set to arrive in the United States in the near future and both look like they will immediately become two of the hottest Android phones on the market. If you can wait, you should wait to weigh them against the current crop of phones.

An open source software updating tool

Once a piece of software is installed on a user’s system, how do you keep it updated? While Linux users typically have a package management system to pull latest versions from a repository of their choice, users of other systems aren’t so lucky. We have developed an open source tool to assist in this process, based on an open source protocol from Google know as Omaha.

Several years ago Google released an open source protocol called Omaha (otherwise known as Google Update) as a part of its Chromium project. The protocol is intended to make the updating process of complicated desktop software easier.

Customer Service and Open Source Software: A Budding Relationship

In business today there is an emphasis on leveraging big data analytics in order to improve customer service. There is much to derive about consumer behavior and market trends that can all be found in the stacks of incoming data received by customer service industries such as contact centers, for example. So, how is open source software relevant to the customer service industry? As of late, many organizations are opting for open source solutions, rather than proprietary software, to augment customer service data analysis.

St. Paddy’s Day Special: 7 Irish open source developers

The Republic of Ireland celebrates its national holiday St. Patrick’s Day this week, when the rivers flow green and the Guinness flows too. This small country has produced some world-reknowned open source and free software developers, and we’ve rounded up a few in honor of St. Paddy’s Day.

Why open source software makes sense in financial services

Unfortunately few organizations have anticipated the influence of mobile and digital consumerization. Combined these two trends have forced many businesses, including banks and financial services companies, to rethink how they engage customers. The impact to IT is two-fold: (1) the CIO and IT are no longer the sole custodians of what systems and software, including mobile apps, the business can use; and (2) IT must is now mandated to roll-out applications faster-to-market to stay relevant to the Lines of Business. Another stark reality is that IT budgets aren’t growing proportionately to these developments. Hence, IT has to do more with what it has.

The Times digital team launches ‘quoteable’ image tool

The Times and Sunday Times is following in the footsteps of Vox Media and NPR by releasing its own open-source image creation tool

Open source voice assistant ‘Sirius’ joins the likes of Google Now, Siri and Cortana

A team of researchers from the University of Michigan are demonstrating the digital personal assistant in Turkey.

Sirius: Like Siri, but it’s open source and backed by Google

Open source Sirius virtual assistant gets Google funding

Facebook releases open source ORC reader for Presto

Aiming to optimize performance of open source distributed SQL query engine Presto, Facebook has designed a new Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format reader that supports columnar reads, predicate pushdown and lazy reads.

Facebook Makes Open Source Networking a Reality

Events

• Open Source and the Rise of as-a-Service Businesses

  If we can accept for the sake of argument that this is not a unique adjustment of Oracle’s, but a pattern replicating itself across a wide range of businesses and industries, there are many questions to be answered about what the impacts will be to the industry around it. Of all of these questions, however, none is perhaps as important as the one I have discussed with members of the Eclipse and Linux Foundations over the past few weeks: what does the shift towards as-a-service businesses mean for open source? Is it good or bad for open source software in general?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Seamonkey review: Firefox’s lightweight hyper-functional cousin

    Seamonkey has an interesting history, in that it is both older and younger than Firefox. Older, because originally it was built from Mozilla Suite code (for those of you that don’t know, Mozilla Application Suite is the parent of Firefox, and was originally built from the code of Netscape Navigator which was open-sourced in 1998).

    Seamonkey is also younger than Firefox in that Seamonkey’s first version, 1.0, was not released until 2006, 2 years after Firefox 1.0. Quite a few people are not even aware of the existence of Seamonkey or the Mozilla Suite, thinking that Firefox was the successor to Netscape Navigator, created deliberately to enact their vendetta against Microsoft for their monopolistic practices that killed Netscape. But glorious fantasies aside, Mozilla Application Suite was the real successor.

  • Students create open source, cross-platform memory scanning tool

    The Masche project, started in mid-2014 as part of Mozilla’s Winter of Security (MWOS) program whose goal is to involve students in building security tools, has been executed by students Agustin Martinez Suñé, Marco Vanotti, Nahuel Lascano, Patricio Palladino, aided by Professor Alejandro Furfaro, and advised by Julien Vehent, one of the members of Mozilla’s Operations Security team.

SaaS/Big Data

• Pivotal releases enterprise-class Big Data products based on open source

  Pivotal will open source the core components of Pivotal Big Data Suite, the next generation big data solution built to help customers accelerate the value they get from their big data.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 4.4.2 Release Candidate 1 Is Now Available for Download

  A new development version for the next maintenance release of the acclaimed LibreOffice 4.4 office suite has been announced today, bringing a wide range of enhancements and bugfixes that improve the overall stability of the software on all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

Education

• Let’s build open source tensor libraries for data science

  Data scientists frequently find themselves dealing with high-dimensional feature spaces. As an example, text mining usually involves vocabularies comprised of 10,000+ different words. Many analytic problems involve linear algebra, particularly 2D matrix factorization techniques, for which several open source implementations are available. Anyone working on implementing machine learning algorithms ends up needing a good library for matrix analysis and operations.

Funding

• The Apache Software Foundation Accepted as a Google Summer of Code 2015 Mentoring Organization

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that it has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization for the 11th consecutive year.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty

  Richard Stallman, who published his manifesto in March of 1985, has been known to say that, “with software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.”

Project Releases

• ownCloud Client 1.8.0 Released

  Today, we’re happy to release the best ownCloud Desktop Client ever to our community and users! It is ownCloud Client 1.8.0 and it will push syncing with ownCloud to a new level of performance, stability and convenience.

Licensing

• VMware, SFC trade barbs over GPL code infringement lawsuit

  A war of words has ensued since Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy filed a lawsuit against VMware over GPLv2 compliance in the company’s ESXi line of enterprise hypervisor operating system products.

• VMware denies violating Linux open source license

  Filings from the Free Software Conservancy (FSC) in Hamburg, Germany accused the company of failing to release the source code for the open source products that is included with ESXi, following a three-year dispute over the matter.

Openness/Sharing

• Apple ResearchKit: Is New Open-Source Software For Sales Or The Greater Good Of Health Care?

  For medical researchers, the tens of thousands of people who recently signed up to participate in studies on asthma, Parkinson’s disease, and other medical conditions by using Apple’s ResearchKit marked a watershed moment in research. Researchers hailed the possibilities brought by the new open-source software framework designed to aid medical studies, all from the screen of the iPhone, with vastly expanded participant pools, more rapid data collection, and better information overall.

• Open Data

  • We need open data to become the new open source

    The open source movement is one of the most powerful forces pushing technology forward. It’s easy to forget that not long ago, startups had to raise tons of money from VCs to license Oracle or a web server. Today any tiny startup has access to the best tools in the world.

Security

• Security in Three Ds: Detect, Decide and Deny

  Whenever a server is accessible via the Internet, it’s a safe bet that hackers will be trying to access it. Just look at the SSH logs for any server you use, and you’ll surely find lots of “authentication failure” lines, originating from IPs that have nothing to do with you or your business. Brute-force attempts (such as “dictionary attacks”) try different passwords over and over to try to get into your box, and there’s always a chance that they eventually will succeed. Thus, it’s a good idea to apply these “three Ds” for your security: detect intruder attempts, decide when they’ve gone “over the top” (past what would be acceptable for honest-to-goodness typing mistakes), and deny them access at least for a (longish!) while.

