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Links 10/6/2015: BQ’s Second Ubuntu Phone on Sale, Desura and Bankruptcy





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Warning: Don’t Download Software From SourceForge If You Can Help It
    “SourceForge are (sic) abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past,” according to the GIMP project. Since 2013, SourceForge has been bundling junkware along with their installers — sometimes without a developer’s permission.

    Don’t download software from SourceForge if you can help it. Many open-source projects now host their installers elsewhere, and the versions on SourceForge may include junkware. If you absolutely have to download something from SourceForge, be extra careful.


  • SourceForge: The end can't come too soon
    Fifteen years ago, the deep tech side of the Internet was a vastly different place. Geek news aggregator Slashdot was the place to go for all the latest IT and open source news and discussion, and SourceForge was the spot for open source project hosting and distribution. Much like MySpace, it seemed that these two stalwarts of the open source community would reign forever.

    Much like MySpace today, these two sites now live mainly on the margins, and at least in the case of SourceForge, that's been of its own doing.


  • SourceForge Tries to Win Back Trust of Open-Source Developers
    After drawing the ire of the open-source community over the past couple of weeks, SourceForge published a blog post today explaining how it will generate ad revenue going forward.

    The online software repository landed itself in hot water after it was found to be bundling adware with free and open-source software downloads, most notably the Windows version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).


  • 10 Open Source Docker Tools You Should Be Using
    You may have heard of this thing called Docker. You know, the one which has fostered over 20,000 open source projects (including orchestration tools and management frameworks) and over 85,000 Dockerized applications?


  • Apple to tailor Swift into a fully open-source language – for Linux, too


  • Apple may regret its choice of a permissive open source license for the Swift programming language
    The whole Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright infringement litigation would never have happened if Google had adopted Java under the GPL (the license under which Sun Microsystems already made Java code available before being acquired by Oracle), but it feared that copyleft would prevent its device makers from differentiating through proprietary add-ons.


  • Apple To Open-Source & Support Linux With Its Swift Programming Language


  • Apple to open source Swift programming language
    Apple brought out the big guns, from CEO Tim Cook to musical performer Drake, but perhaps the loudest reaction at the company's Worldwide Developers' Conference Monday in San Francisco resulted from news that the Swift programming language is being open sourced.


  • Apple Announces Swift 2, Open Source for iOS, OS X and Linux
    Apple today announced Swift 2, the latest version of its programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS with all-new Whole Module Optimization technology. Apple executive Craig Federighi also announced that Swift will be open source and made available for Linux later this year.


  • ​Docker certification program eyes long-term partnerships
    Docker has dominated the container business since it first exploded on the scene. Now, with its new certification program, Ecosystem Technology Partner (ETP), it's trying to turn its current momentum into long-term partnerships.


  • Proof of Concept: Dell OPNFV Infrastructure-as-a-Service


  • It Is Rocket Science! NASA Releases Abundance of Free Code
    This week, NASA released its second annual Software Catalog, a giant compendium of over 1,000 programs available for free to industry, government agencies, and the general public. The Software Catalog contains the actual advanced engineering and aeronautics codes NASA engineers purpose-built for their daily work.


  • Events



    • Announcing Apache: Big Data and ApacheCon: Core
      A year and a half ago, we forged a partnership with the Apache Software Foundation to become the producer of their official ASF events. The ASF has long blazed a trail of innovation in open source and our work with them has yielded results in successful developer collaboration and events. It’s been a great partnership, in our opinion, led on our side by my colleague Angela Brown.


    • Mautic Association Extends Global Reach with Open Source Initiative Affiliate Membership
      The Mautic Association provides resources and a network for people to connect and grow both personally and professionally through collaboration and co-creation.




  • SaaS/Big Data



  • Databases



    • New Fixes Released For PostgreSQL Open Source Database
      Every once in a while, a software developer releases a long-awaited update to much fanfare and user enthusiasm…and then it bombs miserably. We’re not saying that’s what happened with PostgreSQL, but just in case you didn’t love the way it runs after you updated it last, the publisher has released a new update that addresses most of the necessary bug fixes from the last update.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • CMS



    • Why the Ubuntu developer portal moved to DjangoCMS
      Canonical has used a variety of content management systems throughout the years, including Drupal and Zope, and a large number of our websites have run on WordPress; in fact, many still do. Our developer portal was one of these standard WordPress instances, which worked well enough for a simple website that didn't get very heavy traffic, but we began to outgrow it. The launch of the Ubuntu phone project, and its accompanying SDK for app development, meant that this site was going to start getting a lot more attention—from a very different audience—and it needed to do a lot more than it currently did.




  • Funding



    • Rancher Labs Raises $10 Million for Docker Container Cloud Tech
      Virtualization startup Rancher Labs today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. Rancher Labs' founders are well-known in the cloud industry as the founders of cloud.com, which was sold to Citrix and evolved to become the Apache CloudStack cloud platform.




