–Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson

Summary: The abusive behaviour of Microsoft continues unabated long after Judge Jackson warned about the sociopathic management and its dangers

M

ICROSOFT is best known to many as the champion of antitrust abuses. The judge who knows this best has just died (see biography or some corporate press coverage [1, 2, 3]). He left behind him is a lot of paper trail showing how Bill Gates and his goons repeatedly broke the law while trying to marginalise, demonise and incite judges like himself. To quote the book authored by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR leader, Microsoft said “Judge Penfield Jackson’s decision to appoint a “special master” was not appropriate and that the company would challenge it. On December 23 Microsoft did just that and filed a motion to remove Lawrence Lessig from the case. [...] In trying to get rid of Lessig, Microsoft argued the law, but they also argued bias.”

“He left behind him is a lot of paper trail showing how Bill Gates and his goons repeatedly broke the law while trying to marginalise, demonise and incite judges like himself.”See our symbolic list of personal retributions by Microsoft, which at times behaves like a dangerous cult. Microsoft’s antitrust abuses are far from over. Someone from Finland tells us about “The last of that OSS OS” which Microsoft destroyed using its mole in Nokia. In Europe, specifically in Germany, the Microsoft-run Nokia has been suing Android using patents. There is a motion for outright ban of such patents, led by Jimmy Schulz and Matthias Kirschner, the FSFE’s coordinator for Germany. Mr. Pogson and many others write about it because the key to many of Microsoft’s latest competition abuses is software patents.

The Microsoft-Apple duopoly [1, 2] is getting closely tied (search engines too) now that the mission is to destroy Google/Android. Microsoft needs a proxy to make antitrust claims against Google, for it would seem hypocritical otherwise.

Nokia to Microsoft’s rescue! Here is the article “EU to probe Google’s below cost licensing of Android: Courtesy Microsoft Nokia,” stating:

Microsoft, the company which created abusive monopoly in the PC desktop space and did not leave any room for a single player to breath and survive for almost three decades is now crying wolf when competitors are doing better.

Microsoft and it’s pizza delivery boy Nokia filed complaints with the EU, via is proxy body FairSearch, against Google’s free and open source Android OS. According to reports EU is going ahead with the probe.

FairSearch is no ‘independent body. Nicolas Petit, a professor of competition law at the University of Liege in Belgium was quoted by Computer World stating, “FairSearch.org is seen by many observers here as a Microsoft Trojan Horse Everyone understands here in Brussels that it’s Microsoft versus Google.”

As put by Pamela Jones: “This is beyond silly. Microsoft and Nokia a sore losers, and they should put more effort into their products instead of attacking Google via regulators. It’s unseemly. Of course the wrongly named “Fair Search” is involved. It’s here if you want. I hate to give them clicks: http://www.fairsearch.org/mobile/fairsearch-announces-complaint-in-eu-on-googles-anti-competitive-mobile-strategy/ but here’s the thing: every time these guys complain to the EU regulators, they have to look into it, even if it is absurd on its face. It’s how it works, and the article is clear it’s still an “informal” investigation, meaning nothing has happened except Microsoft and its little sidekick Nokia are complaining again.”

Many articles about this subject cite this original report and a FOSS-oriented site says this:

The Financial Times reports that it has access to documents indicating that the EU Commission is investigating the licensing practices for the Android mobile operating system. According to the documents, Google is offering Android below the usual market prices. The report also says that the company has been signing exclusive contracts with smartphone manufacturers related to the factory installation of Google’s mobile services. Reportedly, competitors have accused Google of exploiting its dominant market position to achieve this.

Over at CNET, the battle is said to be fought by “a group of companies that includes Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle” (Apple friend and CPTN member). Jones writes: “Do you remember Daniel Wallace, who sued the Free Software Foundation, as well as Novell and Red Hat over the GPL, claiming it was an antitrust violation to offer it for free, because then other software couldn’t fairly compete? The judge specifically ruled that the GPL encouraged competition and innovation and was advantageous for consumers in that prices to go down instead of up, writing: “[T]he GPL encourages, rather than discourages, free competition and the distribution of computer operating systems, the benefits of which directly pass to consumers. These benefits include lower prices, better access and more innovation.

“And what, pray tell, would the remedy be, if Microsoft and its sidekick Nokia were to prevail? Force Google to charge for Android? Ban it from the market? I mean, what? This accusation, aside from being untrue, reveals that what Microsoft really wants is one of the following: 1) that Android cost more, either through patent royalties paid for Microsoft’s aged and unnecessary, maybe invalid, patents; or 2) Android’s total destruction. That’s not competition in any normal sense.”

Here is how Pogson puts it:

The idea that an owner of copyright cannot give away it’s product is plainly silly. Copyright law says the owner can make copies any way they want, charging money or not.

This just shows that Microsoft continues to abuse and misuse the system while at the same time, as Tim put it, Microsoft wants to be seen as a victim that plays “nice”. The headline says “The writing is on the wall? Microsoft wants to play nicely now?”

The picture is not too great for Microsoft and its future. I’ve said recently that I believe the reason Microsoft plugs away with its phone efforts is so that it can’t be accused of patent trolling when it rakes in the profit from it’s Android licenses and as some people will probably agree, if Microsoft does have a long term future, it will be in the area’s of patents.

The worrying thing about this is (and the Microsoft Advocates are keen to point this out) is that Microsoft is not going anywhere – this is very true. It has a massive warchest of cash, a library of patents and in my view a opinion of “do it our way or not at all”. I think on the way down, Microsoft will bring many others down with it.

Microsoft play nicely with others? In my opinion, there’s more chance of Steve Ballmer spontaneously growing a full head of hair than Microsoft playing nicely with anyone.

Racketeering with patent threats and misuse of regulatory agencies through proxies is not playing “nice”, it’s acting criminal.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said “Microsoft expends a significant portion of its monopoly power [...] on imposing burdensome restrictions on its customers and inducing them to behave in ways that augment and prolong that monopoly power.” He also said that it “is Microsoft’s corporate practice to pressure other firms to halt software development that either shows the potential to weaken the applications barrier to entry or competes directly with Microsoft’s most cherished software products.” This is still true. On another occasion he said that “[t]he period since 1996 has witnessed a large increase in the usage of Microsoft’s browsing technologies and a concomitant decline in Navigator’s share. … The relative shares would not have changed nearly as much as they did, however, had Microsoft not devoted its monopoly profits to precisely that end.”

To summarise in the words of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, “Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft’s core products. [...] The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft’s self-interest.” █

Summary: The hallmarks of Microsoft — AstroTurfing, vapourware, developers disdain and interference with journalism — found sparingly in the gaming consoles scene

Microsoft’s ‘new’ console is a story full of abuses of all sorts. Microsoft’s friends at Amazon are apparently playing along with the marketing campaign. “Sony of rootkit and retroactively-cancel-linux fame,” says iophk, is winning polls, so “Amazon Prematurely Ends PS4 vs Xbox One Poll When PS4 Takes 95% of the Vote” (Microsoft’s poll rigging is common and it is part of the AstroTurfing). It is all about what’s sometimes referred to as “perception management” [1, 2] in Microsoft’s PR agencies. There is apparently this new document for guiding a consistent hype campaign, aiding for example Microsoft’s Reddit astroturf and other perception management activities that are illegal. The PR agencies of Microsoft are desperate to turn a series of Xbox failures into something successful like the PS2. Here is what Slashdot says about that newly-discovered document:

“In the wake of a disastrous E3 product reveal Microsoft has purportedly distributed a confidential internal 100-point ‘FAQ’ for the Xbox One that reads like it’s from the Ministry of Truth. It was of course immediately leaked on pastebin. Kotaku has the story and an amusing online poll. In the discussion below make sure to line up the FAQ entries with the AC comments for extra ‘Informative’ moderation.”

Former Microsoft MVP Ryan (DaemonFC in our IRC channel) says “the silver lining is that people are absolutely up in arms over the XBOX One. It looks like Microsoft has finally crossed the line. They’ll either backpedal or be crushed.”

Watch this article about illegal activities from Microsoft, relying on euphemisms like “reputation management” (defined therein as “the term social media marketers use to “pose as happy customers” on social media sites. They upvote/downvote and make comments”).

“It looks like Microsoft has finally crossed the line. They’ll either backpedal or be crushed.”
      –RyanMicrosoft just knows it cannot perform well without playing dirty. This has always been true, perhaps with few exceptions. Microsoft should just be closing shop when it comes to gaming. Android, iOS and to some degree Valve/Steam, which is cross-platform now , generally mean that Microsoft’s inertia through games is mostly over. Some consoles are now based on GNU/Linux (Piston for example) or Android (Ouya and others), so the worst Microsoft can do is set barriers for games, such as this new case, which Slashdot summarises as follows: “The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One. It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game. It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops, Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace their console.”

This is a sure way to keep developers away.

Meanwhile, point out some sources, “Xbox One Games At E3 Were Running On Windows 7 With Nvidia GTX Cards?”

If true, then this means that what Microsoft has at the moment is partly vapourware and this may as well explain the descent to dirty tricks. █

–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO

Summary: The SCO v. IBM case is reopened, despite a glaring lack of funds, resuming the FUD against Linux

Microsoft is now openly — not just covertly [1, 2] — supporting Apple’s fight against Android. “Microsoft disagrees that Judge Posner created a “categorical rule” or “blanket prohibition” on injunctive relief for infringement of SEPs,” says this post. “It calls the question of a RAND-encumbered patent owner’s entitlement to injunction relief “an interesting question — but not a question presented on appeal here.” Microsoft argues that RAND commitments must be considered as part of the eBay analysis, which it says Judge Posner precisely did here” (Posner is against software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]).

Here we have Microsoft interfering with a competitor using a proxy or a litigation ally. It is typical Microsoft behaviour which goes back to the SCO case and prior to it, too. According to this [via], SCO’s case is still going on:

The Hon. David Nuffer has ruled on the SCO v. IBM motions, granting SCO’s motion for reconsideration and reopening the case, which IBM did not object to. Judge Nuffer apologizes to the parties for the error in his previous order refusing to reopen the case. Sounds like a mensch to me. I love it when judges don’t pretend something is the lawyers’ fault when it’s really the judge’s fault. He’s newly assigned to this case, and it’s been going on for over a decade, so he specifically tells the parties not to assume his familiarity, asking them to provide him with enough detail in the various briefs going forward to work with. And he has essentially accepted the IBM suggestions on how to go forward, which SCO did not want to happen. I was fairly confident he would, though, precisely because he’s new and he surely needs some time and help from the parties to get up to speed.

The pro-FOSS news site says: “After both parties have submitted their motions, the court will decide whether the case will be closed without further hearings with a summary judgement or if it will be re-opened in earnest.”

A Microsoft partner says “IBM’s lawsuit with SCO over just who owns Unix has crawled out of the grave and seems set to shuffle back into US courts.

“For the uninitiated, or those who’ve successfully tried to forget this turgid saga, a brief summary: SCO in 2003 sued IBM for doing something nasty to bits of Unix it owned. Or felt it owned. SCO also sued Novell, which it felt did not own some copyrights for Unix.

“Many private school educations later for the offspring of the lawyers involved SCO lost against Novell. By this time SCO was out of cash with which to keep up the fight against Big Blue, so the matter hibernated for a while.”

“Decade-old lawsuit exhumed in response to SCO motion for reconsideration,” writes Lee Hutchinson. Richard Adhikari writes the following summary in ECT:

The news that lawyers for The SCO Group have filed a new motion to reopen its case against IBM was greeted with incredulity, to put it mildly. Turns out that the bankrupt SCO really isn’t attempting to retry the case — there are some loose ends from the long and drawn-out proceedings that still need to be tied up. The motion did provide an excuse for traveling once more down memory lane, though.

What we have here is Microsoft-funded litigation. This one involved copyrights and Microsoft is currently trying patents, also using proxies to enhance impact (e.g. patent-stacking).

Thankfully there are some actions to curb patents in the US right now, even if some are misguided and badly-aimed [1, 2, 3]. Recently we got this ruling [1, 2] that “May Be A Boon For Biotech Startups” (no more patents on nature's basic genetics) and the text in Groklaw opens with:

I join the judgment of the Court, and all of its opinion except Part I–A and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology. I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief. It suffices for me to affirm, having studied the opinions below and the expert briefs presented here, that the portion of DNA isolated from its natural state sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the DNA in its natural state; and that complementary DNA (cDNA) is a synthetic creation not normally present in nature.

Watch the patents boosters react. Pamela Jones replies to this booster by saying: “He’s arguing CLS Bank was wrongly decided. Still. The law is quite specific that you can’t patent function in such a broad way it closes off all competition such that no one else can make a device that “scrolls intuitively”. But with software patents, that’s exactly what has been happening, and that isn’t even talking about the fact that software is mathematics and should not be patentable subject matter in the first place. But if it is going to be, the issue isn’t hardware or software; it’s specificity. If you want a patent, then, and it’s 100% software, be specific so you patent only the precise way you did what you did; that leaves room for others to do it a different way. And that is what President Obama said he’d like to retrain the USPTO examiners so they recognize the difference.”

In order to defend Linux we must watch out for patents on software and those who promote them. Microsoft is trying to sustain a SCO-like smear and scare, showing that the copyright plot against Linux is not completely dead yet (Microsoft has since then moved on to patents). █

Summary: The company with history of hostility towards GNU/Linux is now becoming part of Microsoft

COMPUTER giant Dell was recently hijacked by Microsoft and now it’s Best Buy‘s turn. iophk calls it “Yet another reason to avoid Best Buy,” adding that “they’re really worried about the chromebooks that people would otherwise buy” (see upcoming daily links for major news related to this).

Here is a report showing what happened:

Microsoft, in a new take on the store-within-a-store model, will take over the entire computer section of 600 Best Buy stores.

Microsoft, tweaking the store-within-a-store concept, has announced plans to build Windows Stores inside of 500 Best Buy stores in the United States and another 100 in Canada.

Best Buy was reportedly wakened by Vista series machine and now made hostage by the very same company which arguably caused its demise. It’s the same as Dell and Novell. This has “Stockholm Syndrome” written all over it. Our new Wiki page about Best Buy helps provide other reasons to boycott Best Buy, notably the store’s FUD campaign against GNU/Linux. Fortunately, there are many alternatives to Best Buy. █

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• 2009: “IDC research finds that Linux users are clearly satisfied about their choice to deploy Linux”

  It’s definitely happening on small mobile devices, but how about the thick clients and thin clients on desks of business, schools and governments?

• Windows Blue Blues, Symantec’s Kernel Confusion & More…

• Strategic Test releases data acquisition software for Linux

  The sixth generation of the SBench 6 data acquisition software has now been released by Strategic Test, and now the software is available for both Windows or Linux users. SBench continues to support all of the companies PCI Express, PCI, PXI and CompactPCI digitizer, waveform generator and high-speed digital I/O cards, some 300 variants in total. The Base version of Sbench 6 is supplied at no-cost with each UltraFast card. In addition, a fully functional demo version of the Professional Version with a limited run time is also included. The software is also able to run simulated demo cards to allow full software test even without hardware.