• LibreSSL 2.1.5 Released

• OpenSSL vulnerabilities coming on the 19th

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Jihadi John and MI5

  First up is the now-notorious press con­fer­ence hos­ted by the cam­paign­ing group, Cage, in which the Research Dir­ector, Asim Qure­shi , claimed that MI5 har­ass­ment of Emwazi was the reason for his rad­ic­al­isa­tion. Emwazi had com­plained to Cage and appar­ently the Met­ro­pol­itan Police that over the last six years MI5 had approached him and was pres­sur­ising him to work as an agent for them. Accord­ing to Cage, this har­ass­ment lead to Emwazi’s radicalisation.

• Man with alleged links to Canada helped a dozen cross into Syria: reports

  A Syrian man arrested in Turkey last month for allegedly helping three British schoolgirls join Islamic State militants told police he was in touch with Canadian officials as far back as 2013 and had helped a dozen other people cross into Syria, according to Turkish media reports.

  Turkey’s Foreign Minister revealed last week that police had arrested the man, who he said had been working for another country’s foreign intelligence service. Mevluet Cavuolu would not name the country in question but said it’s part of the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State extremists and is not the United States nor a member in the European Union.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

Censorship

• Facebook updates guidelines: To ban or not to ban?

  Facebook has updated its community guidelines to make what can and cannot be shared on the social network crystal clear.

• Islamist Websites in Turkey Manage to Evade Strict Internet Censorship

  The websites of an atheist association, the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Kurdish separatist organization are blocked to Turkish Internet users. But many sites that promote extreme Islamist messages — even some that are outright sympathetic to the Islamic State, the militant organization that has marauded through Iraq and Syria — escape Turkey’s censors.

  A hallmark of the decade-long leadership of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., has been a crackdown on freedom of expression. Yet what Turkey chooses to censor reflects the Islamist values of the government, critics say. With the rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, this dynamic has been set in sharp relief, highlighting the deep divide between Turkey and its Western allies in the fight against the militants.

Privacy

• The NSA Has Taken Over the Internet Backbone. We’re Suing to Get it Back.

  Every time you email someone overseas, the NSA copies and searches your message.

• TeenSafe monitors your child’s communications – but who else monitors TeenSafe?

  Closely monitoring your child’s mobile phone or tablet use is a contentious issue. But if it is something you believe you should be doing and you trust an overseas company with your child’s communications data and metadata, then the TeenSafe monitoring software is now available in Australia.

• Security guru Bruce Schneier: Your privacy is already gone

  Many of my friends and coworkers have an unreasonable trust in our government’s intentions. Part two is for them. It discusses what’s at stake and why we don’t want to behave like mindless sheep. Again, Schneier provides example after example of the harm caused while the supposed true goals are rarely met.

• Hertz puts cameras in some of its rental cars, but it never meant to be creepy

  Last week, Fusion reported that Hertz had been updating the navigational devices in its rental cars to include cameras that have a full view of the interior of the vehicle. The update, which began in mid-2014, happened quietly and so far has only impacted about thirteen percent of Hertz’ fleet. Still, that number troubled those who noticed the tiny unblinking eye staring back at them.

Civil Rights

• USA Today Headline Makes a Leap to Pin the Rap on ‘Protester’

  County prosecutor Robert McCulloch is paraphrased as saying Williams “was involved in the demonstration that was wrapping up when the incident took place”–though one of the charges against him is “firing a weapon from a vehicle,” which is an unusual place to be if you’re taking part in a protest.

• Police arrest cancer patient 16 months after raid

  Under Michigan law, the police agency seizing the property gets to keep it. In 2013, law enforcement agencies in the state seized and kept more than $24 million in property and cash.

• NYPD won’t punish cops for sanitizing Wikipedia police brutality entries

  The New York Police Department has identified two officers who used agency computers to sanitize Wikipedia entries about incidents of police brutality.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Universal Music Hijacks YouTube Videos of Indie Artist

    Universal Music Group has hijacked several YouTube videos of Bjorn Lynne, an independent musician from Norway. The world’s largest music corporation is now running advertisements on videos of music tracks Lynne created, and is refusing to correct the mistake.

  • Internet Providers Win Court Case Over “Pirate Tax”

    Belgian Internet providers have won their court case against music group SABAM, which had demanded a 3.4 percent cut of all subscriber fees to compensate artists. The court ruled that ISPs are a mere conduit and can’t be taxed as a public broadcast medium.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Review: Dell’s Ubuntu-powered M3800 Mobile Workstation is a desktop destroyer

  Dell has offered a Linux (Ubuntu) option on some laptops (and servers) for a few years now. Considering my general love for all things Linux, combined with my (often) overpowering desire to play with new hardware, it’s rather odd that I’ve never gotten my hands on a Linux-powered Dell laptop.

  That rather egregious offense has now been remedied.

  Right in front of me sits the Dell M3800 Mobile Workstation – a 15.6-inch laptop that doubles as a Linux-powered desktop replacement.

• Building a pre-release Linux testbed with openSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, and more

  Panic was starting to creep in, and was pushing the anger level even higher. ‘OK, run gparted and see exactly what Windows has done to me,’ I thought. And…nothing. Empty. The entire hard drive was unallocated space.

  Time to rant. Microsoft, I hate you! I hope that each and every one of you is condemned to an endless purgatory of trying to recover corrupted Windows systems!

  OK, with that rant out of the way, what to do? The prospect of installing Windows from scratch was unappealing beyond description.

  On top of that, even if I got it installed and running again, I would have to go through the fight to get UEFI boot configured to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and that in itself is a basically never-ending struggle because Windows keeps trying to ‘reclaim’ first boot.

• Paving That Other OS With openSuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu…

  The more people discover the wonders of GNU/Linux, the faster that desktop monopoly sinks.

Server

• Oracle adds secure-ish boot support to its Linux distro

  Oracle has released a new secure-boot version of its Linux, but the new issuance is attracting criticism that it’s not actually secure.

• [Old] Docker Rolls Out Very Robust Orchestration Tools

• The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers

  And since nobody is still able to compile things from scratch, everybody just downloads precompiled binaries from random websites. Often without any authentication or signature.

  NSA and virus heaven. You don’t need to exploit any security hole anymore. Just make an “app” or “VM” or “Docker” image, and have people load your malicious binary to their network.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 4.0 RC4 with ARM Changes and Updated Drivers

  A few minutes ago, Linus Torvalds had the pleasure of announcing the fourth Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming and highly anticipated Linux 4.0 kernel. According to Linus, Linux kernel 4.0 RC4 is a small release that includes many driver updates and ARM changes.

• Linux 4.0-rc4

• Data center managers struggle to fill Linux admin jobs

• Confessions of a Recovering Proprietary Programmer, Part XV

  On the other hand, I was also heartened by what does not appear in the above paragraph. There is no assertion that the Linux kernel community’s processes are perfect, which is all to the good, because delusions of perfection all too often prevent progress in mature projects. In fact, in this imperfect world, there is nothing so good that it cannot be made better. On the other hand, there also is nothing so bad that it cannot be made worse, so random wholesale changes should be tested somewhere before being applied globally to a project as important as the Linux kernel. I was therefore quite happy to read the last part of this paragraph: “we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual result to ever decrease.”

• Verification Challenge 4: Tiny RCU

  The challenge is to take the v3.19 Linux kernel code implementing Tiny RCU, unmodified, and use some formal-verification tool to prove that its grace periods are correctly implemented.

• Benchmarks/Performance

  • Ext4 Filesystem Improvements to Address Scaling Challenges

    The ext4 filesystem causes a number of scaling and performance issues which Jan Kara, Linux kernel engineer at SUSE, addressed in his presentation at The Linux Foundation’s Vault storage conference last week.