  • BSD



    • DragonFlyBSD Now Supports Parallelized Kernel Module Building
      Matthew Dillon's latest addition to DragonFlyBSD will help those that build out the full kernel themselves: parallelized kernel module builds. This change for developers allows the the kernel build process to be multiple times faster when doing a full kernel build.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



    • Pragmatism in the History of GNU, Linux and Free/Open Source Software
      If you ask a lot of people why Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel that he wrote became one of the most prominent open source projects of all time, while Richard Stallman's GNU project has received much less attention beyond hacker circles, they'll tell you the difference has to do with Stallman's excessive commitment to an uncompromising ideology. Is that really accurate?


    • Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer added to license list
      We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer(HPND). The HPND is a simple permissive license, compatible with all versions of the GPL. The HPND is actually more of a template, allowing developers to select a few options, such as whether to include a disclaimer.




  • Licensing



    • 5 Practical Ways for Legal Counsel to Advise Developers on Open Source
      As an essential member of an open source compliance program’s advisory board, legal counsel provides numerous services to ensure a company’s products comply with open source copyright and licenses. They provide approval around the use of FOSS in products, for example, advise on licensing conflicts, and advise on IP issues associated with the use of FOSS. (See the previous article, 5 Essential Duties of Legal Counsel in an Open Source Compliance Program.)




  • Programming



    • HHVM Is Now Running Even Faster, Beating PHP7 By Wider Margins
      The Facebook team working on the HHVM project for being a faster PHP interpreter and powering their Hack language have just come out of a two-week, open-source performance lockdown. Over the past two weeks they focused on making strides to make HHVM's compelling performance even better.


    • BFP Proposed To Become A First-Class Backend In LLVM
      When it comes to taking advantage of the Linux kernel's (e)BPF in-kernel virtual machine, LLVM has served as the compiler of choice for targeting this virtual machine




  • Standards/Consortia



    • Dutch MP wants sanctions to enforce open standards
      Public administrations that continue to ignore the policy to implement open standards in their ICT solutions should be fined, says Dutch MP Astrid Oosenbrug. “Public administrations should come to grips with open data, open standards and open source. With all their talk about regaining the trust of their citizens and creating a participatory society, public administrations should take a cue from open source communities.”


    • Sweden refines specifications of open standards
      Sweden’s governmental procurement specialists at Statens inköpscentral are fine-tuning the list of ICT standards that public authorities may use as mandatory requirements when procuring software and ICT services. The procurement agency is working with standardisation specialists at the University of Skövde, to check which ICT standards are truly open.






Leftovers



  • Queen Elizabeth II Will Visit Bergen-Belsen, Former Concentration Camp In Germany
    For the first time, Queen Elizabeth II will travel to a former Nazi concentration camp on her trip to Germany this month, the Associated Press reported Monday. In addition to Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot, died, the queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will visit Berlin and Frankfurt during the June 23-26 trip.


  • Lord Janner claim investigated by Police Scotland
    Police in Scotland are understood to be investigating claims Labour peer Lord Janner abused a boy there in the 1970s.


  • Science



  • Security



    • How secure is your email?


    • Security advisories for Monday


    • Dangerous minds: Are maths teachers Australia's newest threat?
      Australian academics who teach mathematics may need to run new ideas by the Department of Defence before sharing them or risk imprisonment.

      Some academics are set to become much more familiar with the department's Defence Export Control Office (DECO), a unit that enforces the Defence Trade Control Act 2012, Australia's end of a 2007 pact with the US and UK over defence trade.


    • Why the “biggest government hack ever” got past the feds
      In April, federal authorities detected an ongoing remote attack targeting the United States' Office of Personnel Management (OPM) computer systems. This situation may have gone on for months, possibly even longer, but the White House only made the discovery public last Friday. While the attack was eventually uncovered using the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Einstein—the multibillion-dollar intrusion detection and prevention system that stands guard over much of the federal government's Internet traffic—it managed to evade this detection entirely until another OPM breach spurred deeper examination.


    • U.S. Army public website compromised
      On Monday afternoon, the site was disabled after it displayed messages including, "YOU'VE BEEN HACKED" and "YOUR COMMANDERS ADMIT THEY ARE TRAINING THE PEOPLE THEY HAVE SENT YOU TO DIE FIGHTING," according to NBC News.

      The U.S. Army confirmed to CNN the web page had been compromised.

      "Today an element of the Army.mil service provider's content was compromised. After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure there was no breach of Army data by taking down the website temporarily," spokesman Brig. Gen. Malcom B. Frost said in a statement.






  • Finance



  • Privacy



    • Senators Introduce Legislation Calling For Mandatory Data Collection On Police-Involved Shootings
      If you're looking for the number of citizens killed by police officers, don't ask the government. It just doesn't know. The DOJ is nominally in charge of compiling this information, but it has not made anything resembling an honest effort to do so.

      To begin with, it has mostly ignored the federal law ordering the compilation of stats on excessive force by law enforcement officers. And it has ignored this for the last 20 years. To make things worse, it has turned over the duty of collecting data on police-involved shootings to the FBI, which has even less interest in ensuring the comprehensiveness of its "collection."