• Reality Check: Defining The True Success of Linux

  Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a new series by SUSE community marketing manager Brian Proffitt for Linux.com called “Reality Check” that will take a look at Linux in the real world. The first, 5 Linux Features You Want in Your Company, was published in May.

• Pondering Life in a PRISM World

  “Terrorists can adapt to non-use of telephone/Internet just as Osama bin Laden did,” countered blogger Robert Pogson. “Despite $billions spent, it took many years to hunt him down.

  “PRISM and other such blunt instruments will not discourage alert terrorists,” he opined. “Further, terrorists could use PRISM to set false alarms or to entrap responders.”

  [...]

  “There is NO difference between left and right; all we have in this country is right-wing and ultra right-wing, nothing else,” he explained.

• Desktop

  • System76 Jumps on the Haswell Bandwagon with Two New Ubuntu Laptops

    The Gazelle Professional and the Galago UltraPro both come pre-loaded with Ubuntu 13.04

• Server

  • Chinese supercomputer tops the charts — two years early

    Tianhe-2, with 3.1 million processor cores and a lot of Chinese-build technology, is the new leader of the twice-yearly list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Meet the GIMP!: Episode 192: Look Down! – A Challenge

• Kernel Space

  • Stable kernels 3.9.6, 3.4.49, and 3.0.82

  • Linux 3.10-rc6 Kernel Brings In More Fixes

    Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 3.10-rc6 kernel on Saturday afternoon. While there’s still some time ahead before the official Linux 3.10 kernel release, the rate of change appears to be slowing.

    After worrying last week about all of the changes still being pushed for Linux 3.10, Torvalds threatened to be more strict about the changes he would permit. A week has passed and the rate of pull requests to take care of only regressions has decreased.

  • Linux 3.10-rc6

  • NSA Has Legitimate Code Running in Linux Kernel and Android

    The National Security Agency or NSA is now in the public eye for some nefarious surveillance, but Linux users should know that the agency also had an active role the Linux kernel development, with the addition of SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux).

  • Graphics Stack

    • X.Org XDC2013 Announced For X, Wayland, Mesa

      The X.Org Foundation has finally announced the details concerning the 2013 X.Org Developers’ Conference.

    • Google Pushes More Mesa / Gallium3D Patches

      More Mesa / Gallium3D patches out of Google have come about this month for improving the open-source graphics stack.

      Google has been using Mesa/Gallium3D drivers for use on their Intel-powered Chromebooks. Google had invested heavily in the Intel Gallium3D driver for use on their older Chromebooks, but now they are starting to push more of their Mesa/Gallium3D changes that have been building up in months past.

  • Benchmarks

    • Optimized Binaries Provide Great Benefits For Intel Haswell

      Utilizing the core-avx2 CPU optimizations offered by the GCC 4.8 compiler can provide real benefits for the Intel Core i7 4770K processor and other new “Haswell” CPUs. For some computational workloads, the new Haswell instruction set extensions can offer tremendous speed-ups compared to what’s offered by the previous-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs.

    • Intel Haswell-Based Apple MacBook Air, HD 5000 Benchmarks

    • Min / Max FPS Comes To Test Results

      With Phoronix Test Suite 4.8 “Sokndal”, the minimum and maximum performance results are now being commonly displayed along side the rest of the results.

      Aside from showing the average performance result, the standard error, the actual result values, and other data already displayed through the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org has been to also display the minimum and maximum results. This min/max request has most commonly been for when displaying the frames-per-second (FPS) results on graphics tests. With Phoronix Test Suite 4.8, due out next quarter, this will commonly happen.

    • Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 vs. AMD Radeon Graphics On Linux

      Already published on Phoronix have been Intel HD Graphics 4600 benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux from the Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” processor and compared against previous generations of Intel HD Graphics. Being benchmarked today is the Intel HD Graphics 4600 on Linux compared against various AMD Radeon graphics cards using both the open and closed-source graphics drivers.

• Applications

  • Ardour 3.2 adds video support

    Ardour lead developer Paul Davis has announced the release of version 3.2 of the open source digital audio workstation (DAW). The biggest new addition in this version is video support, a feature on which developer Robin Gareus “has worked for a couple of years”, according to Davis. Video support allows users of the DAW to easily extract, edit and mix audio tracks associated with video while being able to see the video in a preview.

  • Searchable Memories

    Recoll is a GUI interface to Xapian, a search engine and indexer. While designed for programmers,

  • Creating Peer.fm: Interview with Developer Ryan Lester

    Back in April we reported on the release of Napster.fm by Ryan Lester, a service which used YouTube to serve up streaming music right in the users’ web browser. Ryan released his software under the GPLv3 on GitHub, and thanks in no small part to the notoriety of the Napster name, the service rapidly gained popularity.

  • normalize: Three quick tasks, in one tool

    I have a few programs that I use often but rarely think to mention, just because they are static background tools.

  • XSensors: Lets you Monitor CPU Temperatures in Ubuntu

  • ‘Zeegaree Lite’: Stopwatch & a Timer App for Ubuntu (13.04, 12.10, 12.04)

    ‘Zeegaree Lite’ is a beautifully designed stopwatch & a timer application for Ubuntu users. The interface also has a ‘hybrid’ type look, which gives the impression that it may work really well on both desktop and Ubuntu touch based user interfaces.

  • Songbird media player to cease development

    Eric Wirttman, CEO of POTI (Pioneers of the Inevitable), which produces the open source media player Songbird, has announced on the Songbird blog that, for financial reasons, Songbird development will cease and POTI will shut down its business activities as of 28 June.

    Songbird first saw the light of day early in 2006, as a hybrid browser/media player with a look and feel similar to Apple’s iTunes. It exited the alpha phase around two years later with the release of version 0.7. The first big cuts arrived in 2010, when financial constraints caused the company to drop Linux support.

  • Old utopian ideal revived on Swiss streets

    The campaigners say it is time for a broad public debate about the value of work in society and the widening gap between rich and poor – and more specifically to grant every legal resident in Switzerland contributions of CHF2,500 ($2,597) a month outright. The aim is to give everyone the right to self-determination and to live a life with less pressure, according to a promotional leaflet.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Use Awk to Find and Sort Text in Linux, GnuCash

    • FLOSS Manuals Offers New, Useful Guides to Cool FOSS Applications

    • How to Use Awk to Find and Sort Text in Linux, GnuCash

    • How To Install and Configure iTunes on Ubuntu

    • Securely share files between your computer and phone using samba

    • Flashify Sends Web Sites Between Android Browsers

    • Counting and Calculating with Vim

    • How to Enable Appindicator in Gnome Shell

    • How To Install and Configure iTunes on Ubuntu

    • How To Install Ubuntu On A Chromebook

    • 10 Ways to Generate a Random Password from the Command Line

    • Take a Screenshot and Edit Them in Ubuntu Desktop with Hotshots

    • Unix Fundamentals 101

    • Monitoring OpenStack Swift With Opsview

    • More and simpler patterns

    • Securely share files between your computer and phone using samba

    • http://www.nextstep4it.com/categories/how-to/cssh/

    • Create multiple servers with OpenVZ

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 1.6 Release Candidate 2 Is Out There

      Being in a code freeze now ahead of the Wine 1.6 official release in the coming weeks, no new features are coming but just bug-fixes.

  • Games

    • QFusion Game Engine Advanced With New Features

      QFusion is the game engine that’s derived from the Quake 2 code-base but has advanced a great deal and presently powers the popular open-source Warsow first person shooter. Since Warsow 1.0, the QFusion engine has advanced a great deal and the code has now been released.

    • HoN as a replacement for Dota 2?

      While a lot of Linux gamers are waiting for the appereance of the linux-version of Dota 2, a very similar game Heroes of Newerth has been supported on Linux for a while now.

    • Humble Weekly Sale with Games from 11 bit studios

      For a while now, the project Humble Bundle has been publishing, in addition to the Indie and the Android Bundles, the Humble Weekly Sale which usually contains several games from one game company.

    • Scraps vehicle combat game has a Linux release!

    • Half-Life 2 for Linux Finally Updated to Fix Save Game Corruption

      Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Valve that was released back in 2004 and it has recently been ported on the Linux platform. The first patches have started to arrive.

    • Humble Weekly Sale with Games from 11 bit studios

    • Paradise Perfect Boat Rescue heading to Linux!

      Paradise Perfect Boat Rescue is an interesting title from Calvin French (@psysal the developer of The Real Texas), the game is just as the title may suggest, boat around and save people from islands!

    • Window Maker Live 2013-06-05 Screenshot Tour

      Paradise Perfect Boat Rescue is an interesting title from Calvin French (@psysal the developer of The Real Texas), the game is just as the title may suggest, boat around and save people from islands!

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNUstep Mythbusting

  • Freedesktop Summit

    A few days back I attended the first freedesktop summit/sprint where a few hackers from different free desktops met with the objective of working together. We were people from Razord-qt, GNOME, Unity and of course KDE.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE 4.11 beta brings Wayland support to KWin

      The developers at the KDE project have released a first beta version of KDE 4.11 – including Plasma Workspaces, the KDE Platform and its associated applications. New features include experimental Wayland support in the KDE window manager KWin, the introduction of more Qt Quick elements to Plasma Workspaces and several improvements to file indexing and the desktop’s contact management application.

    • KDE Releases Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11

      With the large number of changes, the 4.11 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the 4.11 team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.

    • First beta of KDE SC 4.11 released

      The KDE team have announced the release of first beta of KDE SC 4.11, which includes Workspaces (desktop environment), Applications and development platform. The KDE team will now focus on fixing bugs and polishing the software as API, feature and dependencies have been frozen.

    • Mastering Interfaces with QT

    • Finding Information in Human-Entered Search Queries

    • Plasma Workspace: present and future

      We saw last week the release of the first beta of KDE Plasma Workspace and applications 4.11

      From my side, that’s a very important milestone, because it’s pretty much the coronation of what we intended the 4.x series of the workspace to be. It was a long ride, but I think this future release will be pretty stable and “defined” in its own identity.

    • Hello World! Me, the blog, and GSoC

      The main purpose of this blog, or rather the reason it came into existence, is to write about Google Summer of Code, more specifically about my own GSoC project. The title of this proposal is Reimplement Amarok 1.4 (FastForward) & iTunes importers on top of Statistics Synchronization framework, and add Amarok 2.x and Rhythmbox as synchronization targets. Amarok is a legendary music player, part of the KDE software suite (I’d say it’s a Linux music player, but that’s not entirely true).

    • What KDE can learn from Cinnamon

      Well, this ought to be interesting. Battle royale, except we have no gentry, just the two seemingly and arguably dominant desktop environments for Linux. In my humble and narrow perception, there has been a dramatic shift in the Linux desktop usage in the past several years. Come the season of Gnome 3, a split happened in the community, breaking the decade old Gnome-KDE dominance. A whole generation of desktop environments was born, forked and knifed. Unity took its own path, Gnome 2 returned as MATE, and Gnome 3 was eclipsed by Cinnamon. Only KDE remained as it was, and now it was facing a new rival.

    • Choqok-devel mailing list

    • News from the 2013/05 Gentoo KDE team meeting

      Independent of the meeting, a stabilization request has already been filed for KDE 4.10.3; thanks to the work of the kde stable testers, we can keep everyone uptodate. And as a final note, my laptop is back to kmail1… Cheers!

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 26th May 2013

    • Coordinate Systems in KStars

      This post describes a few of the coordinate systems that KStars uses to keep track of the positions of various astronomical objects, and how they relate to one another.

      All of the points used in KStars can be thought of as lying on a sphere, because it really makes no difference how far away a sky object like a star is – we only care about the direction. We can then imagine that these points “live” on the celestial sphere, an imaginary sphere surrounding the Earth. The problem of rendering a map of the night sky is then the problem of figuring out how to transform this sphere onto the screen.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME Desktop Webapp Chrome Extension

• Distributions

  • Linux Community Distro Poll

    Any distribution of GNU/Linux could be said to be a “community distro” in that it’s FLOSS and anyone including end-users could run, examine, modify and distribute it. The question really boils down to the health and vitality of the community surrounding particular distros. I recommend distros that have been around a while with large repositories and large numbers of contributors. Debian GNU/Linux is my particular favourite because, with the APT package management system, huge repository and huge fleet of mirrors around the globe there’s very little that can’t be accomplished with it and one person can easily manage a system large or small. What more can be asked of a distro? Debian is completely open with a large core of package managers, users able to examine and post bug-reports often with immediate responses and great documentation both within packages and on Debian sites. Of particular value to people who actually depend on IT to work or study or enjoyment is that Debian is serious about the quality of each package and the compatibility of the whole system with formal rules for packaging and releasing distros that all but guarantee working systems indefinitely. It is a healthy and vital community.

  • Do-over for Linux Community Distro Poll

  • New Releases

    • CRUX PPC GNU/Linux Project

      CRUX PPC is a volunteer driven non-profit project based on the releases of CRUX for x86. It contains software written by a lot of different people, each software comes with its own license, chosen by its author. Parts written by CRUX PPC Team are to intend as free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

    • 2013-06-15: CRUX PPC 3.0 released!

  • Screenshots

    • Peppermint OS Four Screenshot Tour

    • Window Maker Live 2013-06-05 Screenshot Tour

  • Red Hat Family

    • Stock Downgrades: Red Hat Inc Goes Cap in Hand

      It felt fitting that an upgraded Groupon (GRPN) jumped 10.23% last week, for the market overall reduced many investors to coupon-clipping penury. Shares slumped as a global trail of tears extended from Tokyo to Istanbul, whose customs officials have happily maintained an enduring faith in unicorns amid a crisis in the capital’s central square.

    • Will Red Hat Beat Earnings in 1Q?

      Red Hat Inc. (RHT – Snapshot Report) is set to report its first-quarter 2014 results on Jun 19. In the previous quarter, the company’s earnings of 25 cents beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 19.05%. Let’s see how things are shaping up for the company in this quarter.

    • Can Red Hat do for OpenStack what it did for Linux?

      Red Hat made its first $1 billion commercializing Linux. Now, it hopes to make even more doing the same for OpenStack.

      Red Hat executives say OpenStack – the open source cloud computing platform – is just like Linux. The code just needs to be massaged into a commercially-hardened package before enterprises will really use it. But just because Red Hat successfully commercialized Linux does not guarantee its OpenStack effort will go as well.

    • For Red Hat, the Cloud Beckons

      Red Hat has made a name for itself as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and it has proven that its Linux-focused strategy is very profitable. In fact, the company is the first open source-focused company to hit the $1 billion revenue mark. That said, though, Wall Street has been questioning where else the company might be able to generate revenues in the future.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 19/20 logfile explosions

        PSA: if you’re running Fedora 19 or 20, I highly recommend you stop what you’re doing right now and do this instead. There are a couple of unfortunate bugs in F19/F20 right now which may well be screwing the hell out of your log files.

  • Debian Family

    • Updated Debian 7: 7.1 released

      The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

    • Debian 7.1 Rounds In Some Bug-Fixes

    • Debian 7.1 coughs up first Wheezy fixes

    • The Linux Setup – Gregor Herrmann, Debian Developer

    • Debian is missing a tool, want to write it?