    Ext4 represents the latest evolution of the most-used Linux filesystem, ext3. In that regard, ext4 can be considered a deeper improvement over ext3 than ext3 was over ext2. (Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to ext2.)

Applications

• Evince 3.14.2 Is an Important Bugfix Update for GNOME 3.14

  The GNOME development team announced recently the immediate availability for download and update of the second maintenance release of Evince document viewer for their GNOME 3.14 desktop environment. Evince 3.14.2 is a mainly a bugfix release that repairs several issues discovered in the previous version of the software.

• Qomp Simple & Easy Music Player Reaches Version 0.8

  Qomp (Quick Online Music Player) is a minimal music player written in Qt, with a basic interface, support for local files and online music streams.

• ownCloud Client 1.8 Will Bring HIDPI, Qt 5.4, and Desktop Sharing Support

  ownCloud, through Klaas Freitag, has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming ownCloud Client 1.8 for all supported computer operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• flareGet Download Manager Receives Numerous Fixes

  flareGet, a full-featured, advanced, multi-threaded, multi-segment download manager and accelerator for Linux and other platforms, has received an update and quite a few fixes.

• HomeBank: A Personal Money And Finance Account Manager

  HomeBank is a free, open source, personal finance and money management application that can be used to manage your daily and monthly finance details easily as well as effectively. It has built-in powerful filtering tools and graphs that will help you to analyze your everyday transactions. It is a cross platform tool which will work on almost all common devices and operating systems, including Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.

• Nautilus File Manager Gets Another Bugfix Release Ahead of GNOME 3.16

  Almost a month ago, we announced the release of Nautilus (Files) 3.16 Beta 1, which brought various fixes and improvements to the default file manager application of the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 desktop environment. Today, we announce the second Beta release of Nautilus 3.16.

• Git 2.3.3 Is Now Available for Download with a Handful of Changes

  The third maintenance release of the stable Git 2.3 branch has been released bringing several bug fixes and performance improvements to the world’s most popular distributed revision control system that lets developers interact with GitHub to upload the source code of their programs.

• andatool: Searching forever and ever

• clockwork: Easier to fudge

• bashmount: Another seemingly roundabout solution

  Mounting volumes from the console, without the need for background daemons or automounting tools, has been near the forefront of my Linux experience for years now. If it makes any difference, I’ve tried other options but still rely on mostly the same solution and setup that I did eight years ago.

• talkfilters: All that computing power, and this is what you come up with?

• peat: Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. …

• color-invaders.sh: A script! and a site!

• logintop10: Drum roll, please …

  It should be fairly obvious what’s happening there: logintop10 parses through your wtmp file (which was at /var/log/wtmp on my Arch system) and comes back with an array of login statistics. Output is to an HTML file of your choosing, with very clean formatting and with a little color here and there.

• Bonus: A dozen more remainders

• 9 Quirky Linux Commands You Need to Know (And Will Love)

  Make ASCII art, talk to your computer and play text adventures. Your Linux command line isn’t just for work: it can be weirdly entertaining, if you know the right commands.

• CherryTree: A Powerful Notepad For Easy Note Taking

  Since there is still no official version for Linux, many apps are trying to be Evernote alternatives, more or less successfully. Although it’s possible to run Evernote in Wine, it’s a good idea to find a native note-taking app for Linux that suits your needs.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Xerox ColorQube 9302 and Linux

  • LinuxFoundationX: LFS101x.2 Introduction to Linux

  • ibus tips

  • How to make a custom Live image

  • Install And Configure OpenVZ On CentOS

  • Install And Configure OpenVZ In Ubuntu

  • How To Install OpenFire On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

  • How To Install Jenkins In Ubuntu 14.10 And CentOS 7

  • Fancy git aliases and git cherryfetch

  • How to Monitor Linux Server Using Nagios Core And NRPE

  • How To Install Mate Desktop In FreeBSD 10.1

  • Install Phabricator on a CentOS 7 VPS

  • GIMP: Turn black to another color with Screen mode

  • How To Install Kernel 3.14.34 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Deepin And Other Ubuntu Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Calligra 2.9 On Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

  • Upgrade Now To Receive The New 3.16 Kernel On Your Ubuntu 14.10

  • How To Install Kernel 3.16.7 CKT7 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Entangle 0.6.1 On Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • Getting Started With Docker : Working With Containers

  • Building Kali Linux for Gumstix Overo

  • localized directory name is harmful

  • Troubleshooting syslog-ng

• Wine or Windows

  • Why Are We Still Dual Booting?

    The Linux community is one full of passion. From the outside it may seem strange why a small percentage of people around the world care so much about an operating system, after all it’s merely a tool or set of tools used to complete certain tasks.

• Games

  • The Hero of Kendrickstone 40% Off on Steam Ending March 20

    The Hero of Kendrickstone is a single-player interactive, text-based novel game launched on Steam on March 13, in which you have to save the city of Kendrickstone from an evil wizard.

  • Linux Now Has Over 1000 Titles On Steam

  • First-person Puzzler Parallax – Game No. 1000 On Steam For Linux

    Last week we celebrated 1000 games on Steam for Linux. But as Liam says, quality is more important than quantity. So I took a look at game no. 1000: Parallax.

  • Steam for Linux Goes Past 1,000-game Mark

  • The GOL Nouveau Experiment

    I’ve messed with the open source Nouveau driver once in a while but recently I decided I’d like to properly test how well Nouveau would be able to handle my day-to-day computer activities.

  • Larian Studios Detail Why The Linux Port Of Divinity Is Taking So Damn Long

    It’s no secret that a lot of people are impatiently waiting for the promised Linux port of Divinity: Original Sin, but we have a little more insight as to why now.

  • Bundle Stars ‘Crimson Bundle’ Has 5 Linux Games For Cheap

    Bundle Stars do have some really sweet deals now and then, and the Crimson Bundle is certainly one of them.

  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Claptastic Voyage Trailer

    It will release for Linux at the same time as Windows thanks to Aspyr Media, and it now has a trailer.

  • Spec Ops: The Line Looks Like It’s Coming To Linux

    It looks like yet another bigger game is heading to Linux, and it’s Spec Ops: The Line this time! A Third-Person modern military Shooter designed to challenge players’ morality by putting them in the middle of unspeakable situations.

  • Creator of Blizzard – Linux Petition Insults Blizzard CEO After He Responded

    A petition aimed at Blizzard, which was asking for Linux support, has gathered a lot of attention from the Linux community, but not for the important answer from Blizzard’s CEO. The author of the petition made the stupidest and most uncalled-for comments following Mike Morhaime’s response.

  • Age of Wonders III Turn-Based Strategy to Land on Linux in April

    Age of Wonders III, a turn-based fantasy strategy developed and published by Triumph Studios, will arrive on the Linux platform.

  • Shadow Of Mordor Wins GDC Game Of The Year, Linux Version Due This Spring

  • Sentinels Of The Multiverse, A Mix Of Comics & A Card Game Ported To Linux

    Sentinels of the Multiverse is quite a fun looking title that was ported to Linux last month, and sadly it got buried in my growing inbox.

  • Dying Light Major Patch Released, Performance Finally Okay On Linux (UPDATED)

  • Nightside Is That RTS Game I’ve Been Waiting For On Linux

    Nightside is a traditional real time strategy game, so you build a base, gather resources and finally, you assemble your army to conquer your foes.

  • H-Craft Championship Free & Open Source Racer New Version

  • Outland, A Fast-paced, Dynamic Platformer Now Available On Linux

  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel New DLC Arriving On March 24

    Aspyr Media have confirmed it will all launch on Windows, Mac and Linux together! Good to see them keeping up with the DLC.