    • According To The Government, Clearing Your Browser History Is A Felony
      The "do something" resulting from the Enron scandal was Sarbanes-Oxley. To date, the law has done very little to curb corporate fraud -- its intended target. But it has become a handy tool for prosecutors looking to stack charges against defendants far removed from the financial world.


    • Why we need anonymity on the Internet -- even if it hurts
      I had a friend once who told me that after being abused by a stranger over the phone, she never picks up from numbers she doesn't have in her phone. In fact, her phone doesn't even ring. If somebody who doesn't know wants to get in touch, she says, they can send her a text. She told me that her life improved dramatically after that decision: no more abuses, telemarketers, unwanted phone calls, ever. It's an important lesson for me too: if an anonymous person is attacking you, you can always ignore them. What gives them power, is your responses. This way, everybody wins -- and the trolls eventually will get bored of being ignored.


    • The encryption 'access' debate heats up
      Even as the US government bids adieu to Clipper Chip, an infamous episode that influenced the cryptography debate for years, there is renewed focus in a number of quarters that it should not repeated.

      The most recent evidence comes from a new report from the United Nation's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). A Special Rapporteur, David Kaye, was appointed to look into the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communications. In preparing the report—which will be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council later this month—he drew from research on international and national norms and jurisprudence, and received input from governments and civil society.




  • Civil Rights



    • For AP, Being Shot by a Cop Makes You a Suspect
      No, the “incidents” raising concerns have not involved black “suspects.” Freddie Gray was not a suspect, nor Akai Gurley. Tamir Rice and John Crawford held toy guns, and Ferguson officers evidently “suspected” Michael Brown of nothing more than not walking on the sidewalk. A number of those killed have been “suspected” of being mentally ill and in need of help.

      As a matter of fact, the presumption by law enforcement—and media—that any black person involved in an altercation with police must be a criminal suspect is part of the outrage driving public protest.

      Telling, too, that in its description of police killings in the news over the last several months—including one officer who went free after leaping on top of the car of two unarmed black people and firing dozens of bullets into them, and another who saw all charges dropped for a putting a bullet through the head of a 7-year-old girl sleeping on her living room sofa—the only thing AP sees fit to describe as “violent” are the protests.


    • Ayaan Hirsi Ali vs. Jon Stewart: Islam, liberals, and the media’s dangerous double standard
      Progressive critics enamored of the semantically fraudulent junk label “Islamophobe” are de facto aiding the assassins of free-thinkers, abetting the oppressors of women, and shielding razor-happy butchers slicing off the clitorises of little girls. And at no time do they betray the ideals for which they supposedly stand more than when they call ex-Muslims living in the West “Islamophobe.”

      To understand why, let’s examine the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. No one exposes the faulty thinking, moral incoherence and double standards pervading the Western liberal reaction to Islam better than this Somali-born, self-professed “infidel” and “heretic.” Herself a survivor of female genital mutilation, civil war and forced marriage, and, for more than a decade now, the object of Islamist death threats, Hirsi Ali deserves the respect of all who cherish free speech, equality between the sexes, and the right to profess the religion (or no religion) of one’s choosing.


    • Lawsuit Claims Sheriff's Dept. Perfectly Fine With Arresting Person 70 Lbs. Lighter And Six Inches Shorter Than Suspect Sought
      Towns is now suing the Clay County Sheriff's Department for this mix-up, which resulted in some jail time for a crime he didn't commit. His claim that his ID was stolen is backed up in the court filing, which includes a report made to another sheriff's department in 2011. That report includes him informing the Jacksonville Sheriff's Dept. that someone using his name and ID was cited for shoplifting earlier that year. He finally turned himself in to the Clay County Sheriff's Dept. in 2013, presumably to clear the whole thing up. Obviously, that plan didn't work.


    • Six inches too short, 70 pounds too light, he's arrested in Clay County mistaken identity case
      A Jacksonville man and the State Attorney’s Office say that the Clay County Sheriff’s Office arrested the wrong man in a case involving stolen cologne and missed court appearances.




  • DRM



  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Daniel Ek: Spotify and free music will save the industry, not kill it
        The music streaming pioneer has come under fire from critics such as Taylor Swift for giving away songs. Now he faces a new challenge from Apple


      • Team Prenda Gets Hit Hard With Contempt Sanctions For Lying To Court
        It looks like Team Prenda has been smacked around once again. This is in the Lightspeed case -- which is one of the rare earlier cases where they were actually representing a real third party, rather than a made up entity that they really owned themselves. This was the case where they tried to drag Comcast and AT and T into the lawsuit and it all failed terribly. If you don't recall, in late 2013, the district court smacked them around as judge Patrick Murphy clearly figured out what was going on: "The litigation smacked of bullying pretense." Yup, you got that right. The defendant, Anthony Sweet, represented by Prenda killers Booth Sweet, asked for attorneys' fees and got them at the end of 2013, with the court ordering Team Prenda to pay up $261k, saying that Team Prenda "flat-out lied" to the court.


      • Netflix: the crumbling borders of geolocation and the thieves who happily pay for what they "steal"








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