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • System76 Galago UltraPro Runs On Haswell Processor And Ubuntu

          Intel’s latest mobile processor to see action in majority of the coming Ultrabooks out there in the market has been given the codename Haswell, and this time around, we are treated to the System76 Galago UltraPro which is powered by an Intel Haswell processor no less (it offers more than decent processing performance without sipping up too much juice along the way), with Ubuntu as the operating system of choice. The System76 Galago UltraPro is a sleek new notebook which is touted to be the first notebook that measures under 1″ of thickness, all the while sporting Intel’s Iris Pro graphics. Anyone out there who wants to dispute that particular claim?

        • Ubuntu now available for Mini PCs powered by RK3188 Processors

          For any PC powered by Rockchip’s RK3188 quad-core processor, Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems are now available to run on the devices as well as the standard Android OS that probably came with the device.

        • Ubuntu Support: How to Get Help

          For those of us Linux users who are more adventurous, switching to a new operating system can be pretty exciting. Unfortunately, problems tend to crop up when a new user seeking help isn’t familiar with the best practices for finding support.

        • Ubuntu Unity tips

          A FUNNY thing happened on my Macbook Air the other day. Out of habit, I went to the left side of the screen to look for my launcher.

          Now any Mac user will consider this strange behavior, because the default location for the dock on OS X—and many other user interfaces—is at the bottom of the screen. You can change this to any of the other three sides of the screen, but it’s an option most folks will leave alone.

        • The Ubuntu PC Case Mod Pt. 2 Pick a Case

          Since my last post i’ve got a lot more done towards this project. I’ve made a crowdfunding account so i can get sponsored. I’ve got a shortlist of cases, the poll is here. I also have a PSU and sleeving is on it’s way. If you have advice or want more frequent updates, either use the comments here, my email ( noskcaj@ubuntu.com ) or http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=54532

        • Main Machine: Finally on Ubuntu 13.04

          When Ubuntu 13.04 was released I had been running the OS on my Lenovo T500 for almost five months, but I was not able to migrate my main laptop due to two bugs.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 15 Olivia on Nvidia-ed laptop – Perfection?

            We shall now commence the second review of Linux Mint 15 Olivia. In the first installment, we played with the distro on top of a T61 laptop, which comes with Intel graphics and two internal SSD. There were no cardinal issues, then again, neither there were any with Ubuntu, which later failed miserably when thrown against the HP machine and its Broadcom Wireless and Nvidia graphics.

          • Living free with Trisquel GNU/Linux 6.0

          • Multiple DEs for Ubuntu Studio (part 1)

• Devices/Embedded

  • 3 Portable Options For The Raspberry Pi

    The Raspberry Pi – I just can’t stop tinkering with it. Fresh from setting it up as a media centre and a retro games console, I’ve recently started looking at the possibilities of the device as something more important.

    You may have seen one of our earlier posts about the unusual uses for a Raspberry Pi. One of these was using it as the computer in a low-budget space program, something that would make the Pi more portable than most computers on earth! Sticking to the point, however – there are several ways in which a grounded Raspberry Pi can break free of power supply and its compact little Perspex or Lego case and be used as a an actual laptop computer.

  • Linux-based surveillance cameras start at $70

    D-Link has begun shipping four new models in its line of Linux powered surveillance-oriented “Cloud Cameras,” and has updated its web-based “Mydlink” software with new remote monitoring and video management features. The new cameras boast improved sound/motion detection, 802.11n WiFi extender capabilities, enhanced night vision, and weatherproof casing.

    The new cloud cameras, which include the Cloud Camera 1050 and 1150, the Pan & Tilt Day/Night Network Camera, and the Outdoor HD Wireless Day/Night Network Camera boost D-Link’s embedded Linux-based Cloud Camera line from 10 to 14 models. All the devices connect via WiFi to the company’s cloud-based Mydlink monitoring and control platform.

  • Phones

    • Jolla smartphone: First carrier takes the plunge

      Finland’s third largest mobile carrier DNA has confirmed it will be the first and so far the only in the world to sell Jolla’s Sailfish OS smartphone when it arrives.

      DNA was an early supporter of the Finnish startup’s work on remnants of Nokia’s abandoned MeeGo phones and will now also help Jolla sell its successor.

    • Ballnux

      • See how Samsung torture-tested the Galaxy S4

        A video from the Korean device maker shows the abuse its Android flagship smartphone is put through before hitting the public.

    • Android

      • Ubuntu up and running on Android min PCs with RK3188 chips

        Rockchip’s RK3188 quad-core processor is one of the fastest ARM Cortex-A9 chips on the market. But up until now if you’ve had a tablet, TV stick, or other devices with an RK3188 chip, you’ve probably only been able to run Android on it.

      • 10 reasons Android beats iOS 7

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Acer now eying wearable tech too

      The company is just the latest looking at the burgeoning market, according to Pocket-Lint.

    • A third of American adults now own tablet computers

      If you thought you were seeing tablet computers everywhere, you were right. Over a third of Americans now own a tablet and more are buying them every day.

Free Software/Open Source

• Researcher To Open-Source Tools For Finding Odd Authentication Behavior

  Rather than watching for communications between infected systems and command-and-control servers, companies can detect stealthy malware when it attempts to spread

• Experimental coding project opens up Sony SmartWatch

  Sony has pushed its Bluetooth SmartWatch project to a more open status with an invitation to software application developers to now design, develop and code applications and ancillary firmware and/or other extensions to the device.

• Sony SmartWatch goes open-source, looking for more innovation

• Sony allows hacking of its unloved SmartWatch

• Sony Opens Up Its SmartWatch for Developers

• Sony Smartwatch now open-sourced

  Wearable gadgets have become a real trend. While the other giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are busying with their wearable gadget plans, Sony already has a smartwatch in the market. Although the small device didn’t get too much attention from the tech fans when it launched but it may get a little more from now with Sony’s recent announcement that its smartwatch has now become open-sourced.

• Open-source software aids NPOs

  Three years later, the foundation’s thesis has given rise to an open-source software platform called Mobile Technology for Community Health (Motech), which an increasing number of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian groups are using to address pandemics such as tuberculosis and HIV.

• Sony Smartwatch Gets Open Source Treatment

• Sony’s SmartWatch goes open source

• Joeffice, an open source office suite one developer built in 30 days

  Don’t like Microsoft Office? Just build your own office suite—this guy did.

• S.H.O.V.E.L. Is An Open Source Multi-Tool

  S.H.O.V.E.L. is yet another multitool, but an unusual one. It sports a combined fork/spoon for eating, a serrated edge for cutting things, a bottle opener and a length of paracord. It’s also open source so you can customise it yourself.

• WANdisco Snaps Up Dev Site to Boost Open-Source Mojo

  WANdisco announced that it has snagged TortoiseSVN.net, the website that hosts the open source Subversion client of the same name. According to the company, this domain attracts 500,000 unique visitors each month and supports over five million downloads each year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but WANDisco revealed that lead developer Stefan Küng will be joining its ranks.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • VP9 Codec Now Enabled By Default In Chrome

      Google has just enabled their new, royalty-free VP9 video codec within their Chromium / Chrome web-browser.

      We have known for a while that VP9 was coming, the codec successor to the increasingly-used VP8 codec. In May we learned that VP9 was nearly ready and now as of today it’s enabled by default within the latest Chrome web-browser.

  • Mozilla

    • Introducing the Mozilla Science Lab

      We’re excited to announce the launch of the Mozilla Science Lab, a new initiative that will help researchers around the world use the open web to shape science’s future.

      Scientists created the web — but the open web still hasn’t transformed scientific practice to the same extent we’ve seen in other areas like media, education and business. For all of the incredible discoveries of the last century, science is still largely rooted in the “analog” age. Credit systems in science are still largely based around “papers,” for example, and as a result researchers are often discouraged from sharing, learning, reusing, and adopting the type of open and collaborative learning that the web makes possible.

    • Mozilla-backed Stop Watching Us blows past 100,000 signatures to fight NSA surveillance

      The legal battle over PRISM and the NSA’s phone records program is only getting under way, but advocacy groups are striking while the issue is hot. Stop Watching Us, a website that encourages citizens to digitally sign a letter that will be emailed to their elected representatives, today passed the 100,000 signature mark.

      That milestone, passed this morning, comes less than 48 hours after the start of the program. Currently Stop Watching Us has collected 112,279 total signatures. A quick multiplication indicates that 336,837 emails will be generated, at a minimum; each person has two Representatives and one Senator.

    • Mozilla Launches Science Lab Project, Seeks Better Scientific Collaboration

• Databases

  • Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7

    In a surprise move, Red Hat has announced that version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will ship with the MariaDB database installed by default, in place of MySQL.

  • Ditching MySQL: Red Hat shows its prowess in spin

    In the aftermath of one of its most dramatic announcements, Red Hat, the premier Linux company, continues to demonstrate that its main strengths lie in things other than technology.

  • Report: Red Hat to Switch Up MySQL for MariaDB

    Back in 2010, when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, MySQL founder Monty Widenius (shown) was very vocal about the acquisition, and raised many questions about the future of the open MySQL database, which he founded. In fact, we did an interview with Monty here on OStatic, where he said, “It’s clear that Oracle is in the game for the profit and it’s in their interest to get out as much money from MySQL as they can over the long term.”

    Monty went on to become the lead developer of MariaDB, a fork of MySQL, and now there are reports that Red Hat will switch the default database in its RHEL enterprise product, from MySQL to MariaDB, upon the release of version 7. That’s a big vote of confidence in MariaDB.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Java EE 7 at a glance

    Around three and a half years have passed since the last major version jump of the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE). It was intended that Java EE 6, which was designed with developer performance and simplification in mind, would become technologically more powerful in Java EE 7 through the addition of cloud support. These plans proved too ambitions at quite a late stage. As a result, the version that was completed in mid-April contains very few fundamentally new aspects and just represents a consistent effort to round off existing features.

• CMS

  • How leading open source enterprise portals are solving the CMS dilemma

• Funding

  • Leadwerks crowdfunding native Linux development

    Middleware outfit looking to help facilitate expansion of Linux games library

    Game engine provider Leadwerks is attempting to crowdfund native Linux development using its tech on Kickstarter.

    The company is looking for $20,000 to fund the engine’s compatibility with Linux operating systems, starting with Ubuntu 12.04.

• Public Services/Government

  • NYC opens the books, and the source code, on Checkbook 2.0

    Checkbook NYC illustrates how the city government spends its nearly $70 billion annual budget. Using a dashboard that combines graphs and user-friendly tables, the site displays up-to-date information about the city’s revenues, expenditures, contracts, payroll and budget. It also offers that information programmatically via APIs.

  • Open source by default?

    “Over the last ten years, open source has become unremarkable. I think that’s a great achievement. We no longer argue about whether it’s secure or not, or whether it’s safe to use. We focus now on how best to use open source to get the best value for every tax dollar,” said Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector Group.

• Licensing

  • Should Governments Specify Licence Conditions?

    I have been made aware of a meme passing around Government purchasing circles to the effect that Government ought not to be dictating licence terms in the course of procurement. This has two variants, a strong variant that Government ought not be specifying, for example, a class of licence that ought to apply to the procurement and a less strong variant to the effect that Government ought not be specifying particular licence terms.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • X-Cube 3D Printed Open Source Puzzle Cube: Rubikulous

      Dane Christianson’s X-Cube is not the weirdest, most complex or most sophisticated puzzle cube I’ve ever seen. But Dane didn’t really want to make the world’s most difficult or intimidating take on the Rubik’s cube. His aim with the X-Cube was to make a fun and relatable product to raise people’s awareness about 3D printing.

• Programming

  • Global Open Source Leader, Eclipse Foundation, Selects Granite Networks for Primary Data Centre

  • Learning to program, the open source way

    Kushal Das thinks he knows what you’re doing this summer: joining him and his team of volunteers in free, online programming classes, where you’ll learn more than just how to code. In Kushal’s hands, you’ll also receive a crash course in the open source way.

Leftovers

• Business donations to judges’ campaigns often equal friendly rulings

  State supreme court justices are favoring the corporate interests that finance their election campaigns, a comprehensive new study concludes.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Monsanto Wins Again in Federal Circuit: Organic Farmers Have No Standing to Challenge Patent

    In 2011, Dan Ravicher at PubPat led a group of 23 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Monsanto seeking declaratory judgment of non-infringement and invalidity of Monsanto’s genetically modified seed patents. Although not directly related, the patents challenged here are the same as those that Monsanto has asserted against dozens of farmers for growing unlicensed versions of its Round-Up Ready Soybeans. See, e.g., Bowman v. Monsanto (2013). In the present case, however, none of the plaintiffs want to grow genetically modified crops. Instead, the case asserts that the organic and heritage seed growers are in fear of becoming liable for inadvertently growing patented seeds. In many ways, patent infringement can be considered a strict liability tort and, as such, the unknowing use of another’s patented invention still creates liability for patent infringement. Thus far, Monsanto has promised that it will not sue farmers who inadvertently grow its patented crops so long as the farmers do not take
    advantage of their glyphosate resistant properties and so long as the farmer’s do not intentionally re-plant GM progeny. However, Monsanto has not offered any clear covenant-not-to-sue for inadvertent growing. Recent news that Monsanto’s experimentally genetically modified and non-FDA approved wheat has inadvertently spread even though Monsanto had attempted to destroy all of the crops.

• Security

  • Patients Put at Risk By Computer Viruses

  • ICS-CERT issues warning about unsafe medical devices

    Industrial Control System CERT (ICS-CERT) of US-CERT and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have published an advisory that some 300 medical devices from around 40 firms can be easily manipulated because they use hard-coded passwords. A growing number of medical devices have embedded web servers that are connected to the internet or the hospital’s network and could potentially be open to attack.

• Finance

  • Bank of Canada brings in bond, markets specialist as adviser to Poloz

    The Bank of Canada has appointed former Merrill Lynch executive Lynn Patterson as special adviser to new governor Stephen Poloz, the central bank said on Friday.

  • Senator Warren Presses White House to Release Pacific Trade Text

    President Barack Obama’s administration should release documents the U.S. and 10 other Pacific-region nations are using as they negotiate a new trade agreement, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said.

    In a letter to Michael Froman, Obama’s nominee to lead the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, the Massachusetts lawmaker said releasing details of what is being considered by the parties would give citizens a chance to evaluate the deal before negotiations are completed.

  • Goldman Sachs CEO blames lagging economy on Americans’ negative culture

    The chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs blames the lagging U.S. economy on Americans’ negativity, which he has partly attributed to Congress and the media.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Koch brothers blast Reed Hundt’s remarks on newspaper ownership

    Hundt, a Democrat, said in an interview that the Koch statement “proves my point that they distort public dialogue.” He reiterated from his remarks last week that a lot has changed in the media landscape over the past decade as new platforms have emerged and led the way for more diversity of news and analysis.

  • Join CMD for ALEC Exposed Panel at Netroots Nation 2013

    Join the Center for Media and Democracy at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in San Jose, California. On Friday, June 21, CMD is hosting a panel called “ALECexposed: Strategies and Tactics for our 2013 Campaign” taking place at 10:30am in the Town Square. See the panel description here.

    This session will focus on the strategies and tactics being used by groups and individuals working to expose ALEC, including our work on ALECexposed.org and our reporting on ALEC at PRWatch.org. It will include new angles to our corporate campaign, new tactics in our outreach to legislators and new research on ALEC “stink tanks” and on immigration, guns, voting, climate, federal legislation among other issues.

