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06.08.15

Links 8/6/2015: Red Hat Upgraded, Debian 8.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 4:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Debunking 4 misconceptions about open source software

    Misconceptions range from the belief that open source is not secure enough for businesses, since it is community-based, to misunderstandings about the availability and quality of technical support. While some of them have been propagated since the early days of open source, enterprise-ready offerings today provide the same, if not higher, levels of security, capabilities and reliability as proprietary counterparts.

  • 2/3 Internet Exchange Points use Czech open source router

    Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Internet Exchange Points are now using BIRD, an open source router solution maintained by the Czech CZ.NIC Association, taking first place from proprietary routers.

  • 3 Financial Companies Innovating With Open Source

    The financial industry is on the verge of an open source breakthrough, say three companies on the cutting edge of the trend. Traditionally very secretive about their technology, banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies have begun in the past few years to talk about how they use open source software in their infrastructure and product development. They have also been steadily increasing their contributions to upstream projects in the form of user feedback and code. And some companies have initiated their own open source projects or released portions of their own code to the open source community.

  • Open-Source NFV Group Launches First Software Release

    The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project has rolled out “Arno,” an open-source platform that group officials said will give users and developers a framework for testing NFV efforts, checking out basic NFV uses cases and trying out virtual network functions (VNFs). The growing demand among telecommunications vendors and other organizations for ways to more quickly adopt and implement NFV is driving the OPNFV’s efforts, according to Chris Price, technical steering committee chairman and open-source manager for software-defined networking (SDN), NFV and the cloud for network vendor Ericsson.

  • NASA Releases Source Code for Its Software Tools

    NASA has released the source code for a complete set of software tools that that cover pretty much everything from aeronautics and propulsion, and from system testing and handling.

  • Events

    • SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

      From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Education

    • Open education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation

      When I started working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we set out to revamp the website and add learning materials for educators. In the mean time, we wanted to get a few resources out in time for Hour of Code week, so we wrote them on GitHub for easy sharing. It’s easy to get started writing with markdown, and it made collaboration straightforward. Despite all being new to GitHub, the education team really liked the way this worked and wanted to stick with the method, so we did.

  • BSD

    • Call for testing: OpenSSH 6.9

      OpenSSH 6.9 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release contains some substantial new features and a number of bugfixes.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Indian government includes open source in RFPs

      The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.

    • Estonia: A Model for e-Government

      The bold plan is a logical step forward in an unprecedented roll-out of e-government services that began in 2000, when Estonia introduced a public system for electronic tax filing. In 2002, Estonia introduced a universal electronic identification card with digital signatures, which every citizen gets at the age of 15. The ID cards and signatures have become the keys to nearly universal access to government information and services as well as private-sector services in health care, banking and education, and law. In the years since, the Estonian government and industry have put more and more functions online, all connected by a nationwide data backbone called X-Road.

    • New case studies proof competence gvSIG’s GIS tools

      Four case studies published the past weeks by the gvSIG community show the usefulness of this suite of open source Geographic Information Systems. The cases detail the gvSIG use by public administrations in Spain and Italy, to collect, manage and analyse information on gas pipelines, to create hiking trails, examine city commerce, and plan public transport networks.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-source “MMO for makers” aims to crowdsource manufacturing design

      Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including “mods” that leverage the games’ simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.

  • Programming

    • A Heterogeneous Execution Engine Might Make Its Way To LLVM

      An intern from Qualcomm’s Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he’s hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project.

    • C++ at a functional programming event

      In the end, I decided to talk about functional reactive proramming in C++ which will be a thrilling and enticing tale of event-based systems and the power of reactive streams. I’ll also cover some fun new things we are to expect from C++17 that are bringing even more functional programming concepts than we have in the current standard

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Labour Call Unemployed “The Work-Shy”

      I just read the Guardian’s account of today’s Labour leadership hustings, and they are not Tory Lite, they are Tory High Octane. Supporting Tory benefit cuts, calling the unemployed “the work-shy”, defending £9,000 a year tuition fees, supporting Trident and falling over themselves to reject autonomy for the Scottish accounting unit. But what I find even more astonishing is that the Fabian Society audience were lining up afterwards for selfies with Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and according to the Guardian nobody wanted a photo with Jeremy Corbyn, the one decent human being there.

    • Urgent: TTIP Vote – Please Write to Your MEPs before Wednesday

      There is a very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday…

    • Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

      My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering.

  • Censorship

    • Lawyer who sued EFF blames Ars readers for hacking, defamation

      Atlanta IP lawyer Sanford Asman isn’t happy that CaseRails CEO Erik Dykema won’t hand his company’s name over to him—in fact, he’s filed a trademark lawsuit over it, just as he said he would last month.

      Asman believes that CaseRails is infringing his trademark rights to CaseWebs and CaseSpace, two websites that house his own litigation-management software. In fact, Asman believes any Web-based legal software with “case” in its name should be under his purview.