  • Dying Light Gets AMD Radeon Support and Major Performance Improvements

    Dying Light is an FPS developed and published by Techland on Steam for Linux. The makers of the game have just released a new patch that comes with some important performance improvements.

  • Pre-Sequel Claptastic Voyage DLC for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Also Launches in Linux

    Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been a great success on the Linux platform, especially since it was released alongside all the other platforms. Now the latest DLC announced will be made available on Steam for Linux as well.

  • Velocity 2X Shoot Em Up Coming To Linux Thanks To Sierra & FuturLab

    Velocity 2X is a great looking shoot em up that was previously only on Sony consoles, and now FuturLab is teaming up with Sierra to bring it to other platforms, and that includes us too!

  • cp437: Turning frogs into handsome princes, since 2013

  • *angbands: Band of brothers

  • mediocrity: A worthy foray into the genre

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Qactus is out in the wild

    Qactus, a Qt-based OBS notifier, is out in the wild. Version 0.4.0 is the first release.

  • QmlBook Making Progress

  • Rootless Xwayland server integration into KWin

    Over the last weeks I concentrated my KWin related work on trying to integrate the Xwayland server properly. Xwayland is an interesting step on the way to Wayland as it maps X11 windows to Wayland surfaces. But it also needs an X11 window manager to manage the X11 windows. Overall it allows us to start integrating Wayland into the compositor without too much breakage. It’s still X11 after all, so our existing code base continues to work. And gruadually functionality can be replaced with the Wayland equivalent, so that we can afterwards start integrating proper Wayland clients.

  • Macaw-Movies in the KDE incubator

    Macaw-Movies is a movie collection manager. It is now about to be in the KDE Family! And that’s really awesome.

  • IBus panel icon in plasma-desktop KDE5

    It can show the IBus panel icon in KDE5. KDE5 no longer enables notification area by default so this version communicates with KNotification via DBus instead of GtkStatusIcon.

  • MuseScore 2.0 is great, try it!

    Below is a screenshot of MuseScore 2.0, which will be released very soon.

  • Kdenlive to be released with KDE Applications 15.04

    So we met the freeze deadline to get our port to KF5 released with KDE Apps.

    What does it change? you have a changelog, but it doesn’t explain what’s behind.

    Being based on KF5 makes Kdenlive future-proof and opens doors for potential new horizons (platforms, design)…

  • Plasma NM 0.9.0.12

  • Calligra 2.9.1 Released, Improves Krita Support on CentOS 6.5 Linux

    The Calligra development team, through Cyrille Berger, has announced earlier today, March 15, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first maintenance release of the Calligra 2.9 office suite for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

  • Calligra 2.9.1 Released

    The Calligra team has released version 2.9.1, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite in the 2.9 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.9.0 and we recommend everybody to update.

  • KDebugSettings (0.3)

    I improved kdebugsettings (and increased version to 0.3).

  • Krita 2.9.1 Released

    The first bugfix release for Krita 2.9 is out! There are now builds for Windows, OSX and CentOS 6 available. While bug fixing is going on unabated, Dmitry has started working on the Photoshop layer style Kickstarter feature, too: drop shadows already work, and the rest of the layer styles are coming.The goal is to have this feature done for Krita 2.9.2, which should be out next month. And we’re working on a new Kickstarter project!

  • Interview with Abbigail Ward

    Krita really is more focused to creating images from scratch without being chained to imitating traditional media as close to possible. I’ve tried quite a few programs, but Krita is the program that works the best for me, maybe because I like both traditional and digital media.

  • Interview with Igor Leskov

    I like cinema and I like to draw motion pictures. I do not like very much to draw static pictures but I can. I studied traditional painting for eight years in the art school and after that I’ve continued to do it myself for 36 years. I like to learn painting even more than to paint.

  • Monthly Drawing Challenge

    The idea came when I was browsing the Krita forums in search of a drawing challenge and the only thing that came up was on Facebook. Not everybody has or wants Facebook, so we’ll have this challenge on the forum.

  • Ideas to restructure Plasma content delivery system

    During the past few years at Gluon Project we chose to adopt OCS (Open Collaboration Services) protocol in our distribution system, developing a minimal and working server and client that works on GamingFreedom.org. Gluon, however, never went into full production so people couldn’t test our infrastructure and the distribution system never went above the “experimental phase”.

  • Discuss the Future of Activities and Virtual Desktops

    It has been quite some time since we asked you to share your experiences with Virtual Desktops and Activities. Meanwhile we have been thinking through the enormous amount of feedback you provided. It was very inspiring. Thanks a lot for contributing!

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • TARBALLS DUE: 3.15.92

  • gtk3 vclplug,

    I’ve been hacking the gtk3 vclplug for LibreOffice recently, here’s the before image after scrolling up and down a few times. UI font not rendered the same as the rest of the desktop, bit droppings everywhere, text missing from style listbox, mouse-wheel non-functional

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Lubuntu-Based LXLE Distro Now Supports UEFI, Switches to SeaMonkey

    The LXLE team has announced earlier today, March 11, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta versions LXLE 14.04.2 and 12.04.5 SMS Editions, introducing UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support in the 64-bit ISO images. The distribution also switches to SeaMonkey as the default web browser.

  • Robolinux 7.8.3 Released with Five Powerful Privacy and Security Applications

    John Martinson has announced recently the immediate availability for download and testing of the third maintenance release of its Robolinux 7.8 Linux distribution, which now features new powerful security and privacy applications designed with a single goal in mind, to keep users safe at all times, online and offline.

• Screenshots

  • Linux Lite 2.4 Beta Screenshot Tour

  • Chakra 2015.03 Screenshot Tour

• Arch Family

  • March 13 Update for Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 Brings the Xfce 4.12 Desktop Environment

    The Manjaro development team was proud to announce today, March 13, the immediate availability for update of a new Manjaro Update Pack, dated 2015-03-13 (stable). This is the fourth update to the Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 computer operating system, and it brings exciting features and performance improvements.

  • Manjaro Linux Xfce 0.9.0 Promises to Bring the Best Xfce 4.12 Experience Possible

    One day after announcing the fourth update for Manjaro Linux 0.8.12, the Manjaro developers released the fourth Preview version of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 0.9.0 and Manjaro Linux KDE 0.9.0 distributions. The Xfce edition comes now with a tweaked and patched Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, promising the best Xfce experience possible.

• Slackware Family

  • Updated KDE 5 packages for Slackware (release 5_15.02_02)

  • LibreOffice 4.4.1

  • Coordinated release of VLC 2.2.0

    Seven months after the VideoLAN team released version 2.1.5 of their VLC player, we are treated to two new releases. There is a version 2.1.6 bugfix release, but that is not really getting attention. Everybody’s eyes are focused on the brand new 2.2.0 release. For the first time in the history of the VideoLAN Client, nowadays better known as the VLC player, there are simultaneous releases for most Operating Systems, including Android, iOS, Windows RT and Windows Phone. Of course there’s a release for Linux too (ok… and Windows) so I built you all some packages for Slackware (compatible with 14.1 and -current).

• Red Hat Family

  • How this Australian university turned IT management around with Red Hat

  • CWE update

    In the past Red Hat Product Security assigned weakness IDs only to vulnerabilities that meet certain criteria, more precisely, only vulnerabilities with CVSS score higher than 7. Since the number of incoming vulnerabilities was high, this filtering allowed us to focus on vulnerabilities that matter most. However, it also makes statistics incomplete, missing low and moderate vulnerabilities.