  • ALEC Tours Tar Sands, Works with Industry Groups to Block Low-Carbon Fuel Standards

    The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) recently adopted a “model” bill from an oil-industry lobby group, that would limit the ability of states to negotiate regional “low-carbon fuel standards” (LCFS), a mechanism designed to reduce the carbon intensity of transportation fuels. If agreed by states, LCFS could have a significant impact on the sale of fuels derived from Canadian tar sands in the United States, regardless of any decision the Obama administration makes over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

• Censorship

  • ISPs to include porn filters as default in the UK by 2014

    Parental filters for pornographic content will come as a default setting for all homes in the UK by the end of 2013, says David Cameron’s special advisor on preventing the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, Claire Perry MP.

    Internet service providers (ISP) will be expected to provide filtering technology to new and existing customers with an emphasis on opting out, rather than opting in.

    “[In the UK] we will have filters where if you do nothing, the parental filters will come pre-ticked,” said Perry, speaking at a Westminster eForum on 14 June.

    The move is part of a government effort to force ISPs to make filtering a standard option across industry and to make the technology easier for consumers to use. As ISPs are voluntarily rolling out filtering technology, it will require no new legislation or regulations.

  • Jargon File blocked by O2, Youtube by Orange

    We regularly collect blocking reports from mobile users, via blocked.org.uk – and we’ve recently had some interesting ones.

• Privacy

  • Slides from Simon Phipps Communications Data Bill Zombie Talk

    The slides from this weeks talk on the ‘Snoopers Charter’ are available here : wmk.me/10bdcFq

  • Google: The Thin Line between Search and Surveillance

    One could argue that Google is a corporation whose content and cash flow results from their ability to survey the Internet with unfettered access to users’ information under protection of the Safe Harbor Provision of the DMCA. The provision is a corporate loop-hole that allows Google to not be held responsible for content that might otherwise be personal, private, or illegal as defined by the U.S. Constitution and The Geneva Accords. Google claims to be software without moral judgment and purposely refuses to admit that it may be facilitating mafia-style corporations counterfeiting without license and thus profiting through illegal gain by eradicating people’s property rights as otherwise guaranteed.

  • Seeking Surveillance Safe Search Engines

    While helping our colleague Dave Bean as he worked to get his essay on Google and the NSA ready for publication, I found myself wondering if any of this latest news on the government’s forcing their nose into everybody-in-the-world’s business would have any lasting effect. Sadly, I figured not–if there was any change, it’d only be temporary. I’ve spent too many years on this planet to expect too much in the way of permanent change for the better.

  • NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants

    National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

  • Six ways to protect yourself from the NSA and other eavesdroppers

    1) Abandon the cloud

  • How Long Can Edward Snowden Stay in Hong Kong?

    Such criticism of the treatment of Manning could make Hong Kong judges less willing to accept any U.S. request for extradition.

  • Why We’re ‘Shocked, Shocked’ At NSA Surveillance Revelations

    For those of us who had been following the story for a decade, this was no “bombshell.” No “leak” was required. There was no need for an “expose” of what had long since been exposed.

    As the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez and others reminded us, the NSA’s surveillance activities, and many of the details breathlessly reported last week, weren’t even secret. They come up regularly in Congress, during hearings, for example, about renewal of the USA Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the principal laws that govern the activity.

  • How the U.S. PRISM and Blarney Programs Mine Your Data for Intelligence

    Two programs go beyond phone calls to email and cloud storage to gather info about terrorism and provide it to the NSA and British intelligence.

  • Why PRISM kills the cloud

    The migration from desktop computing to the cloud is on every tech firm’s playlist this season, with Apple [AAPL] expected to deliver improvements to its iCloud service later today — but recent revelations regarding the US government’s PRISM surveillance technology could be the kiss of death to these future tech promises. (You may also wish to read this more recent report).

  • To understand Edward Snowden’s motivations, look to Aaron Swartz

    Since the 29-year-old intelligence contractor Edward Snowden outed himself as the source of the NSA leaks on Sunday, reporters and pundits—heck, even Snowden himself—have compared him with Bradley Manning, the Army private on trial for passing classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks. There’s obviously something to the comparison—both men were apparently dedicated enough to the cause of transparency to risk their lives for it. But, after reading the early biographical reporting about Snowden, I can’t help recalling another transparency activist in the news recently: Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January while awaiting trial for downloading millions of pages from JSTOR, the online database of academic articles.

  • The PRISM Details Matter

    Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill’s account of the NSA’s “PRISM” program in the Guardian is woefully short on technical details of how the program works. This lack of clarity should be troublesome to those attempting to decide whether they should be outraged. Does this program allow the government to look at private communications on a company’s central servers without a valid court order, or is it something more benign?

    [...]

    These details matter. These details completely change the nature of the story, and they shouldn’t just be brushed aside as a minor technical footnote. Serious accusations were made, and have been roundly denied by the implicated parties. There is no aspect of this story more important than finding out which account is accurate.

  • Expert says Kiwis under constant surveillance

    An Otago University-based security expert believes Kiwis are under constant surveillance and the Government should own up to its part in the operation.

    University of Otago information science Associate Professor Hank Wolfe made the comments today after ex-CIA whistle blower Edward Snowden revealed electronic data was being collected from around the globe by a massive US intelligence monitoring programme called Prism.

    “The [National Security Agency] has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything,” Snowden said.

    “With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.’’

  • Patents Illustrate Crafty Surveillance Techniques

  • Who watches the watchers? Apparently, no one

    And yet Booz Allen, and through the company the NSA, gave Snowden a $200,000 salary and access to and apparent operational control over the most sensitive, powerful surveillance instrument ever devised by man. By Snowden’s account, he had no trouble whatsoever in assembling the data about the program and taking it out of the office. He claims to have had “full access to the rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station we have, what their missions are and so forth.”

    If he had wanted to turn that data over to the Chinese or Russians, he could have done so. As he described his operational authority, he could have tapped into the email stream of any person in the world, up to and including President Obama, without oversight. And presumably he could have used information gathered through the program as he saw fit, from leaking it to celebrity magazines to turning it to blackmail to using it for financial gain in the markets.

    Now, is all that true? Former NSA employees have told the media that it’s highly doubtful, but they also express astonishment at the range of material, including a subpoena from a top-secret federal court, that Snowden was clearly able to acquire. So the truth is that we don’t know, and that’s kind of the point. When you give these agencies immense power and huge budgets and cloak them in invisibility, accountability disappears.

  • How Big Is the NSA Police State, Really?

    Early last month, even while he was finalizing his discussions with Edward Snowden, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reported on a conversation between Tim Clemente, a former FBI agent, and CNN host Carol Costello. In the interview about the Boston Marathon investigation, as seen at right, Clemente makes the claim that “all digital communications are — there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.” Costello refers to a previous appearance in which Clemente claimed the government could access phone calls, even “exactly what was said in that conversation.”

  • ACLU Files Lawsuit Challenging NSA’s Patriot Act Phone Surveillance

  • Senators propose bill to declassify orders behind NSA spying

    A bipartisan group of eight prominent US senators announced a new bill today to declassify the court opinions that give the US National Security Agency the legal power to carry out the sweeping internet surveillance program known as PRISM and the separate phone records surveillance program, both revealed last week by leaked documents. “Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law,” said Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the architect of the bill, a version of which he originally introduced last December, but which failed to gain traction at the time.

  • Europe warns US: you must respect the privacy of our citizens

    EU officials demand answers on what data snooping programmes entail and whether they breach human rights

  • Edward Snowden: “I am not here to hide”

    Edward Snowden has surfaced again, according to a local Hong Kong newspaper, telling them he has no intention of hiding from whatever may come next….”People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality,” Snowden told the paper.

  • Treason charges for Snowden would be rare, challenging

    Several key U.S. senators are lobbying for treason charges against Edward Snowden, the former analyst who leaked information about government spy programs. So how rare and unusual would that be?

  • No, Edward Snowden probably didn’t commit treason

  • FISA Court Rejects Catch-22 Secrecy Argument in FOIA Case

    In the first publicly known victory by a non-government party before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret court today granted a motion filed by EFF related to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

  • Europe rallies against PRISM

    German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger characterised PRISM as “dangerous”.

  • The Government’s Word Games When Talking About NSA Domestic Spying

    Government officials have made many statements about the warrantless surveillance since it became public in 2005. They’ve done so in court, in Congress, and in the media. Unfortunately, their words have too often served to evade or obscure, rather than clarify, their actions.

  • Feds May Have To Reveal FISA Phone Records In Murder Case

    There’s been a lot of focus elsewhere concerning the FISA rulings that were leaked, showing that the government is scooping up the details of pretty much every phone call. However, a case concerning some guys who were trying to rob an armored truck may lead to some interesting revelations related to what the government collects. Daryl Davis, Hasam Williams, Terrance Brown, Toriano Johnson, and Joseph K. Simmons were charged with trying to rob a bunch of armored Brink’s trucks, in which one of the robberies went wrong and a Brink’s employee was shot and killed. As part of the case against the group, the DOJ obtained call records. However, during discovery, the government refused to hand over call records for July of 2010, claiming that when they sought them from the telco, the DOJ was told that those records had been purged. Terrance Brown’s lawyer is now claiming that since it appears the NSA has sucked up all of this data for quite some time, it would appear that the government should, in fact,
    already have the phone records from July 2010, which he argues would show that he was nowhere near the robbery when it happened.

  • Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

    In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

    [...]

    But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

    It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

  • Reddit co-founder on NSA snooping

    Alexis Ohanian discusses the NSA’s controversial surveillance program and says it’s time to ‘draw a line in the sand’ for what’s off-limits in the digital age.

  • GAP Statement on Edward Snowden & NSA Domestic Surveillance

    Snowden disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal. Consequently, he meets the legal definition of a whistleblower, despite statements to the contrary made by numerous government officials and security pundits. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky), Sen. Mark Udall (D-Co), Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Ca), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) have also expressed concern about the potential illegality of the secret program. Moreover, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wi) who is one of the original authors of the Patriot Act – the oft-cited justification for this pervasive surveillance – has expressed similar misgiving.

  • GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits

    Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

    The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

    The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance by GCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

    [...]

    A second review implies that the analysts’ findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: “In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential.”

    In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised this live monitoring: “Thank you very much for getting the application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The call records activity pilot was very successful and was well received as a current indicator of delegate activity …

  • G20 summit: NSA targeted Russian president Medvedev in London

    American spies based in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London, leaked documents reveal.

    The details of the intercept were set out in a briefing prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s biggest surveillance and eavesdropping organisation, and shared with high-ranking officials from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

  • 3 NSA veterans speak out on whistle-blower: We told you so

    In a roundtable discussion, a trio of former National Security Agency whistle-blowers tell USA TODAY that Edward Snowden succeeded where they failed.

  • Edward Snowden Q and A: NSA whistleblower answers your questions

    The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history answered your questions about the NSA surveillance revelations

  • The Government says NO to blanket pub snooping

    Having recently posted about local councils reducing the number of CCTV cameras in their local area it seems that the Government has taken the additional step to ensure that pub landlords aren’t forced into using CCTV when it is not necessary to do so.

  • Work for the UN

    GCHQ and the NSA between them employ tens of thousands of people. I am bemused by the shock at the “revelation” they have been spying. What on Earth did journalists think that spies do all day? That includes electronics spies.

  • Jerrold Nadler Does Not Think the NSA Can Listen to U.S. Phone Calls

    An exchange between Rep. Jerrold Nadler and FBI director Robert Mueller is coming under some scrutiny after a reporter claimed it concretely proves that NSA analysts can listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant.

    CNet’s Declan McCullugh published a story Saturday night purporting to prove Edward Snowden’s claim that NSA analysts can wiretap domestic phone calls without a warrant. His case was built entirely around an exchange between Rep. Jerrold Nadler and FBI director Robert Mueller that happened during an FBI oversight hearing with the House Judiciary committee on Thursday.

• Civil Rights

  • Exclusive – Wal-Mart’s everyday hiring strategy: Add more temps

    Wal-Mart Stores Inc has in recent months been only hiring temporary workers at many of its U.S. stores, the first time the world’s largest retailer has done so outside of the holiday shopping season.

  • Woz: This is not my America

    Stopped by Spanish language tech journalists at an airport, the Apple co-founder says that after the NSA revelations, he questions his own government and wonders whether it’s behaving like a king.

  • Raspberry Pi Tor proxy lets you take anonymity with you

• DRM

  • Apple’s Cue Says Publishers Pushed for Higher E-Book Prices

    According to the government, Cue was the main intermediary between Apple and five major publishers, and the “chief ringleader” of an alleged conspiracy to shift the e-book industry from the wholesale pricing model established by Amazon to an agency model where publishers, not retailers, set e-book prices, sending them higher than they had been in the past. But on the witness stand Thursday, Cue maintained he was anything but.

  • Apple Executive Denies E-Books Conspiracy

    Apple is the last defendant standing in the government’s antitrust case against six of the world’s leading publishers and two subsidiaries. Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster all settled in April 2012. Penguin joined the settling bandwagon in December, and Macmillan copped to its role in the scheme two months later.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Filmmaker picks a copyright fight with “Happy Birthday”

      The copyright on the world’s most popular song? A new lawsuit says it’s bogus.

    • File-Sharers Are Well Educated and Earn More Money

      New research commissioned by the Australasian Performing Right Association reveals that Australian file-sharers are more affluent and better educated than their non-downloading counterparts. One in three Aussie Internet pirates earn more than $100,000 and one in four enjoyed a university education. The results further confirm that pirates tend to be relatively young, with 44% of file-sharers under 30 years of age.

IRC Proceedings: June 10th, 2013

IRC Proceedings: June 11th, 2013

IRC Proceedings: June 12th, 2013

IRC Proceedings: June 13th, 2013

IRC Proceedings: June 14th, 2013

IRC Proceedings: June 15th, 2013

Enter the IRC channels now

Summary: Server maintenance complete, making pageloads faster and the Web site more robust, hence resilient against attacks

RECENTLY we have been having unprecedented problems with availability. After preparations last week we finally migrated and upgraded the Techrights server, doubling the CPU capacity and completing all the associated tasks over the weekend. A few changes remain to be applied shortly. Technical details are in my personal blog (not so relevant to the scope of Techrights).

Copilotco has kindly provided hosting for over 4 years. Without it, Techrights would not have been where it is today. It all started when Techrights came after DDOS attacks lasting several days. There are people (or companies) out there who would like to see the site dead. █

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Turning to Linux: A guide for SMBs

  A partial Linux solution could solve Windows 8 woes

• What Linux Taught Me About Productivity

  I’ve spent the past two years interviewing people about their desktop Linux setups, asking them about the Linux distributions they chose, the desktop environments they use, and the software upon which they rely. Over the past 73 interviews, a number of common lessons have emerged. Most of these apply to anyone who relies on a computer to do their work, Linux user or not. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from these interviews:

• Five apps to make the Linux desktop business-ready

  It used to be quite the challenge to make a Linux desktop business-ready. Most every business depended upon niche, proprietary software that simply could not be run on anything but Windows. However, times have changed and so much of business is now handled through a web browser. Add to that how much the Linux platform has matured and you have the makings for a big win on the open source front.