  • Privacy

    • The Mass Surveillance of US Public Continues as USA Today Declares It Ended

      And that points to a bigger problem with declaring that the NSA’s data collection has “ended”: The same data will still be collected, only it will be held in phone company computers rather than the NSA’s computers. The NSA will still have access to the data, only having to get an OK from the FISA court–a notorious rubberstamp that operates in secret. As NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told FAIR, “It’s more of a psychological maneuver to make us all feel good than a true constraint.”

  • Civil Rights

    • LAPD officer convicted in videotaped beating of handcuffed suspect

      A Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Friday in connection to the videotaped beating of a female suspect who was struck in the throat and crotch in a patrol car.

      Officer Mary O’Callaghan, an 18-year veteran, was accused of felony assault under the color of authority in a 2012 incident largely captured on a patrol-car camera. The 35-year-old victim, Alesia Thomas, died later that July evening. Medical examiner officials said cocaine intoxication was a “major factor” in the Los Angeles woman’s death.

    • Save Majid Ali

      Glasgow City College student Majid Ali faces torture and death if returned to Pakistan. Majid Ali’s brother and other members of his immediate family have been taken and I am afraid very probably murdered by the Pakistani authorities as part of their relentless persecution of the Baloch people and desire to wipe out Baloch national identity. The UK Home Office intends to deport Majid. The people of Scotland must defend him.

    • Saudi court upholds blogger’s 10 years and 1,000 lashes

      Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has upheld the sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment on blogger Raif Badawi, despite a foreign outcry.

      Speaking from Canada, his wife Ensaf Haidar told the BBC she feared his punishment would start again on Friday.

      Badawi was arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels”.

    • There is no justice: What cops and courts get wrong about the human brain

      Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go

    • Kalief Browder, 1993–2015

      Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

      In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

      Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

      [...]

      Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.

    • Left Divided as Violence and Protests Derail Mexican Elections

      Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.

    • On Equality

      A good rule of thumb is that if we feel the views of others are offensive, they probably feel our own views are offensive as well, a view they are completely entitled to when they do not act on it to harm us. If we wish to have our freedom to own and express our views protected, we must also actively respect — preferably protect — the rights of others to the same freedom.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality

      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.

  • DRM

    • Apple Music and the terrible return of DRM

      My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I’d totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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Pages that cross-reference this one

What Else is New

  1. All of GNOME Board of Directors Works on (for?) Microsoft GitHub

    The GNOME Board of Directors works for IBM and/or Microsoft at GitHub; it’s not entirely surprising that despite opposition from some GNOME developers the head of the GNOME Foundation, preceded by people who have since defected to Microsoft, described Dr. Richard Stallman as “reprehensible” and called for him to step down (from his very own thing, never mind the “G” in GNOME standing for GNU)

  2. They'll Always Call it Linux (Not GNU or Even GNU/Linux) Because Linus Torvalds is Less Principled (Tivoization, DRM etc.)

    Principled, opinionated, self-governing individuals aren't any good for corporations looking to not only use their projects but to totally control those projects (copyleft licences such as GPL already make that hard enough for them, so it takes more time for legal 'hacks' such as software patents, "clown computing" and GitHub)

  3. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 06, 2020

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 06, 2020

  4. Openwashing Report: When It Comes to the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative (OSI) You Should be a Pessimist, Not an Optimist

    Certain groups that claim to represent the values of "Open Source" are in fact promoting the interests of Microsoft, GitHub etc. (i.e. monopoly or "open" as in a bunch of monopolies like Facebook and Microsoft sharing code snippets/resources over GitHub)

  5. They Tell Us Linus Torvalds is Sexist But Evidence Suggests Otherwise

    Torvalds and others who are middle-aged (or older) males are often torpedoed using weakly-backed allegations (or insinuations/innuendo) of sexism; that does not seem to matter and won't matter when they treat men the same (or worse)

  6. Sometimes Sounding 'Rude' Can Be Necessary

    We need to quit accepting this corporate-led ideology that says you cannot 'offend' people whose work is of offending quality (an offense against technical standards)

  7. Status Update: DDoS, Traffic, Interns

    Times are difficult for liberty/freedom; but we're trying to stay on top of it all in spite of attempts to derail us

  8. GNU/Linux Still Not Controlled Purely by Large Corporations

    Linus Torvalds was not fully canceled; nor was Richard Stallman, who's still heading the GNU Project (under conditions specified by those looking to oust him; people who code for Microsoft GitHub and many IBM employees)

  9. The Need for Purely Independent Media

    The media crisis, which has deepened greatly as more journalists are laid off amid pandemic, means that the PR/B2B industry takes over what's left of news sites; we need to counter this worrying trend

  10. Links 7/6/2020: Sparky 2020.06, Wine Staging 5.10, Vulkan SDK 1.2.141

    Links for the day

  11. GNU is Open Source

    "The GNU Project is no longer ethical. RMS may care, but he's outnumbered enough by liars and traitors."