  • virgil3d local rendering test harness

    So I’ve still been working on the virgil3d project along with part time help from Marc-Andre and Gerd at Red Hat, and we’ve been making steady progress. This post is about a test harness I just finished developing for adding and debugging GL features.

  • Red Hat wants to do for containers what it’s done for Linux

    That’s the latest plan put forward by the folks in Raleigh, as Red Hat unveils three new products — two of them software, one a partner program — intended to put the company at the center of all matters container-related.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 22 Scientific Alpha

      Just tested the Fedora 22 Scientific Alpha RC3 image today with the test scripts/programs.

    • Fedora Design Suite 22 Alpha

      Design Suite Alpha 22 is available for downloading along the Workstation edition of Fedora 22 Alpha which is based.

      The spins includes plugins for both Gimp (Gmic), Inkscape (support of making tables) and Blender (LuxRender). Shutter, a screenshot tool for desktop, is added at the request of Design Team.

• Debian Family

  • apt install dpl-candidate: Neil McGovern

    My name’s Neil, I’ve been involved with Debian for over 10 years now. I’ve held a variety of roles, from the SPI board, writing policy and secure testing team, to being one of the Release Managers for Squeeze and Wheezy.

  • Imminent steep decline in RC bugs affecting Jessie – need more RC bug fixes

    Earlier today, I posted a mail to debian-devel about how approximately 25 RC bugs affecting Jessie have been unblocked. As mentioned, I planned to age some of them. The expected result is that about 18 of them will migrate tonight and the remaining 7 of them will migrate tomorrow night.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Lets Users Change Folder Color – Video

        Ubuntu MATE 15.04 comes with a very interesting application that allows user to color the newly created folders and to even assign a small number of symbols to it.

      • Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Default Wallpaper Revealed

        The default Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet wallpaper was revealed a few minutes ago.

      • Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Community Wallpapers Revealed

      • Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Switches To Boot With systemd By Default

        This change affects Ubuntu desktop (and all Ubuntu desktop flavors) and cloud/autopkgtests (snappy was already using systemd) but not Ubuntu Touch.

        According to Martin Pitt’s announcement, Ubuntu Touch can’t use systemd yet because most platforms currently run an ancient 3.4 kernel and “there’s some porting work to do on the upstart jobs”.

      • Oxide Exploits Closed in Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

        Canonical revealed that a number of Oxide vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in its Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 operating system

      • Intel CPU microcode support in ubuntu-drivers-common

        Ubuntu Vivid Vervet 15.04 is on its final approach to release at the end of next month. Here is a highlight of one of the features that I have helped to land.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu MATE Now Accepts Bitcoin Donations

          At the request of a single user, Martin Wimpress, the developer of the famous Ubuntu MATE Linux operating system modified the donation page of the distribution by adding support for Bitcoin donations, which means that you can now donate Bitcoins to the project.

        • Thoughts on using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition 17.1

          I had long been attracted to the idea of using Linux. When Microsoft ceased to provide security patches for XP I got an excellent independent computer shop to install Lubuntu on my netbook for me. This allowed me to get used to the ways of Linux, and experiment with different programs. Any fears I may have had regarding ease of use were soon forgotten, and despite my experimentation, installing and uninstalling lots of programs, the system remained far more responsive than XP.

        • Meet Blueberry, Linux Mint’s New Bluetooth Setup Tool

          What do you do when the default Bluetooth confirmation utility is less than ideal for your users? Why you dive in and improve it! This is Linux after all!

        • [Old] Ubuntu Mate Will Become An Official *Buntu Flavor In A Few Days

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi 2 Makes It Easier Than Ever to Just Do Stuff

  Raspberry Pi is nothing short of a revolution. This credit-card-sized, $35 computer has created an entire breed of makers and enthusiasts who are doing amazing things with this device. The device is developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation which was established by the technical director and ASIC architect for Broadcom, Eben Upton in May 2009.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Circuit: Supercharged Galaxy S6 Active Leaks, Android 5.1 And Bloatware, Google Attacks iOS

    • Google: USB Type-C Coming to Android Phones in Near Future

      USB Type-C, featured on Apple’s new MacBook and Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, is coming to Android phones. In a video from Google which goes over the benefits of USB Type-C, product manager Adam Rodriguez states that the company is very committed to the new spec, and that upcoming Chromebooks and Android phones will see it in the near future.

    • Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact in certain regions now receiving Android 5.0.2 Lollipop

      Sony officially announced that the Lollipop update for both the Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact is indeed rolling out as we speak.

      While Samsung, HTC, and LG were updating a fair amount of their top-end smartphones with Android 5.0 Lollipop, Sony took its time and did not release a firmware refreshment for its top-end devices. Well, it might be late for the Lollipop party, but this doesn’t mean that it’s not attending at all.

    • Google rolls out Android 5.1: Five new features

      For all you Android Lollipop users out there, Google just began pushing out its first major update to its Material Design-dressed OS, and unlike some updates that are usually just for “stability and performance,” Android 5.1 actually comes with some stuff you’re definitely going to want to know about.

    • A man can dream: concept renders show us a sleek Android-powered Nokia 1100

      Recently, a “leak” popped up and rekindled the hopes of all those fans that swear by the name of Nokia. A device named “Nokia 1100″ (an obvious nod to one of Nokia’s most successful phones ever) was caught in a benchmarks website, bringing Android 5.0 and a MediaTek chipset in tow. The device was claimed to be bound for 2016 (when Nokia can once again put its name on a smartphone).

    • Sony pushes Android 5.0 Lollipop for Xperia Z3, Z3 Compact

      Sony has started rolling out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Xperia Z3 and Xperia Z3 Compact in the Nordic and Baltic countries.

    • IBM teams with BlackBerry and Samsung to offer governments a secure Android tablet

      IBM is entering the tablet market — sort of. The company plans to sell a modified Samsung Android tablet this summer with extra security capabilities, aimed at government users.

    • Lookback Buys Screencasting Startup QuickCast, Adds Android And Mac Apps To Its User Testing Tools

      Lookback — a user testing app that was co-founded in Sweden first as a side project by Spotify engineers before striking out on its own with funding from Index and others — has made its first acquisition: it has acquired a UK startup called Reissued, the company behind screencasting app QuickCast, which had 15,000 users and 500,000 screencasts recorded on its platform, from customers that include the likes of Twitter and Basecamp.

    • 10 free Android apps that are worth checking out

      Saving time is good. Free is good. Combine the two and you may have a winner. Here’s a list of assorted Android apps that deliver on both.

    • Check out what’s on Jon’s Android tablet

      The great thing about Android is that it never gets boring. You can tailor it exactly to your liking, making it feel completely different from one day to the next. If you get bored easily, it’s exactly the software for you. And it’s a big reason why Jon recently made the switch from his iPad mini to the Nexus 9.

    • Featured: Top 10 Best Games For Android – March 2015 Edition

    • Apple Watch vs. Android Wear: Comparing the Tech Giants’ Smartwatches

    • Google VPN service spotted hidden within Android 5.1

    • The best apps for following March Madness on your Android phone or tablet

    • Android 5.1 Memory Leak: Google With Internal Fix That Might Come With Android 5.1.1 Lollipop

    • The 15 best Android apps that use material design

      Google’s Material Design aesthetic is supposed to be the new standard for Android design, but not all apps have made the transition to the catchy new look.

    • Android phones will soon use a smaller, simpler USB connector

      That tiny USB Type-C port you’ve seen on the latest MacBook and Chromebook Pixel? Don’t be surprised if you see it on your smartphone soon. In a video accompanying the new Chromebook, Google’s Adam Rodriguez says that his company is “very committed” to the new USB spec and that you’ll see it on both Android phones and more Chromebooks in the “near future.” It’s a vague promise, to be sure, but it’ll matter a lot in the long run. Type-C delivers brisk USB 3-level speeds (and eventually, 3.1) without requiring a gigantic connector, and the reversible design means you won’t have to inspect your phone to make sure you plug the cable in the right way.