• One Window Successfully Shut; budding authouress Daughter Sarah’s voluntary testimonial

  Being a broke university student who couldn’t afford a technician’s fee, a client of this new ISP’s (and hardly servile at that), and with no other ISP options due to the grand monopolization of the region and who knows, maybe price fixing, I looked to my father and brother for advice. Brother recommended reinstalling Windows XP. Father recommended Debian GNU/Linux.

  And so it was. I didn’t want to deal with virus scanners and paying heed to time allocated to ensuring my shit was safe, so I went Father’s way with a free disk from Brother.

  The first few times I ran Ubuntu GNU/Linux (my brother deviated from Debian), the new ISP couldn’t give me a connection, leaving me to call their tech people yet-a-friggin’-gain. Since I changed network names and passwords, there’ve been no issues in that regard, though I am still using their provided modem.

• Desktop

  • Availability Of Dell’s Linux Laptop Confusing US Buyers

    Trying to buy Dell’s developer-orientated Ubuntu laptop – the XPS 13 – is a confusing affair at present.

    Several readers have contacted us to say that the device is no longer being offered for sale on the Dell US website.

  • System76 Unveil New Haswell-Powered Ultra-Thin Ubuntu Laptop

    The world’s first ultra-thin laptop to use Intel’s Iris Pro graphics has today been unveiled by Ubuntu-dedicated hardware company System76.

• Server

  • The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean

  • IBM unveils two new power systems linux centers

    At the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston, IBM, the giant international computer and server company, has announced its plan to expand the adoption of Linux accross its enterprise. There will be two new Power Systems Linux Centers in Austin and New York and support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) will be extended to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.

    In July, the two first North American IBM Power Systems Linux Centers will be opened, in Austin, Texas and in New York. With these centers, software developers will find it easier to develop and deploy new softwares for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open-sourced technology building blocks using the latest IMP processor technology and Linux.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast Season 5 Episode 10

    In this episode: It looks like Rockwell was right – somebody was watching him (and us). There’s a great new Raspberry Pi installer called NOOBS and the President of the US promises action against patent trolls. Ubuntu’s ‘bug one’ has been fixed and the EFF objects to DRM in HTML 5. As ever, hear our discoveries and your opinions in this epic length podcast.

• Kernel Space

  • IBM Announces New Initiatives to Support Adoption of Linux OS Across Enterprise

    IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced new initiatives to further support and speed up the adoption of the Linux operating system across the enterprise. These include two new Power Systems Linux Centers and plans to extend support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.

  • International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) News: Linux KVM Virtualization, Brain-Simulating Supercomputer, DevOps & More

  • Graphics Stack

    • Intel Gallium3D Driver Now Supports GLSL 1.40

      The “Ilo” open-source driver that provides unofficial Intel Gallium3D graphics support for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics cores on Linux now is advertising GLSL 1.40 compliance. The GL Shading Language update comes after landing UBO and TBO support.

  • Benchmarks

    • Gallium3D LLVMpipe Benchmarks From Intel Haswell

      Being published this afternoon are benchmarks of the Gallium3D LLVMpipe software driver compared to Intel HD 4600 graphics on Mesa 9.2 Git when using an Intel Core i7 4770K. While this Intel “Haswell” CPU is faster than previous generations, it’s still obviously best not relying upon LLVMpipe.

• Applications

  • It’s Official, Liferea 1.10 RC4 Can Import Google Reader Subscriptions

    Liferea, a free news aggregator capable to store articles for offline reading and with full synchronization with Google Reader and TinyTinyRSS, is now at version 1.10 RC4.

  • Ardour 3.2 adds video support

    Ardour lead developer Paul Davis has announced the release of version 3.2 of the open source digital audio workstation (DAW). The biggest new addition in this version is video support, a feature on which developer Robin Gareus “has worked for a couple of years”, according to Davis. Video support allows users of the DAW to easily extract, edit and mix audio tracks associated with video while being able to see the video in a preview.

  • Retroshare: A Next Generation Secure Communication and File Sharing Platform

    Retroshare is the next generation of peer to peer sharing networks. Unlike classic peer to peer software, it only connects to trusted friends and not just anyone.

  • Top Free Android SSH Clients

  • Glances – CLI curses based monitoring tool for GNU/Linux

    Glances is a CLI curses based monitoring tool for GNU/Linux and BSD OS.Glances uses the PsUtil library to get information from your system.It is developed in Python.

  • Proprietary

    • LinMin™ Introduces LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.0 for Linux® Systems and Virtual Machines

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Change System Language in Ubuntu

    • Short Tip: Remove guest account in Ubuntu

    • The Power of Linux “History Command” in Bash Shell

    • PAC Manager Replacement of Secure CRT / Putty on Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

    • Using RoundCube Webmail With ISPConfig 3 On Debian Wheezy (Apache2)

    • Reporting A Bug Against the Xen Hypervisor

    • How to use a Playstation 2 joypad with Linux

    • Setup Your Own YouTube Like Website Using ClipBucket

    • 4 different ways to print file content reversely

    • NAS Storage Performance Testing Using DD Command

  • Wine or Emulation

    • Wine 1.6 Release Candidate 2 Is Out There

  • Games

    • Linux International boss: Lack of games harmed desktop adoption

      Linux has struggled to earn its gaming stripes across the years in the face of stiff competiton from Windows and, in recent times, OS X.

      That began to change when Valve launched its Steam gaming service on Ubuntu-flavoured desktops earlier this year, with some hailing its arrival as a turning point for the operating system.

      Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, told TechRadar: “Quite frankly, the lack of games is one of the big reasons why Linux hasn’t made it onto [more] desktops.”

      Hall continued: “Even people who are 50 years old are going to say they have to have a particular game, so they have to have to do a dual boot and stick with Windows.

      “Of course, developers look for the largest install base possible, which is typically Windows, and then Apple. They don’t take it to the third platform as that would take away engineering resources for making new additions and features.”

    • Paranautical Activity is on IndieGameStand (PWYW) and the dark side of Greenlight

      They were originally on Steam’s Greenlight, found a publisher who was supposed to get them onto Steam normally, Steam then blocked it to “send a message” and so they had to do it all again.

    • The Cheapskate’s Corner 5 (Jun 13th-19th) (UPDATED)

    • Lost Sky Tactical J-RPG [PyGame]

    • Folk Tale a sandbox fantasy city builder heading to Linux on Steam!

    • Scraps vehicle combat game has a Linux release!

      Scraps is a bit like the multiplayer melee mode in Interstate ’76, except you build your vehicle from the chassis up instead of just bolting on weapons and armour. It’s kind of like how you put stuff together in Stratosphere: Conquest Of The Skies except that it’s a vehicle instead of a floating platform.

    • Paranautical Activity is on IndieGameStand (PWYW) and the dark side of Greenlight

      Paranautical Activity combines the classic FPS action of games like Doom and Quake, with the randomness and difficulty of modern roguelikes like Binding of Isaac and Spelunky. I don’t usually shout out sales since our sales page, but these guys really need it…

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Improve Your Xfce Desktop with the Zen Suite 0.11.3 Theme

    Zen suite, a theme compatible with GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3.x that aims to be simple, consistent and visually appealing, is now at version 0.11.3.

  • If You Hate Flat Themes and Icons, You Are Going to Love Sphere 1.2.5

    A lot of users have turned to the flat model for their themes, but if you don’t like this type of embellishments, you can go the other way and install spherical icons.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Mir Still Causing Concerns By Ubuntu Derivatives

      With Canonical’s planned adoption of their in-house Mir Display Server over the next year rather than using an X.Org Server or Wayland, derivatives such as KDE-based Kubuntu continue to fear the change and what exactly the options will be.

      KDE will not support Mir as long as it remains a one-distribution solution. With KDE not coming to Mir for the foreseeable future, Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu started a new technical discussion about non-Unity flavors and Mir.

    • Fanboys in Free Software

      Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it’s against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community.

      But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.

      When one starts to have a blog in free software one learns the hard way that being a relatively good developer means that you get hated. If you achieve something you get attacked, you get insulted, you get called a dictator [1], you get compared to Hitler [2], etc. etc. People say that you need a thick skin if you want to work in free software. I disagree. There shouldn’t be a need to have a thick skin. We are improving the world, we donated lots of our spare time to work on free software, we donate the source code we write for the public good and we are thanked by insults. This is not acceptable! Even if people dislike some specific software or are a great supporter of another software there is no reason to insult the people or the products. It never is! Not even if it is Microsoft or Apple or Google. There is no reason to attack them.

      [...]

      Final remark: please don’t come and tell me that I’m the same by criticizing Mir. It’s not the same. Criticizing decisions and having discussions is important, but of course critic has to be constructive. I have never attacked any of the Mir developers or have attacked the software in any way. I criticized the decision and the reasoning and pointed out the problems it causes for us, but I have in no way attacked Canonical, Ubuntu or Mir.

    • New Krita Web-shop!

    • KDE Ships First Beta of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.11

      Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

    • KDE 4.11 Beta Released, Works On Wayland

    • Choqok Twitter client handed over to community

      Mehrdad Momeny, the developer of the KDE microblogging client Choqok, has announced that he plans to hand development of the application over to the community. Momeny had previously apologised for not finding a maintainer to take over the project after admitting that personal circumstances did not leave him enough time and energy to continue development.

    • Disabling semantic-desktop at runtime

      Today we bumped KDE SC 4.11 beta 1 (4.10.80) in the gentoo kde overlay. The semantic-desktop use flag is dropped in >=kde-base/4.10.80, as you may already noticed or read in dilfridges blog post. So if your hardware is not powerful enough or you just don’t want to use the feature you can easily disable it at runtime.

    • Status and plans for plasma-nm

    • SFLPhone-KDE 1.2.3 released!

      SFLPhone-KDE 1.2.3 have been released today as a bug fix release 6 months after 1.2.2. This version is (hopefully) the last in the 1.2.* serie. The next generation (1.3) is under heavy development since the last release. According to git diff –stat, 1.3 branch have a massive 16000 lines of changes. It is also 10x faster, less memory hungry and usable (more on that in an upcoming blog post(s)). As for 1.2.3, the new features include macro support, new command line options and being able to be invoked from KaddressBook. Important bug fixes include compilation fix on Fedora 19 beta, prevent race condition when launching SFLPhone-KDE in autostart. On the daemon side, many bugs have been fixed there too. Overall, this release should be quite stable.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME 3, Windows 95 Disconnected

      About a week and a half ago, I was nearly taken-in when an item appeared on The Register that tied recent Linux desktop woes to behind the scenes moves by Microsoft to enforce patents against GNOME. Supposedly, GNOME was violating Redmond’s patented designs of the Windows 95 desktop, most specifically the Start Menu and the Start button. According to the story painted by reporter Liam Proven, KDE was also guilty of violating the same patents, but got a pass as they benefited from the famous Novel/Microsoft patent swap deal, being they were the default desktop in SUSE.

    • Who’s birthday is it today?

      Users today have countless ways of knowing or getting notified when their friends and family have birthdays. The most popular way comes from social networking where such data is shared publicly, but is there a way to get Gnome Shell notifications about this?

• Distributions

  • Divergence in the distros: how the Linux community is splitting into a two-tier system

    Look at any major service provider: Heroku, Google, Amazon, Apple. All of them offer different levels of access to what they offer, usually at different prices. There’s even an established route to enticing customers towards the paid plans, via the well-worn ‘freemium’ model.

    Let’s be clear about this: Linux isn’t dividing into paid and unpaid. It’s not going the freemium route (although the cynical will suggest that Canonical might be thinking about it). What we’re seeing, though, is the development of a clear split. A kind of meiosis.

  • New Releases

    • ArchBang 14.06.2013

    • Bridge 2013.06

    • Parted Magic 2013_06_14

    • Peppermint OS 4 out now

      The lightweight, cloud connected distro gets its first update in a year, and ditches Openbox in favour of Xfwm4

  • Screenshots

    • UberStudent 3.0 Screenshot Tour

    • ROSA 2012 R1 Screenshot Tour

    • Zorin OS 7 Screenshot Tour

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva releases Pulse2 1.4.2 with additional features and improved stability

  • Gentoo Family

    • News from the 2013/05 Gentoo KDE team meeting

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Honors Rafael Guimaraes as 2013 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year

    • Red Hat Announces Red Hat Storage Integration with Red Hat OpenStack

    • Where Is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7?

      In a standing room-only set of sessions at the Red Hat Summit here this week, the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was revealed.

      Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the Linux vendor’s core platform, had its last major release with the debut of RHEL 6 in November of 2010. Red Hat has been releasing major new RHEL platforms every two to three years, and at its 2012 Summit event the company had hinted that 2013 could be the year in which RHEL 7 might be released.

    • Red Hat bets its cloud future on OpenStack

      The message coming out of Red Hat’s annual Red Hat Summit is that while Linux is Red Hat’s foundation, OpenStack is its future.

    • Red Hat Launches New Initiative to Help Enterprises Chart Course to Open Source Middleware

      As more enterprises develop technology-dependent products and services, interest in robust and reliable middleware continues to grow. These enterprises are reconsidering existing investments in middleware as they look at open hybrid clouds, yet may find themselves unable to proceed as easily as they would like with proprietary middleware solutions because of “cloud unfriendly” features and practices, including rigid architectures, prohibitive license structures, and lack of portability. In addition, the technical complexity and mission-critical nature of enterprise applications present numerous migration challenges when the time comes to change platforms.

    • Red Hat + Hortonworks Tag-Team Open Source Big Data Storage on Apache Hadoop

      At the Red had Summit 2013 yesterday, Hortonworks and Red Hat announced an engineering collaboration to advance open source big data community projects. The engineering partnership will be a collaboration effort on enabling more storage file systems to work with Apache Hadoop. In order to accelerate the enablement of the broader file system ecosystem being used with Apache Hadoop, the engineering teams at Hortonworks and Red Hat will be working directly with the Apache Hadoop Community.

    • Red Hat launches new initiative to help enterprises chart course to open source middleware

      Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa and an authorised distributor in southern Africa for Red Hat, today announced the latter’s new community resources designed to help enterprises migrate to open source middleware technologies, including a community-driven JBoss Migration Centre and new tooling to ease the process of migrating from proprietary application server technologies to the open source JBoss platform.

    • Red Hat Summit: Open source trends, cloud outlook, innovation and more

    • Red Hat updates virtualisation and OpenStack products

      Full Storage Live Migration support and a framework for plugins are two of the new features included in the now available version 3.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV). Storage Live Migration allows the storage media that is used by virtual machines to be migrated from one storage domain to another at runtime. The new plugin framework enables programs to access the management interface of Red Hat’s virtualisation platform and offer additional interface features to administrators; companies such as HP, NetApp and Symantec plan to use it to provide maintenance and operational features for their products this way.

    • Cisco and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

      Cisco has over 10,000 RHEL instances.

    • What Do You Want to Ask a Linux Journalist?

      This morning I was on a panel at the Red Hat Summit with Scott Merrill from TechCrunch and Jon Brodkin from Ars Technica with moderation from 451 Groups John Abbot.