  12. Chairman of the Board of Red Hat Explains He Was Introduced to GNU/Linux When It Helped His Regime Change in Haiti

    General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Board of Red Hat, explains (keynote in 2011 Red Hat Summit/JBoss World) that he was introduced to the system as part of a military campaign; it basically helped war, not antiwar

  13. The Faces of 'The Cloud' (Surveillance in Clown Computing/Clothing)

    Consolidation of the world's computers/servers and the stories told by photo ops; we're particularly interested in IBM's relationship with Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker and Wired

  14. Microsoft is Now in the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation

    Techrights politely takes note of the growing role (or roles) of Microsoft employees inside the Linux Foundation; there are now at least half a dozen people

  15. Two Things IBM and Microsoft Have in Common: Layoffs and Fake Hype Like 'Clown Computing' and 'Hey Hi' (AI) as Perceived 'Opportunity' for 'Growth'

    The infamous pair of monopolists, Microsoft and IBM, are both suffering during the COVID-19 lock-downs (no matter how hard they try to spin it and/or distract from it)

  16. IBM (Red Hat) Lectured FSF That It Needed More Diversity, But Was It Looking at the Mirror? IBM and Red Hat Are Even Less Diverse.

    Techrights examines Red Hat’s (IBM’s) hypocritical claims about the Free Software Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman back when IBM was the “big scary monopolist”; IBM employees were prominent among those pushing to oust Stallman from the GNU Project, which he founded, as well

  17. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 05, 2020

    IRC logs for Friday, June 05, 2020

  18. Guix Petition Demographic Data, by Figosdev

    That old anti-RMS letter, which called for his removal (or resignation) from GNU (RMS is the founder of the GNU Project), as characterised by metadata of signatories

  19. When You Realise People Who Don't Support RMS Do Not Really Support GNU, Either

    The (in)famous letter against Richard Stallman (RMS), which was signed by many Red Hat employees with Microsoft (GitHub) accounts, doesn’t look particularly good in light of recent revelations/findings; it increasingly looks like IBM simply wants Microsoft-hosted and “permissively” licensed stuff, just like another project it announced yesterday and another that it promoted yesterday

  20. The Gates Press (GatesGate) -- Part III: What Happens When You Tell the Truth About Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation

    One might not expect this from a so-called 'charity'; the Gates Foundation's critics are often met with unprecedented aggression, threats and retribution, which make one wonder if it's really a charity or a greedy cult of personalities (Bill and Melinda)

  21. Links 6/6/2020: Bifrost Meets GNOME, Wine 5.10 is Out

    Links for the day

  22. Links 5/6/2020: LibreELEC (Leia) 9.2.3, Rust 1.44.0, and Hamburg's Pivot to Free/Libre Software

    Links for the day

  23. This Article About GitHub Takeover Never Appeared (Likely Spiked by Microsoft and Its Friends Inside the Media)

    And later they wonder why people distrust so much of the media (where paying advertisers set the agenda/tone)

  24. Raw: How Microsoft and/or the EPO Killed an Important EPO Story About Their SLAPP Against Techrights and Others

    Spiking a story about spiked stories about corruption

  25. The Linux Foundation 'Bootcamp' -- Badly Timed and Badly Named in June 2020 -- Only Uses Linus Torvalds Like a 'Prop' (for Legitimacy) While Promoting Militarised Monopolies

    Sometimes a picture says a lot more than words, especially in light of political events in the US and a certain Chinese anniversary we cannot name (Microsoft censors mentions of it)

  26. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 04, 2020

    IRC logs for Thursday, June 04, 2020

  27. The Gates Press (GatesGate) -- Part II: When Media That You Bribe Calls All Your Critics 'Conspiracy Theorists' (to Keep Them Silenced, Marginalised)

    The assault on the media by Bill Gates is a subject not often explored by the media (maybe because a lot of it is already bribed by him); but we're beginning to gather new and important evidence that explains how critics are muzzled (even fired) and critical pieces spiked, never to see the light of day anywhere

  28. GitHub is Not Sharing But 'Theft' by Microsoft

    Microsoft buying GitHub does not demonstrate that Microsoft loves Open Source (GitHub is not Open Source and may never be) but that it loves monopoly and coercion (what GitHub is all about and why it must be rejected)

  29. The Huge Damage (Except for Patent Lawyers' Bottom Line) Caused by Fake European Patents

    The European Patent Office (EPO) keeps granting fake patents that cause a lot of real harm (examiners are pressured to play along and participate in this unlawful agenda); nobody is happy except those who profit from needless, frivolous lawsuits

  30. Red Hat/IBM Got 'Tired' of RMS. Is It Getting 'Tired' of GPL/Copyleft Too?

    After contributing to the cancellation of Richard Stallman (RMS) based on some falsehoods perpetuated in the media we're seeing the sort of thing one might expect from IBM (more so now that it totally controls Fedora and RHEL)

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