    • Android 5.1 L Update Release Date on Moto G 1st Generation, Coming Soon to Moto X, Moto E And DROID Models

      Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop mobile operating system update has officially been announced earlier this week, and the tech company’s flagship Nexus devices are already the first to roll out the patch, but with Motorola being a manufacturing partner on some Nexus devices, we can’t help but wonder when the Moto line will get the latest upgrade.

    • Android 5.0 Lollipop finally comes to Xperia Z3

      Owners of Sony’s current flagship smartphone, the Xperia Z3, have been waiting patiently for the update to Android 5.0 Lollipop and it looks like the wait will finally be over next week.

    • Android app developers should update to Dropbox’s latest SDK

    • Download: OTA update links for Android 5.1 on the Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7 2012 and Nexus 10

    • Sony’s Lollipop Update Illustrates Android’s Fundamental Flaw

      This week, Google announced the availability of Android 5.1, with multiple bug-fixes, security additions, and device protection in software. Meanwhile, back in the real world, Sony today has announced the rollout of the previous buggy Android 5.0 to its latest handsets, more than nine months after 5.0 was announced.

    • 5 Great Fitness Apps for Android

    • Galaxy S4 Black Edition gets Android 5.0.1 Lollipop

    • Android 5.1 reinstates Silent Mode, but there’s a catch

      Google’s decision to remove Silent Mode from the stock Android 5.0 Lollipop update left millions of people feeling perplexed and confused. The trusty Silent Mode was replaced with ‘No interruption’ mode, which flat out switched off all notifications on your phone – from alarms to the LED light. Now, Android 5.1 makes some amends by giving you more control over the Interruptions system, bringing it more in line with the Silent Mode of yore (and most other phones out there).

    • Android 5.1 Lollipop Memory Leak Issue Fixed Internally, Says Google

    • WhatsApp voice-calling feature is now available to all Android users

    • WhatsApp hits 1 billion installs on Android, the second non-Google app to do so

    • WhatsApp is rolling out its voice calling feature on Android — here’s how to activate it

    • WhatsApp Calling For Android Is Now Official: Here’s How To Activate It

    • Android 5.0 Lollipop Update News: Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Roll Out

    • Google fixed Android 5.1 memory leak, no timeline for update

    • Code In Android 5.1 App Reveals Connection Between Unannounced Google VPN Service And “Nova” Carrier Project

      We’ve heard a number of rumors about Google launching its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), codenamed Nova. According to reports, the service will source wireless service from Sprint and T-Mobile, but it will rely on Wi-Fi networks to bear most of the weight of both data and voice services (though VoIP). While the details of this plan still aren’t clear, another piece of the puzzle just emerged that indicates Google is going to offer its own virtual private network (VPN) service, and it may be targeted specifically at Nova subscribers.

    • Android 5.1 Fixes Manual Sync Option In Settings, Now You Can Actually Do It

      If you like some granular control over synced accounts, you probably ran into a little roadblock with Android 5.0. If you wanted to manually sync items in one of your accounts, the button to do that was missing. Well, at least, sort of. In its place was “cancel sync,” even though there was nothing to cancel. That should have only been present after initiating a sync manually with the “sync now” option. None of that worked in 5.0. With Android 5.1, though, everything is back to normal.

    • Android Authority this week

      We’re back with a new installment of Android Authority this week after a two week hiatus for MWC. The show itself has been a blast, but we all had even more fun on the sidelines, just catching up with each other, meeting new people, and getting to hang out with fellow bloggers and journalists from the Android community. Check out a short gallery from the show here: it’s just a taste of an experience that we try to share with you at every show.

    • This app uses your Android phone’s LEDs to create a light show for your music

      On Android devices, the popularization of active display and imitators has basically negated the need for built-in LEDs. After all, what more can a blinking light tell you than a screen? Luckily, crafty developers are finding other uses for the neglected multicolored diodes. One app for Android, LED Music Effects, turns your device’s LEDs into a basic music visualizer.

    • Can the mobile Web win back developers from iOS, Android?

      While mobile-app developers are concentrating their efforts on supporting Apple’s and Google’s mobile operating systems, one group hopes to make the Web a place for apps too.

    • Avira launches free Android Optimizer

      System optimization tools and apps are fairly popular on desktop PCs but also on mobile devices. They promise to free up space, memory or remove privacy-related information from the device they run on.

    • And finally: Android Wear update to take on Apple Watch and more

      And finally is the place where you can catch up with all the news blips that you wouldn’t have seen on the pages of Wareable yet. It’s a one-stop-shop for getting up to date with the little stories you may not be aware of.

    • How to Install Android 5.1 Lollipop on the Nexus 6

      Earlier this week Google announced and released the highly anticipated Android 5.1 Lollipop update for most Nexus smartphones and tablets. However, the updates are slow to arrive for all users, and some may want to install Android 5.1 on the Nexus 6 right now. This guide will show you how to install the brand new Android 5.1 Lollipop update so that you can try out Google’s latest version of Android right now on your Nexus 6.

    • Top Android news of the week: Bye bye Nexus 5, USB C, Google Store

Effektif Open Sources BPM Software with an Emphasis on Developers

Open Source Software Fuels a Revolution in Data Science

It’s hard to downplay the influence of open source software on the spectacular rise of data science. From my perspective as a technology consultant, open source isn’t just an interesting aspect of the data science revolution; it’s absolutely critical.

Events

• Kolab Summit 2015

• LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Web Browsers

• People Who Use Firefox or Chrome Are Better Employees

• Mozilla

  • solicit – an HTTP/2 Library for Rust

    For quite some time now, I’ve been following Rust, a new(ish) programming language by Mozilla. It’s been around for a while, but recently it’s been attracting a lot of buzz. Around the new year, I finally decided to take a deeper look into the language.

SaaS/Big Data

• Apache Software Foundation Launches HBase Version 1.0 for Sifting Data

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is on a roll thus far in 2015, advancing many open source projects that are making a difference in the cloud and on the Big Data scene. Recently, we covered the advancement of Apache Drill to a top-level project. It is billed as “the world’s first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed.” We’ve also covered Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley

  Now, also on the data front, the ASF has announced the availability of Apache HBase v1.0, a distributed, scalable, database for Apache Hadoop and HDFS.

• Mirantis, Google Team Up on Kubernetes and OpenStack Integration

  Mirantis, focused on OpenStack, has announced a new initiative that integrates Kubernetes with OpenStack, letting developers deploy containers on OpenStack in what the company claims takes only minutes. The integration gives developers immediate access to Kubernetes clusters with Docker containers without needing to set up infrastructure. According to Mirantis, developers will be able to seamlessly move entire environments between OpenStack private clouds and public clouds that support Kubernetes, such as Google Cloud Platform.

• The Different Facets of OpenStack HA

  Last October, I wrote about a particular aspect of providing HA for workloads running on OpenStack. The HA problem space for OpenStack is much more broad than what was addressed there. There has been a lot of work around HA for the OpenStack services themselves. The problems for OpenStack services seem to be pretty well understood. There are reference architectures with detailed instructions available from vendors and distributions that have been integrated into deployment tools. The upstream OpenStack project also has an HA guide that covers this topic.