      Officially the session was titled, “Hot Off the Press: Top Journalists on Today’s Tech Trends” but it really could have just been called – What Do You Want to Ask a Linux Journalist?

      We had about 60 people or so in the room and the primary topic of discussion – not surprisingly – was cloud . Also not surprising is the fact that no one in the audience had actually deployed an OpenStack cloud. Considering that this is a Red Hat conference, that’s not terribly surprising either – since Red Hat’s full product is not yet available.

    • Red Hat Virtualization 3.2 announced, available world wide

      New features in Red Hat Virtualization include Storage Live Migration, new third-party plug-in framework and support for new AMD and Intel chips

  • Debian Family

    • Users warned to remove Debian Multimedia repository

      The Debian project is warning users that the unofficial Debian Multimedia repository now has to be considered unsafe. According to the Debian maintainers, the debian-multimedia.org domain is not being used by the maintainers of the unofficial repository any more and is now registered to a party unknown to the Debian project. This means that the repository is no longer safe to use and users should remove it from their sources.list file as soon as possible.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • System76 launches high-end Ubuntu-powered laptops

          Galago UltraPro and Gazelle Professional combine Linux smarts with ultrabook style

        • The Ubuntu App Developer Cookbook Announced

          In recent months we have been seeing tremendous growth and interest in the Ubuntu SDK that is at the heart of building applications for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. The SDK provides the ability to build rich native applications in QML/Qt that hook right into the system, platform services, messaging, social media and more. We will also be providing support for HTML5 apps soon (with deep platform integration), and for OpenGL apps too.

        • Printed Certificates for Ubuntu Members

          The Ubuntu community is a core part of what makes us what we are, and right at the center of that are our Ubuntu Members. Ubuntu Members provide significant and sustained contributions over a wide range of areas such as packaging, documentation, programming, translations, advocacy, support, and more. We always want to do our best to recognize and appreciate our many members in the Ubuntu family, across these many different teams and our flavors.

        • The sorry state of services in Ubuntu

          Read the post How do I choose which way to enable/disable, start/stop, or check the status of a service?. Compare that with systemctl enable/disable/start/stop/status service and tell me, for a user, which is easier?

        • Ubuntu Desktop Convergence

          This is where it starts to get exciting, folks. The future starts now.

          Ubuntu is an operating system for the server, the cloud, the desktop, and the mobile device. One single OS. That makes it different from Apple’s OSes (Mac OS X on the desktop, iOS on the mobile) and Microsoft’s current OSes (Windows 8 on the desktop, Windows RT on the mobile, and Windows Server 2012 on the server and in the cloud).

        • Canonical: OpenStack Cloud Computing Platform Ready for Prime Time

          Has OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform, come into its own? Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux—which happens to be the most popular OS for OpenStack deployments—is saying so this week as it touts the rapid maturity of the software. Now, the question becomes: Does the channel agree?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Review: Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” Cinnamon + MATE

            It’s that time of the year again. Linux Mint has just released the latest version of its distribution, and I’m going to review it.

          • Best Newbie Distro? You Say Linux Mint.

            According to our “Newbie” Distro Poll, someone considering moving from Windows or Mac to Linux should consider taking Linux Mint for a spin. The poll asked the question, “What Linux distro would you be most likely to recommend to a new Linux user?” Evidently this was a subject that interested many of you, because a whopping 1,339 votes were cast in this poll, making it the most number of votes one of our polls has ever received.

• Devices/Embedded

  • COM Express modules surf Intel’s Haswell wave

  • Meet the cloud platform made of Raspberry Pi and Lego: The cloud you can carry in your hand

  • Glassgow University built a cloud platform from Raspberry Pi’s and Lego

  • RS welcomes open-source projects on DesignSpark

    RS Components has introduced an open-source software area as part of its DesignSpark website aimed at design engineers.

    It will include details of how design projects can be developed with resources such as PCB schematics and layout files for DesignSpark PCB, for example, along with mechanical blueprints, software code and/or machine code, mechanical drawings and CAD files.

  • Review: Beagleboard Beaglebone Black

  • Phones

    • The end of Symbian: Nokia ships last handset with the mobile OS

      This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia’s withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct.

    • Selling Palm to HP was a waste

      webOS and the mobile devices that it powered made Palm (remember that company) a media darling. webOS was going to be another successful mobile Linux distribution (after Android). But it was all a dream that never came true. Palm was sold to HP. At some point, HP abandoned webOS, deciding that it was better to sell Android devices.

    • Android

      • ANDROID: Steel Commanders – SciFi card battling!

      • Cupertino’s photocopiers: What iOS 7 borrowed from Android

        Reactions to yesterday’s iOS 7 reveal were largely positive, but one current of criticism kept flowing: that Apple may have relied a little too hard on copying other operating systems—in particular, Google’s Android (though the stark flatness of Windows Phone 8 got cited, too).

      • Acer’s Android Smart Display Pushes Desktop Boundaries

        The Smart Display DA220HQL touchscreen is an impressive piece of hardware that performs extremely well. It looks like a really big tablet; however, this all-in-one device packs enough power to make it a viable second desktop computer or PC replacement. Typing on its wireless full-sized QWERTY keyboard — minus number pad — is an absolute pleasure.

      • The rumored HTC One Mini makes a great companion to a small tablet

        More details of the rumored HTC One Mini appeared yesterday. Samsung is releasing the Galaxy S4 Mini and I wonder if we are starting to see a trend towards smaller smartphones.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Root 101 is an open source Android tablet

      The Root 101 is an open source tablet loaded with a completely stock version of Android (Jelly Bean 4.2) with no bloatware apps and no ugly skinned version of Android. Root access is default, so you can install any app and even custom ROMs.

    • For Android Tablets, Big is Back

      The Computex show in Taiwan is still a PC show, but it’s increasingly known for debuting tablets and tablet reference designs. There have been some misfires over the years, like the thick, Atom-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) shown in 2008, the “Smartbooks” of 2009, and the flawed “Honeycomb” Android tablets of 2011. Things have looked up since then, however, with the 2012 event showcasing numerous high-octane Android 4.x slates that have gone on to collectively overtake the iPad and threaten the PC market.

Free Software/Open Source

• Coping with Loss (in Open Source)

• FLAG to discuss the Open Source landscape – Lawyer Monthly Magazine

• Apps & the City from London-based app developer

  London-based software development company AppShed has detailed plans to migrate its app development platform towards an Open Source footing.

• The Open Source Internet of Things has some big aspirations

  Internet of Things (IOT) advocate Michael Koster fixated makers and hackers at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, a few weeks ago. Standing in front of samples of many versions of Arduino, Rasberry Pi, and sensors, he spoke of an open source horizontal platform that will unify the IOT. He changed people’s perspectives from looking up from a small control circuit of dedicated sensors and actuators to seeing the unique value that will be created by looking down at a unified world of horizontally interconnected sensors.

• Open-source game developers have the power to sink mega conferences like E3

  Contrary to popular belief, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, known as E3, was alive and well, this year. But the rise of Ouya, Steam Box, and GamePop later this year could mark the end of an era. With relatively small revenue generated by a typical open-source game, indie developers simply won’t be able to afford to go.

  At the same time, there’s going to be more and more of them, playing a huge part in the gaming ecosystem.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • The end for Google’s Chrome Frame

      Google has announced that Chrome Frame will no longer be supported or updated from January 2014. The plugin adds a Chrome engine to versions 6 to 9 of Internet Explorer. When a requested web page sends a special header, Internet Explorer will implicitly switch to the Chrome-driven display mode.

    • Chromium to be default browser in Ubuntu 13.10?

      Canonical are discussing the possibility of replacing Firefox with Chromium in the next version of Ubuntu

  • Mozilla

    • Make something amazing on the web during Mozilla’s 2013 Maker Party

      Think back to the first thing you created on the web. For me, it was making a Geocities homepage when I was a teenager (Hollywood, represent). I was amazed that by writing HTML, I could make images of the Green Bay Packers and my favorite PEZ dispensers appear on a web site with my witty commentary.

    • Introducing the Mozilla Science Lab

• SaaS/Big Data

  • NoSQL, Hadoop Power NSA PRISM, Big Data War on Terror?

    The National Security Agency (NSA) apparently uses Hadoop, NoSQL and other open source software to wage its Big Data war against terrorism, according to anecdotal evidence and industry pundits who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

  • SolidFire, Red Hat: SSD Storage for OpenStack Cloud

    It’s been a big week for solid-state device (SSD) storage and the channel. Earlier this week, Intel (INTC) unveiled a new line of SSD hardware for the cloud and Big Data. Then, a day later, SolidFire, which provides SSD storage infrastructure for cloud hosts, announced a partnership with Red Hat (RHT) that will integrate the company into Red Hat’s OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Here are the details on this latest news.

  • Cray Rolls Out Hadoop Cluster Solution

• Databases

  • Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB

    Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released.

  • RethinkDB 1.6 gets regex and array functions

    The open source JSON document database RethinkDB has gained fourteen new array operations and the ability to match regular expressions within stored documents in its latest version, RethinkDB 1.6 code-named “Fargo”. RethinkDB is a rapidly developing database which works with Python, Ruby, or JavaScript in Node.js and supports clustering, sharding and replication. The developers compare it to MongoDB.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 4.1 will shine cleaner!

    Maybe the most important thing about LibreOffice’s 4.0 release was the work done in cleaning the code and making it more efficient, while also doing the biggest API cleanup that has ever occurred since the beginning of the project. This would theoretically help boost the project’s development tempo and make things easier for contributors.

  • Try The New LibreOffice Flat Icon Set

    It looks like LibreOffice will get a new set of flat icons, based on Gnome’s symbolic icons. The icon set isn’t completed yet, but you can try it already – below you’ll find instructions on how to easily try the new icons.

  • Libre Office Version 4 – Tantalizingly Close

    Some of the Linux faithful will look at this and say: “There he goes again, bashing open-source. He’s just a Microsoft shill.” They will use the fact I am an MCSE as ‘proof’ of their opinion.

  • LibreOffice Gets More Code Clean-up for 4.1.0

    LibreOffice 4.1.0 is right around the corner and developers are busy as beavers getting it ready. One of the things featured this release might be hard for ordinary users to see, but is every bit as important. Continued code refinement and clean-up will make LibreOffice 4.1.0 more efficient, smaller, and easier to contribute to and compile.

  • Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps

    Oracle has announced public availability of Java EE 7, the first major release of the enterprise formulation of Java since the database giant took control of the platform in 2010. The last version shipped way back in 2009.

• Public Services/Government

  • European Parliament adopts open data strategy

    EU flag On Thursday, the European Parliament approved new rules, introduced by the European Commission, for re-using public sector information. These changes will require that administrative data is published according to open data principles. When implemented, all documents made accessible by public organisations will be re-usable for any purpose, unless they are protected by third party copyright.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Open Data: Government Responds to Shakespeare’s Review

      The government has responded to the independent review of Public Sector Information (PSI) carried out by Stephan Shakespeare, chair of the Data Strategy Board. Here are our first impressions.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Like a good student, edX finishes open source project ahead of schedule

      Good university students finish projects by their assigned deadlines. The best ones submit their finished work in advance.

• Programming

  • Google App Engine gets git push support

    The latest version of Google’s App Engine, version 1.8.1, adds the ability to git push deployments of Python and PHP applications to its PaaS (Platform as a Service). Once developers have enabled “Push-to-Deploy” in their applications, they will then be able to clone a repository from the project. After making changes locally, they can then deploy the changed application with the command git push appengine master.

  • Eclipse faces challenges with adoption and popularity

    The latest Eclipse Community Survey results highlight some challenges for the Java IDE. For example, new version adoption for the annually updated IDE has slumped: in 2012, 76.9% of users were using the then current release Eclipse 3.7, but in 2013, only 56% are using Eclipse 4.2. Ian Skerrett, Marketing Director at the Eclipse Foundation, believes that this is most likely “the result of the performance issues found in Eclipse 4.2″. He notes in a blog post that overall satisfaction with Eclipse has dropped from last year’s 90% to only 81% being satisfied or very satisfied this year. This is something Skerrett hopes will be addressed “as the Eclipse 4.x platform continues to mature,” but, as it stands, it isn’t very good news.

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • Notebook ODMs bracing for price war

    Notebook brand vendors have recently started the request-for-quotation (RFQ) process for 2014 orders. But because of the notebook industry’s weak shipments and Lenovo increasing in-house production, competition between ODMs are expected to be fierce. Upstream suppliers may also see gross margins fall, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

• Security

  • Snowden: US has been hacking Hong Kong and China for years

    NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has prompted a change of direction in the debate that has been going on for months around China’s alleged hacker attacks on the US. The former Booz Allen Hamilton employee and contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA) told Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper that the intelligence agency has been launching hacking attacks on targets in Hong Kong as well as mainland China.

  • There Are Reasons M$ Is Losing The Web, Besides The Horrific Costs

    Folks who are comfortable with the cost, complexity and vulnerability of M$’s OS have not experienced the joy of IT that works, works for the user instead of for M$. M$ is all about “getting value” from its OS above all else. It is an OS designed by salesmen who love to sell more cost and complexity as “new features”. Unfortunately for the world, that brings vulnerabilities galore. Fortunately for the world, there is an alternative Debian GNU/Linux and other distributions of Free Software.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Preparing to Bomb Syria

    Quite simply I do not believe the US, UK and French government’s assertion that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against rebels “multiple times in small quantities”. Why on earth would they do that? The claim that “up to 150 people have died” spread over a number of incidents makes no sense at all. In a civil war when tens of thousands of people have died, where all sides have been guilty of massacres of scores at a time, I cannot conceive of any motive for killing a dozen or so at any one time with the odd chemical shell. It makes no military sense – chemical weapons are designed for use against population centres and massed armies. They are not precision weapons for deployment against small groups.

  • Syria and Chemical Weapons: What Do We Know?

    abc-assad-chemIf you watched ABC World News last night (6/13/13), the story of Syria and the use of chemical weapons had shifted pretty dramatically. Anchor David Muir declared at the top of the show: “The White House now confirming Syria’s president has in fact used chemical weapons to kill.”

  • The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist

    Who has Crossed the “Red Line”? Barack Obama and John Kerry are Supporting a Terrorist Organization on the State Department List

• Finance

  • Banks Manipulating Trades and Rigging Benchmarks in Foreign Exchange Markets

  • Traders Said to Rig Currency Rates to Profit Off Clients

    Traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice.

• Censorship

  • Website filtering problems are a “load of cock”

    On Tuesday, I spoke at an event organised by the Sunday Times and Policy Exchange about online pornography and child protection. This was in the run-up to the opposition debate that took place in Parliament on Wednesday on these topics.

• Privacy

  • Edward Snowden: change you can believe in

    I voted for Barack Obama in his first term. I had seri­ous doubts about him even then, and today I wish I hadn’t done it, but I did vote for him. I wouldn’t say I com­pletely fell for the “change you can believe in” baloney, but I decided to give the guy the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

  • Government Built Spy-Access Into Most Popular Consumer Program Before 9/11

    In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software.

  • The fight against the snoopers charter rages on

    It seems that the fight against the ‘snoopers charter’ rages on. In a letter to The Times, signed by Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Alan Johnson, Lord Baker, Lord King and Lord Carlile, called for the ‘snoopers charter’ to be revived. The intention of the letter seems to be to put increasing pressure on Nick Clegg to drop his opposition to the draft Bill

    In the letter, the group state that “coalition niceties must not get in the way of giving our security services the capabilities they need to stay one step ahead of those that seek to destroy our society”.

  • You do have the right to record council meetings

    In positive step towards transparency Eric Pickles MP, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, has published new guidance which explicitly states that Councils should allow the public to overly film and council meetings.

    DCLG was forced to publish the guidance after a string of councils had prevented individuals from recording council meetings on health and safety and legal grounds. The guidance will only apply to English councils, but it certainly creates a serious precedent for councils in Wales.

    Public access to meetings is a key part of holding local councils and public bodies to account and it’s wholly wrong for people not being able to film or tweet in public meetings for spurious legal reasons.

  • Beat the CIA

    The World Wide Web is the greatest system for sharing information ever created – but how do you stop it sharing too much? Ben Everard investigates.

  • Baroness Ludford’s proposals take away your privacy choices

    Many amendments proposed by Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford to the Data Protection Regulation would leave us with less control of our personal information. In this post, we focus on consent and loopholes.

    Yesterday we wrote about Baroness Ludford’s amendment to the Data Protection Regulation (amendment number 1210) that would mean your data could be transferred to a third country or international organisation without you being told. In the light of the PRISM revelations, we suggested this amendment should be withdrawn.

  • EU Commission caved to US demands to drop anti-PRISM privacy clause

    Reports this week revealed that the US successfully pressed the European Commission to drop sections of the Data Protection Regulation that would, as the Financial Times explains, “have nullified any US request for technology and telecoms companies to hand over data on EU citizens.

    The article, (as you can read below), would have prohibited transfers of personal information to a third country under a legal request, for example the one used by the NSA for their PRISM programme, unless “expressly authorized by an international agreement or provided for by mutual legal assistance treaties or approved by a supervisory authority.”

  • Has the NSA “poisoned the well” for responsible disclosure?

    Revelations about the PRISM project involve US tech companies have been compelled to provide special assistance to US intelligence agencies. This has also drawn fresh attention to “responsible disclosure” systems regarding information about security vulnerabilities in those companies’ products.

  • How to break out of PRISM

    NSA scandal has exploded fears of being watched on the Internet, but a new website lists ways to escape the Panopticon

  • Tech companies working with the NSA are making a Faustian bargain

    Whatever the details might be, it seems clear that dozens of technology companies — and perhaps even more — have co-operated with the NSA on its surveillance program. And they could pay a high price for doing so.

• Civil Rights

  • Mandatory Ultrasound Bill Moves from Conception to Passage in Just Ten Days

    In ten short days, Wisconsin Republicans steamrolled a radical abortion bill through the state legislature to mandate ultrasounds and close abortion clinics, despite passionate opposition from Democratic Assemblywomen. The debate had many dramatic moments and video of the Senate President furiously gaveling down the opposition made national news.

  • PRISM, Free speech and creativity: Looking back on ORGCon2013

    Open Rights Group’s third national conference took place last weekend at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, with a fantastic set of speakers and hundreds of attendees.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • The EU, safeguarding the open internet for all

    Thank you for inviting me to speak. Net neutrality can be a polarising debate. But I often find there is much we agree on. We agree that the internet is a great place to exercise and enjoy liberty. A great place to innovate, and implement new ideas without having to ask permission. And an open forum for all kinds of activity.sentence

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Anti-Counterfeiting ACTA Bill Referred to Industry Committee

      Bill C-56, the anti-counterfeiting bill that opens the door the Canadian implementation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, has been referred to the Industry Committee for review.

Summary: Official confirmation that the NSA is being notified about ways of hijacking Windows before Microsoft releases fixes

Half a decade ago I put together some links about backdoors in Windows. I had accumulated those links for years. Now that we know how corrupt and aggressive the NSA can be (common knowledge after the latest leak), with cracking attacks on China, espionage, and unlimited mass surveillance in a fascistic manner (with corporations fully complicit), it all seems far less improbable and hardly far-fetched.

According to a new report from the corporate press (as corporate as it can get, being Bloomberg), Microsoft tells NSA staff about universal unpatched holes before they are being addressed:

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft (MSFT) and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft, said those releases occur in cooperation with multiple agencies and are designed to be give government “an early start” on risk assessment and mitigation.

Glyn Moody asked, “why would anyone ever trust Microsoft again…?”

Frank Shaw is not a technical man. His job is to lie, e.g. about sales of Vista 8 (quite famously and most recently). He came from Waggener Edstrom, a lying and AstroTurfing company. The above should be read as follows: when new holes exist which permit remote hijacking the unaccountable, cracking-happy NSA is being notified. What can possibly go wrong now that we have proof that the NSA is cracking PCs abroad with impunity? Germany, are you paying attention?

Here is more about this news:

Some of the back and forth is innocuous, such as Microsoft revealing ahead of time the nature of its exposed bugs (ostensibly providing the government with a back door into any system using a Microsoft OS, but since it’s don’t ask, dont’ tell, nobody really knows). However the bulk of the interaction is steeped in secrecy: “Most of the arrangements are so sensitive that only a handful of people in a company know of them, and they are sometimes brokered directly between chief executive officers and the heads of the U.S.’s major spy agencies, the people familiar with those programs said.”

In IRC, Sosumi highlighted this article and said, “tell me something that isn’t known already, like PRISM is just an evolution of a previous snooping program and that the NSA has built an AI, even if rudimentary, in order to assist them sort the information… also I wonder if Keith Alexander will be at this year’s DEFCOM conference” (part of the PR and recruitment exercise).

Here is an interesting new post which relates to what we know about NSA’s cracking of people’s PCs (the lesser-advertised role of the NSA):

• Government Built Spy-Access Into Most Popular Consumer Program Before 9/11

  In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software.

Skype is said to have several back doors. Our latest post about it got updated with new information. Skype can be used as a back door on any platform (known holes left unaddressed), GNU/Linux included. Microsoft controls it and it has a monopoly on the source code.

Watch the MSN corporate press (Microsoft’s pseudo ‘news’ site) promoting both Skype and Facebook:

Thanks to a simple inquiry on Facebook, it’s now a day to celebrate with a father who didn’t know he existed for nearly three decades.

“Whitewashing of Skype and Facebook” is what iophk called this. “Notice the lack of I-told-you-so articles about FB snooping or any coverage of the snooping at all.”

Skype is a Microsoft-controlled product (acquired and quickly altered to reduce decentralisation, user control, and privacy). Advertising it with the partly Microsoft-owned Facebook is too shallow a case of bogus ‘journalism’.

There is also something about spying capabilities of the Xbox One, summarised by the headline “US Navy serviceman calls Xbox One’s 24-hour online check “a sin committed against all service members”” (people seem to be getting the importance of privacy, over time).

A few weeks ago we spoke about expanding the scope of coverage in Techrights to privacy-related matters. We’ll soon conduct an interview with Richard Stallman (to be published later this month) as privacy becomes a central issue relating to software freedom. We should start using the privacy card to advance the Free/libre software agenda. █

Summary: Examples of some new reports that deal with the suggested patent reform in the US and why it is misguided

The debate about software patents in the US is more or less dead or marginalised. Everyone is talking about patent trolls instead. Masnick and other folks noticed that too and they — like us — emphasised that Obama is evading the broader issues. Here is a more optimistic take on it:

When we wrote about President Obama’s plan to deal with patent trolls, we noted a few areas where it was a bit weak and could be improved. In particular, the lack of an independent invention defense and using independent invention as evidence of obviousness would be quite useful in stopping abuses of the patent system. However, I’m a bit confused by Christopher Mims’ complaints about Obama’s patent plan being useless against patent trolls. I think Mims is a bit confused. He claims that there are two real problems with the patent system, and this plan addresses neither: (1) the patent office is understaffed and there’s a backlog of patents and (2) the fact that we grant software patents at all.

The second bit is actually true, as Obama will allow companies like Oracle, Apple and Microsoft to continue attacking Linux with software patents. This is not the solution. How about the recently-concluded Versata case [1, 2, 3] which has just been concluded? Neither company is a troll. To quote a new article:

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has ruled that Versata Software’s patent claims against SAP be cancelled as they are ‘unpatentable’.

Versata filed a lawsuit against SAP in 2007 alleging that the German firm’s pricing software infringed a number of its patents.

This is a case where patent scope — not scale of the plaintiff — ends spurious litigation. SAP is not even a US-based company. The USPTO‘s granting of patents is the problem. Here is another report which says “Versata can appeal and SAP has yet to get a $345 million judgment overturned” (no need for any penalties here).

Mr. Feld, a longtime opponent of software patents, was recently distracted by the debate about trolls. Here he is writing again about trolls:

I’ve been asserting for at least six years that patent system is completely broken for the software industry. I’ve given numerous examples, dealt with the issue first hand as patent trolls have tried to extort many of the companies I’m an investor in, and I’ve had many public discussions about the topic.

On my run on Sunday, I listed to This American Life – When Patents Attack… Part Two! It is easily the best and most detailed expose I’ve ever heard on this issue. If you care to really understand how patent trolls work, spend an hour of your life and listen to it.

Why not focus on patents’ scope? This is what he has done for ages. The problem is the patent system, not just litigation (which is the consequence of improper scope). As one person correctly put it: “It’s not just entrepreneurs who bear the direct costs of the dysfunctional U.S. patent system, but consumers as well.”

Here is another new article which focuses not on patents but on litigation. It says: “Patent trolls are the bad guys of the moment. They’re the outfits that buy patents and then sue companies that supposedly infringe on them. Last week, the White House announced a bunch of initiatives to thwart them. Trolls don’t actually make the products covered by those patents. But because patent litigation is expensive and time-consuming, most companies that are prey to a patent troll lawsuit choose to throw money at the trolls to settle even if they think they’d win in court. The result is that the trolls are nearly unstoppable whether their patents are legitimate or not.”

The solution is to explore why those patents are issued in the first place and consider banning such patents. Patent trolls are most commonly using software patents, but nobody seems to be pointing that out. Just look at the status quo in nations without software patents. █

Summary: Despite the success story of Munich and the increasing distrust surrounding proprietary software, bureaucrats in Berlin refuse to abandon Microsoft just yet

Backdoors specialist Microsoft is unable to shut down botnets for which it is definitely to blame, perhaps because it made its operating system a real Swiss cheese of a system. Intentional or unintentional? That’s irrelevant. There are several reports about Berlin in the post-PRISM (as public knowledge [1, 2, 3, 4]) era, saying it still refuses to move away from Microsoft, never mind well-documented risks of espionage. The leading report about it came from IDG‘s Loek Essers, who wrote about the risky decision. It is summarised by this German news network, written in English (with links to PDF files in German):

A petition to use more open source tools in the Berlin city administration that was proposed language in the federal state parliament of the State of Berlin by the German Green Party has failed. The petition was rejected with the votes of the governing SPD/CDU coalition in the “digital administration” committee tasked with its evaluation. The Green Party’s plan had included a migration to free and open source software on 25 per cent of the city administration’s workstations and a comprehensive switch of all servers to Linux in a similar fashion to Munich’s LiMux project.

The problem is partly related to staff and moles. They resist the unknown. “No specific mention of Microsoft resellers,” writes iophk regarding this other IDG report about the dangerous CIO-vendor relationships (bribes or whatever). To quote:

It’s a well-established protocol: People buy from people, especially the ones they like and trust. CIOs are no exception, and many benefit greatly from long-established supplier relationships. But there’s a fine line between healthy and unhealthy interactions, a risk that’s exacerbated by a limited amount of love (and budget) to divide across a countless landscape of courters.

Today’s best CIOs create value in large part through the introduction of innovative capabilities, speed, and flexibility — all of which are completely shut down when supplier relationships dictate the IT strategy. Even worse, with so much future revenue and success relying on a solid foundation of technology for success, these situations jeopardize the viability of the entire organization

My experience here in the UK is that Microsoft moles and partners stand in the way of changes that keep Microsoft out of the loop. It’s an HR issue, not a technical issue.

There is a concurrent affair in Germany involving the EPO ignoring the law regarding software patents in Europe. We wrote about it on Friday and Gijs Hillenius has this new report in europa.eu. It says: “The German parliament is asking the government to prevent patents being granted for software. Last Friday, the Bundestag adopted a joint motion to make copyright the exclusive method for protecting software. One of the aims of the motion is to increase legal security for developers of free and open source software. The government should make sure its laws and measures are compatible with free software.”

Parliament should also work to ban proprietary software in government, as it is a threat to national security. It should ban monopolies on algorithms as they are choking development, but why not go further? Watch what happens in Slovakia where someone gets “Fined For Not Using Windows OS”. That’s what happens when the government is held hostage by Microsoft. This has become a high-profile case:

Slovakia’s Supreme Court will intervene in a battle between a textile trader and the country’s tax office over a mandatory tax-application that requires the use of a proprietary operating system.

If Germany wishes not to face this embarrassment which Slovakia found itself in, it will have to radically change its software policy. There were several reports last week about PRISM and industrial/political espionage in Germany. █

Guarding for Sociopaths

Summary: Famous criminal Bill Gates pays the privatised police forces in the UK to get more profit while keeping popular movements dampened

Bill Gates is not a popular figure, but the media, which he bribes, likes to portray him as exceptionally popular, hoping that enough people will follow the media rather than the judgment of friends (to some people the media is a friend).

Those who attempt to actually look at the facts rather than look for handouts may often find that those who acquired their wealth through criminal activities simply continue doing so with varying degrees of success (making money from having money, using lobbying, tax breaks, interest, and insider information).

Bill Gates continues to amass more wealth while the media he bribes contributes to false perceptions that he is giving his money away and invests only in benevolent companies (selective focus on PR-generating grants like scholarships). A lot of the investments are anything but charity and they target monopolies, with or without patents (e.g. Microsoft and Monsanto), with or without human cost (e.g. Shell and other oil companies). When it comes to the GMO monopoly, Gates is not merely an investor but also a lobbyist who tries to go as far as setting school curricula in favour of his investments. People are not dumb enough to miss it and over time they also find out that Gates bribed their press to deceive them. Journalists whom I speak to already take that as a given. They know there is something rotten in Gates.

“G4S has nearly a million employees — people whom the rich hire in large amounts to oppress the population in exchange for a salary.”A while back we showed that Gates was already setting his eyes on British schools and retails giants like JJB. He and Murdoch were spying on young people [1, 2] as means of profiling those who are being indoctrinated. Well, spying on people and breaking down protests are two related activities (mind control and physical control) and this new report shows Gates backing what here is Manchester we consider to be a private army of mercenary thugs that warp public policing into a for-profit business of few (public becomes privatised, with government/taxpayers’ subsidies), ranging in activity from spying in the streets to riot policing (where the rioters are sometimes the police). According to Wikipedia, this is a growing ‘business’, not just in the United Kingdom. G4S has nearly a million employees — people whom the rich hire in large amounts to oppress the population in exchange for a salary. To quote the British press:

Bill Gates has bought a larger share of G4S, a private security giant that was widely criticised for its London Olympics blunders.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and Cascade Investment, an asset management firm also owned by the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, now own a combined total of 3.2 percent of G4S after buying up 6 million shares – worth £110m ($171m) – last week.