• Cloudformation and Eucalyptus

  Eucalyptus officially released support for AWS Cloudformation back in 4.0.0 but with the latest release of Eucalyptus i.e. 4.1.0 this support is now out of tech preview mode. What this means for the cloud users is that they can use Cloudformation just like they use it on AWS and get official support from Eucalyptus for it. Yes our support is not just paid support but we have a very extensive community to help you get started or solve your problems.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OnlyOffice Another Free Office Suite for Linux (Complete Selfhost Office Solution – OwnCloud Compatible)

  Nowadays company employees are often dispersed across the globe and collaboration tools turn out to be of current importance in achieving shared goals. OnlyOffice is a platform for small and medium business that enables teams to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place. Linux users can take advantage of open source version and start to collaborate on projects hosted safely on their own servers. ONLYOFFICE is a cloud business service that enables you to manage projects, customer relations and documents in one place.

BSD

• Pruning and Polishing: Keeping OpenBSD Modern

  Owing to its historic roots as a derivative of the original Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), OpenBSD includes a great deal of old code. Many files bear copyright notices from the year 1980, and in some cases, even older. Although not explicitly stated as a project goal, keeping OpenBSD modern is an important part of satisfying other goals, such as portability and correctness.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A plan for Multi-Byte Unicode Character Support in GNU coreutils

  coreutils is the project that implements about 100 of the most well known and used utilities on any GNU/Linux system. These utilities are used interactively, or extensively in other programs and scripts, and are integral to the standard Linux server distros used today. Originally these utilities were implemented only considering ASCII or sometimes implicitly other unibyte character sets, but many of the assumptions break down in the presence of multi-byte encodings. As time has gone on this has become more of an issue as this graph representing the rise of UTF-8 use on the web indicates.

• Userops: Deployment for the People

  Why the name “userops”? As you may have guessed, this is a pun on the term “devops”; the idea is that we also care about configuration management and deployability, but we aim for a different audience. Devops, as the name implies, focuses on liberating developers in the world of deployment, particularly developers who have to deploy a large number of machines for $LARGE_CORPORATION at their job. Userops, on the other hand, aims at liberating users in the world of deployment. You shouldn’t have to be a developer to take advantage of network freedoms and run network-oriented free software. After all, the free software world generally agrees that it makes sense that users of desktop software should not have to be developers, and that “user freedom” takes priority over “developer freedom”… the freedom of $LARGE_CORPORATION, while not something we object to, is not really our primary concern. (Though of course, if we build solutions that are good enough for end-users, corporations will probably adopt them, and that is fine! It just isn’t our focus.)

Project Releases

• littler 0.2.3

Public Services/Government

• German Greens ask Foreign Affairs to amend way

  The Greens in the German parliament want the Foreign Ministry to revert back to open source software solutions on its workstations. The ministry in 2010 abandoned its open source desktop strategy, pressured by staffers struggling with interoperability problems. The Greens are now asking the ministry to justify the proprietary licence costs it has made since then.

• Feds look to developers to improve big data, open source projects

  The vision behind the open source and big data initiatives underway in the federal government is far more ambitious than just a series of technology projects, but aims to further transparency, citizen engagement and achieve a major shift in agency culture.

Licensing

• VMware wants amicable end to ‘meritless’ Linux-lifting lawsuit

  VMware thinks it will be possible to find an amicable resolution to the lawsuit alleging it has pinched parts of the Linux kernel.

Openness/Sharing

• Apple’s Open-Source ‘ResearchKit’ And The Future Of Medical Research

• Why aren’t governments as transparent as they could be?

  In the quarter century since its creation, the Web has been a printing press and broadcast studio for millions of people whose voices would otherwise have been heard by only a few close friends. It opened a whole new world of sharing, and today nearly three-quarters of all Americans say digital technologies have improved their ability to share their ideas and creations with others, according to a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center.

• Charting the OpenStack galaxy, under the hood at TryStack, and more

• PSI Directive: transposition ends in July 2015

  The Commission has helped Member States to transpose the directive with the publication of a series of guidelines, he added. “Open access is now mainstream,” he said, adding that the Commission was engaged in a policy of openness within the Digital Single Market program.

• Open Data

  • Open Data: national company register data now freely accessible

    Information about French companies, collected and centralised by InfoGreffe, will now be freely accessible. French Members of Parliament have voted in favour of article 19 of the draft Loi Macron (named after Emmanuel Macron, Minister of Economic Affairs, who supports the law). The article, which states that InfoGreffe information will now be available as Open Data, was approved in February.

• Open Access/Content

  • How does your state use open educational resources?

    The price of textbooks continues to be a cost barrier for postsecondary students, even though some states are making notable efforts to bring those costs down. Open Educational Resources are an emerging policy option as states, postsecondary systems and institutions consider how to best develop libraries and collections of OERs

• Open Hardware

  • OpenSCAD 2015.03 released with text objects support

    Marius Kintel released a major new version of OpenSCAD, a 3D solid modeling application popular with the makers movement and 3D printing communities.

Programming

• My IDE needs a makeover

  Gnome Terminal is good enough for my needs. I do have a problem of too many terminal windows… I have tried Terminator (a tiling single-window / multiple-tabs terminal). However during development the things I use shell for, should be part of the IDE directly: changing projects, opening/closing/navigating/creating files, invoking build, invoking debug, “refactoring” (sed). I think I do want to try out a pull-down terminal for temporal look-ups together with a tiling “main” terminal. Or ideally ditch it all together. Emacs does provide multiple terminals, but when I did that I ended up with “inception” -> launching an instance of emacs, inside the terminal, inside emacs…

• Google’s Go language is off to a great start, but still has work ahead

  Go, a Google-developed open source language intended to focus on simplicity and efficiency, has been getting a lot of attention lately. Launched late in 2009, the statically typed language is perhaps best known for its use in the development of the red-hot Docker container platform. “Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming,” a FAQ on Go reads.

• Why Drat? A Guest Post by Steven Pav

  To get some idea of what I mean by this, suppose you are a happy consumer of R packages, but want access to, say, the latest, greatest releases of my distribution package, sadist.

• Taking maintainership of dolt

  For those who don’t know, dolt is a wrapper and replacement for libtool on sane systems that don’t need it at all. It was created some years ago by Josh Triplett to overcome the slowness of libtool.

Standards/Consortia

• Open ICT standards fundamental for small ICT firms

  Government use of open ICT standards are fundamental for smaller ICT companies and for innovation in society, concludes Professor Björn Lundell of the University of Skövde (Sweden), following a three-year research project. “Open standards promote a healthy, competitive market.”

Health/Nutrition

• The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle

  I’m not a journalist, but as of this morning I know what it feels like to be part of the biggest leak in NHS history.

  Published on openDemocracy, the memorandum of information for the £700m sell-off of Staffordshire cancer services is now available for the 800,000 directly affected and 3 million indirectly affected patients to read online.

Security

• Friday’s security updates

• Security advisories for Monday

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• What we can learn from the day the US burned to death 100,000 women and children

  March 9, 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo, World War II’s deadliest day.

  More people died that night from napalm bombs than in the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.

• Venezuela Threatens U-S National Security?

  What’s behind the Obama Administration’s recent imposition of sanctions against Venezuelan officials, and its claim that Venezuela threatens U-S national security? Gloria La Riva and Roger Harris address this question.

• How the FBI Created a Terrorist

  IN THE VIDEO, Sami Osmakac is tall and gaunt, with jutting cheekbones and a scraggly beard. He sits cross-legged on the maroon carpet of the hotel room, wearing white cotton socks and pants that rise up his legs to reveal his thin, pale ankles. An AK-47 leans against the closet door behind him. What appears to be a suicide vest is strapped to his body. In his right hand is a pistol.

  [...]

  Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.

• Tom Cotton Seems Confused About The Basic Geography Of Iran

  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) stood by his decision Sunday to send a letter on a burgeoning nuclear deal directly to Iranian leaders. He insisted on Face the Nation that “Iran’s leaders need to hear the message loud and clear” that an Obama-brokered deal might not last past the end of his administration without congressional approval, despite a stern letter from the White House Sunday night urging senators to hold off on congressional intervention.

Transparency Reporting

• State Department says most officials’ emails were not auto-archived until last month

  The State Department said Friday it was unable to automatically archive the emails of most of its senior officials until last month, which could mean potential problems for historical record-keeping amid criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a private email server while in office.

• State Dept. Shuts Down Email After Cyber Attack

  The State Department shut down large parts of its unclassified email system today in a final attempt to rid it of malware believed to have been inserted by Russian hackers in what has become one of the most serious cyber intrusions in the department’s history, U.S. officials told ABC News.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Vanuatu Blames Global Warming as Cyclone Causes Nation’s Worst Climate Disaster in Recent Memory

  About half the population of the South Pacific Island state of Vanuatu has been left homeless by a devastating category 5 cyclone that flattened buildings and washed away roads and bridges. Aid agencies say Cyclone Pam killed at least eight people, with the death toll expected to rise as rescuers reach more far-flung areas. Vanuatu has a population of about 250,000 and is made up of more than 80 islands. Disaster relief officials and relief workers are still trying to establish contact with remote islands that bore the brunt of winds of more than 185 miles per hour. We are joined by Alex Mathieson, former Vanuatu country director for the aid group Oxfam.

• WaPo Can Find Climate Denial Embarrassment Closer to Home

  Will isn’t the only prominent climate change denier given a prestigious soapbox by the Post.

• UK’s first ‘poo bus’ goes into regular service

  Britain’s first “poo bus”, which runs on human and household waste, goes into regular service this month.

  Powered by biomethane gas, the Bio-Bus will use waste from more than 32,000 households along its 15-mile route.

• Politics Is Poisoning NASA’s Ability to Do What It Needs to Do

  When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was made head of the Senate committee in charge of NASA’s funding, I (and many others) were appalled. Cruz is a science denier, flatly claiming global warming isn’t happening.

  This is an issue, since many of NASA’s missions are directly focused on examining the amount, extent, and impact of that warming. And rightly so.

Finance

• The Long Story Behind Gigaom’s Sudden Demise

  Gigaom’s investors are still hopeful that the company has value, and are continuing to shop it: The sales pitch is that the site itself still generates traffic and ad revenue, and the company’s events business could still draw attendees and sponsors. Some people affiliated with Gigaom believe that Time Inc., International Data Group and O’Reilly Media are all looking at the property. All three companies declined to comment.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• What Was Missing From Coverage of Netanyahu’s Speech

  Another striking omission from these articles, about a speech in which Netanyahu talked about Iran’s “aggression in the region and in the world,” were words like “Palestine,” “Palestinian,” “occupation” or “Gaza”; none of these came up in any of the five articles. USA Today headlined its piece “Netanyahu: Stop Iran’s ‘March of Conquest’”–as though it were Iran, not Israel, that has conquered, occupied and in some cases annexed its neighbors’ territory.

Privacy

• FBI’s Plan to Expand Hacking Power Advances Despite Privacy Fears

  A judicial advisory panel Monday quietly approved a rule change that will broaden the FBI’s hacking authority despite fears raised by Google that the amended language represents a “monumental” constitutional concern.

  The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules voted 11-1 to modify an arcane federal rule to allow judges more flexibility in how they approve search warrants for electronic data, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

• Online privacy nihilism runs rampant in US, survey says

  A majority of Americans have not altered their online behavior in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations detailing widespread US government electronic surveillance activities, according to a Pew Research Center survey published Monday.

• Private Companies Continue To Amass Millions Of License Plate Photos, Hold Onto The Data Forever

  Vigilant Solutions’ automatic license plate readers are everywhere, even places where you wouldn’t expect them. Like, mounted on private companies’ vehicles. This isn’t new. BetaBoston investigated the private ALPR growth industry early last year. Unfortunately, there’s been very little good news to report since then. In fact, there still isn’t.

• Hertz Puts Video Cameras Inside Its Rental Cars, Has ‘No Current Plans’ To Use Them

  According to the Fusion article, Hertz doesn’t seem to be telling anyone about the camera, on the grounds that the company doesn’t plan to use it, and so there’s nothing for customers to know. But if and when it does announce its presence, there will be precisely the problem Techdirt mentioned last week: that people in front of it would naturally be worried they were being spied upon — even if assured to the contrary — and would start constraining their speech and behavior.

• Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them

  This week I got an angry email from a friend who had just rented a car from Hertz: “Did you know Hertz is putting cameras in rental cars!? This is bullsh*t. I wonder if it says they can tape me in my Hertz contract.”

Civil Rights

• [Old] Florida Sheriff to Drivers: Run protesting thugs over!

  An elected Sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who was attending a community meeting in Boynton Beach, Florida, reportedly told the group to run over protesters that were blocking the road.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Our Shiny New Net Neutrality Rules Won’t Be Worth Squat If The FCC Isn’t Willing To Act

  While the FCC’s new net neutrality rules are certainly a step in the right direction for consumers, it’s aggressively premature to uncork the champagne. There are still ISP lawsuits waiting in the wings, not to mention the fact that a 2016 party shift (and subsequent FCC leadership change) could very quickly dismantle ten years of grassroots activism in the blink of an eye. And then there are the rules themselves and the FCC’s dedication to them; as noted last week, it’s difficult to know just how useful the new Title II-based rules are going to be until we see precisely what the FCC defines as actionable behavior.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Members of the European Parliament must support the Reda Report on copyright reform!

    On 23 and 24 March 2015, you will examine the proposed amendements to the report of MEP Julia Reda on the reform of the directive on copyright. More than 500 amendements have been tabled, the large majority of which aim at emptying it from its substance. Julia Reda’s draft report responds to the aspirations expressed by a large number of citizens: they wish to access, to share and t more widely culture and knowledge in the digital environment. La Quadrature du Net calls the MEPs of the JURI commission to preserve the progress in this report and in particular those that strenghten the positive rights of individuals in culture.

  • URGENT! The Positive Reform Of Copyright Is Being Pirated In The European Parliament!

    Julia Reda, German Pirate Party MEP, has presented a report promoting a series of measures to harmonise some aspects of copyright.

  • Cultural industries unite against copyright reform

    France’s cultural industries have shown their determination to fight European copyright reform plans. A parallel movement among members of the European Parliament hopes to have the Electronic Commerce Directive re-examined as part of the reform package. EurActiv France reports.

  • Piracy Is Just Another Copyright Industry Scapegoat

    History repeats itself. Unlicensed home manufacturing of copies was never the cause of the copyright industry’s business problems; they created those all on their own. It’s not the first time they’ve appointed a scapegoat for their own failures to get public funding, either.

  • U.S. Net Neutrality Has a Massive Copyright Loophole

    After years of debating U.S. Internet subscribers now have Government regulated Net Neutrality. A huge step forward according to some, but the full order released a few days ago reveals some worrying caveats. While the rules prevent paid prioritization, they do very little to prevent BitTorrent blocking, the very issue that got the net neutrality debate started.

  • Peter Sunde: File Sharing is Politics, Propaganda and Control

    In the beginning of The Pirate Bay’s history the site was in Swedish. It was made by Swedes for their community. Other countries had their own file sharing sites but they got shut down.