Glyn Moody asks, “so why exactly does Gates need a private army?”

It is a rhetorical question and it is well overdue.

Jose R. Rodriguez wrote to me this morning and said “hard to reconcile w/motto…”healthy, productive lives”,” citing the article “Gates Foundation invests in occupation profiteer G4S, just as Dutch charity cuts ties”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has bought a 3 percent stake in the British-Danish security firm G4S worth £110 million ($172 million), the UK’s Guardian reported just days after protestors made the company’s role in human rights abuses in Palestine and beyond the focus at the firm’s annual meeting.

Gates and his rich friends feel the heat and they want to control the population more effectively while they expand their wealth and power, looting everyone else because they can. G4S is just about as bad as a company can be; last night a lecturer on reproductive systems and I spoke for a couple of hours. He said he knew G4S mainly for Olympic fiasco and abuses. I explained this latest news to him and he found it surprising because the corporate press hardly covers it. Population control too was a subject of discussion and it was stressed that controls should not be put in the hands of plutocrats.

There is a new video in Russia Today, titled “Eugenics now!”

The summary goes like this:

Bill Gates on people that “have no benefit whatsoever”. The troubling history of Bill Gates Sr “one of the grandfathers of eugenics still going strong today” in the US. ABC reports tens of thousands of women across the States from 1929 to 1974 forcibly sterilized. The Times notes Gates Jr has held a secret billionaire summit with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros to “curb overpopulation”.

Why is Gates buying millions of dollars in shares of Monsanto and funding sterilization programs, Monsanto’s response to our interview request, and what happens to scientists who cross the genetically modified cyclops.

Seek truth from facts with investigative reporter Anthony Gucciardi, How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis author Frederick Kaufman, Genetic Roulette director Jeffrey Smith, and chairman of Nestle Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.

We wrote about this subject before.

Ambitions of mass control and population control may be justified, but these must never be put in the hands of convicted offenders like Gates, no matter how much he paid the media to groom and embellish his image. This pseudo parenthood over society needs to stops. It is a recipe for disaster. █

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• System76 finally launches a laptop to compete with MacBook Air

  System76 has launched a laptop which puts Linux users in the same league of Windows and Mac users. Galago UltraPro is one of the lightest laptop which comes pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.

  Galago UltraPro weighs only 3.8 pounds and is only is 0.75 inches thin. It features a 14.1 inch 1080p IPS matte display bringing the 1080p resolution to System76 laptops.

  System76 doesn’t stop there, they are packing Intel’s 4th generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, inside this laptop. The quad-core Intel i7-4750HQ Processor (Haswell),clocked at 2.0Ghz, not only enhances performance but also contributes to making the laptop more energy efficient which means longer battery life.

• Software Company in Perth Anahata Announces Discount for Linux ARM Development Projects

  Software Company in Perth, Anahata Technologies, will be offering a 10% discount to customers willing to engage in a software development project for the Linux / ARM platfrom.

• Can You Completely Secure Linux?

  How does Red Hat go about building and developing a secure Linux operating system? That question was asked and answered at the Red Hat Summit this week by Josh Bressers, who heads the Red Hat Product Security Team.

• Judging Linux Innovation

  It really does means different things to different people. Sometimes it is a net new ‘thing’ that moves the ball forward in some way (like electricity). Then there is disruptive innovation – like the first wave of Linux – which re-thinks and improves the way things are done.

• Linux Gets Mentioned in “13 Things that Seem Like Scams But Are Actually Really Great”

• Server

  • Sun Microsystems Unveils Enterprise AMP Stack for Solaris and Linux

    Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:JAVA), today announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, a fully supported and integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris(TM) and Linux operating systems. The Web Stack software includes the open source, standards-based software most commonly used for Web-tier application development and services. Download the Web Stack at http://www.sun.com/webstack

  • MTN awards entire Wintel, Linux Server support contract to Integr8

    Leading ICT managed services and outsourcing company, Integr8, has been awarded the contract to provide support for the entire Wintel and Linux Server environment for telecommunications giant MTN SA.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast Season 5 Episode 10

    In this episode: It looks like Rockwell was right – somebody was watching him (and us). There’s a great new Raspberry Pi installer called NOOBS and the President of the US promises action against patent trolls. Ubuntu’s ‘bug one’ has been fixed and the EFF objects to DRM in HTML 5. As ever, hear our discoveries and your opinions in this epic length podcast.

  • web2Project

• Kernel Space

  • How Linux Foundation Runs Its Virtual Office

    Cost savings is only part of the picture behind the nonprofit’s remote workforce strategy. Linux Foundation exec says the virtual office has made the team more productive and innovative, and happier in their jobs.

  • IBM to Support Linux KVM Virtualization on Power Systems

    The move will enable developers to more easily create applications for big data and the cloud on Power 7+ systems running Linux.

  • Buffer Synchronization Comes To DMA-BUF

    In recent days, Samsung has been posting kernel patches pertaining to buffer synchronization support of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism.

  • The Linux Kernel: Introduction

    In 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Benedict Torvalds made the kernel of a now popular operating system. He released Linux version 0.01 on September 1991, and on February 1992, he licensed the kernel under the GPL license. The GNU General Public License (GPL) allows people to use, own, modify, and distribute the source code legally and free of charge. This permits the kernel to become very popular because anyone may download it for free. Now that anyone can make their own kernel, it may be helpful to know how to obtain, edit, configure, compile, and install the Linux kernel.

• Applications

  • Photoshop versus GIMP: the Empire Strikes Back

  • Linux: GRUB Bootloader

    Most of us simply install our favorite distribution, accepting many/most of the defaults, including the boot loader setup, without a second thought. However, there has been a lot of time and effort spent on the bootloader over the years, GRUB taking the place of the venerable LILO. GRUB offers a lot of flexibility in controlling our system during boot, allowing us to have Linux along with (boo) Windows on a nicely partitioned system. Let’s talk about some of the options we have and how to make those changes.

  • myman: Still a magnificent achievement

  • Ezame: A New Menu Editor For Unity

    Ezame is a new menu editor especially created for Unity, though it should work with other desktop environments as well.

  • Variety Wallpaper Changer 0.4.15 Released With Cinnamon 1.8 And MATE 1.6 Support

    Variety is a wallpaper changer that automatically downloads wallpapers from sources such as Wallbase, Flickr, Wallpapers.net, Desktoppr, NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day as well as World Sunlight Map: a live Earth wallpaper which changes throughout the day. Using it, you can get a new, beautiful wallpaper automatically at the interval you set in the application preferences.

  • Proprietary

    • Don’t expect an Opera Next Linux build anytime soon

      It is too early to tell if Opera’s move to the Blink engine away from Presto is going to pay off in terms of overall users who use the web browser as their primary, or if the company has shot itself in the foot with it.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to instal Python 2.6 in ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 13.04

    • How to Install Unity Smart Scopes in Ubuntu 13.04

    • Fixing the Linux black screen of death on machines with Intel HD video

    • Vim and Elixir

    • How to change the overview transitions in GNOME Shell

    • How to use a Playstation 2 joypad with Linux

    • How to install Intel(R) Linux Graphics drivers on ubuntu 13.04

    • Ubuntu 13.04 – How To Get Rid Of “System Program Problem Detected” error

    • CentOS system administration using text-based user interfaces

    • How to Access Linux Ext4 Partition From Windows

    • How to Compile Linux Kernel from Source to Build Custom Kernel

  • Games

    • Serious Sam 3: BFE review – Blood by the pound

      I am not usually prone to nausea after playing first person shooters. In fact, I’m quite resilient, and have successfully endured hour after hour of grueling matches, indoors and outdoors, well-lit maps or night missions, from the original Doom via America’s Army to ArmA II recently. However, one game made me succumb, and that was the first installment of Serious Sam. Just half an hour into the game, I was lying on my bed, pressing hard into my eyelids and repeating, thou shalt not throw up, thou shalt not throw up.

    • Dear Esther Linux Port Available for Download

      It had previously been a re-purposed Windows build running on WINE, the Windows compatibility layer.

    • Ubuntu App Charts for Mai 2013

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • RHEL 7 is shipping GNOME Shell in Classic Mode

      RHEL 7 the upcoming enterprise Linux of Red Hat is scheduled for the second half of 2013. Around half year ago Red Hat made known that they were going to ship GNOME 3 for their desktop, so it was easy to guess that they were going to use version 3.8 since that was going to be the latest GNOME version at the time for RHEL 7 Beta.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Introducing Peppermint Four

      Welcome back to the new and improved Peppermint web site and welcome to the next iteration of our operating system: Peppermint Four. We are seriously excited about this release and we hope you are as ecstatic as all of us on Team Peppermint. Make sure to download a bunch of copies and give them to friends and family. They will thank you, for sure.

    • Clonezilla 2.1.2-12

    • Window Maker Live release 2013-06-05 (June 2013) available!

  • Arch Family

    • I can do it better

  • Slackware Family

    • Linux Kernel 3.9.x and GCC 4.8.1 Goes to Slackware-Current

      Patrick has decided to leave Linux Kernel 3.8.x branch and include Linux Kernel 3.9.x branch for the next Slackware release. Both of them are not LTS, but being LTS doesn’t mean that it’s really that stable as expected (take an example from the previous experience of upgrading the kernel in Slackware 14.0 from 3.2.x to 3.4.x branch which caused some regressions for Intel Graphics).

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Looks Beyond Linux For Its Next Decade Of Growth

      Red Hat’s last 10 years were all about enterprise Linux. The next 10 will be about enterprise clouds.

    • Red Hat Inc : Red Hat Customer Portal Named One of the “Ten Best Web Support Sites”

      Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Red Hat Customer Portal has – for the third consecutive year – been recognized by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) as one of the industry’s “Ten Best Web Support Sites” for 2013. Red Hat was honored in the Open Division along with technology industry leaders Cisco Systems, Intel, Nokia Corporation, PTC, Inc., EMC, and CheckPoint.

    • EPAM Expands Open-Source Digital Services with Zend and Acquia

      Red Hat Inc.’s lead for its technology and product organizations, Paul Cormier, opened Day 2 of the ninth annual Red Hat Summit, held here on Wednesday, by explaining how some of the company’s pivotal undertakings over the past 11 years will provide the springboard to where Red Hat is headed tomorrow.

    • The Planet Adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Managed Hosting Platform

      The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced the addition of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to its Planet Northstar Managed Hosting line of business. Customers with Linux, Microsoft or blended environments can now take advantage of premium managed hosting services. As one of just two Red Hat Premier Hosting Partners, the Planet Northstar engineering team will have direct access to the company’s product roadmaps and new platform features, creating a technically superior hosted environment for its customers.

    • Red Hat Debuts Linux-based OpenStack Offering

      This is a big week for Red Hat in the cloud. As we’ve reported, Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog recenlty confirmed that the AWS Free Usage Tier, which lets users run applications and operating systems in the cloud, now includes 750 hours of Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage. This is a good tire-kicking opportunity for those who aren’t quite ready to commit to an RHEL deployment.

    • Red Hat Launches Linux-Based OpenStack Platform, Targets VMware For Control Of The Data Center

      Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.

      Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.

    • Red Hat Backs OpenStack For Cloud Attack On VMware

      Red Hat has produced a fully-supported OpenStack distribution so customers can deliver open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, at its Red Hat Summit in Boston this week.

      The open source firm has been a member and supporter of OpenStack for some time, but with this announcement, its OpenStack distribution graduates from a “community release” similar to its Fedora Linux distribution, to a fully supported offering, comparable to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The company wants to position OpenStack as a future cloud platform analogous to Linux, and is building it into a whole set of announcements and programmes.

    • [Red Hat] Celebrating 20 years of open

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Day Four: Performance

        So I’m now a few days into my time with Fedora, and things are going well so far. The machine is all up and running, and I’m back at my keyboard working away. We now know how to make Fedora look good, but how well does it perform in practice? Let’s take a look…

      • Rawhide week in review 2013-06-11

        Another week another rawhide review post.

  • Debian Family

    • on package duplication between Debian and debian-multimedia

    • Remove unofficial debian-multimedia.org repository from your sources

      The unofficial third party repository Debian Multimedia stopped using the domain debian-multimedia.org some months ago. The domain expired and it is now registered again by someone unknown to Debian. (If we’re wrong on this point, please sent us an email so we can take over the domain! )

    • 16 students to work on Debian during Google Summer of Code

    • Derivatives

      • Debian Edu interview: Jonathan Carter

        There is a certain cross-over between the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project and the Edubuntu project, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • System76 introduces new high-end Ubuntu Linux laptops

          Thanks to Windows 8′s Secure Boot, it’s getting harder and harder for a non-technical user to just get a new laptop and run Linux. System76, along with other Linux PC vendors such as ZaReason, have a better idea: Just buy a laptop with Linux already installed.

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 320

        • Firefox may be replaced by Chromium in Ubuntu 13.10

          If a group of developers at Canonical have its way, we may not see Firefox as the default and pre-installed web browser in Ubuntu starting version 13.10 (Saucy Salamander). Support for replacing Firefox with Chromium has been increasing inside Canonical, where many developers believe they can provide a better end-user experience through Chromium.

        • Running Ubuntu/Unity on a machine that is not 64 bit capable?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Lubuntu 13.10 To Have Firefox by Default, Disregard its Daddy

            Not everyone is of the same opinion when it comes to web browsers at the Ubuntu camp. While we saw Canonical seriously considering replacing Firefox with Chromium in Ubuntu’s next release (13.10), Saucy Salamander, Lubuntu’s lead developer Julien Lavergne came up with an announcement that Lubuntu’s next would have Firefox by default, replacing Chromium. See the irony?

• Devices/Embedded

  • Mini-ITX boards step up to Intel’s 4th Generation Core

    Six vendors announced embedded Linux-ready Mini-ITX single board computers (SBCs) supporting Intel’s newly announced 4th Generation “Haswell” Core i7, i5, and i3 processors. The Aaeon EMB-QM87A, BCM MX87QD and MX81H, DFI HM100-QM87 and HD100-H81D, iBase MI980, Kontron KTQ87/mITX, and Portwell WADE-8015 are equipped with Intel QM87, Q87, or H81 chipsets.

    Intel’s announcement of its 4th Generation Core (aka “Haswell”) processors last week was quickly followed by partner announcements in a variety of form-factors. We’ll get to the COM Express products soon, but first we’ll focus on six Mini-ITX boards that support Haswell.

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • Sony Opens Up its SmartWatch Platform

        For many years now, users have been awaiting the fabled “Dick Tracy watch” — a smart watch that can perform advanced digital computing and communications tasks. There are lots of stories speculating about an iWatch offering from Apple, and Samsung officials have talked up their answer to such a smart watch.

      • The Sony SmartWatch takes wearable tech into open-source territory

        In an interesting twist on the open source hardware movement, Sony has just announced it’s opening up its SmartWatch for your hacking pleasure.

        The SmartWatch SDK has for a while allowed devs to create apps for the 2012-launched device, but today’s Open SmartWatch update will let devs build and flash alternative firmware to the SmartWatch.

      • Samsung Posts Kernel Open Source Code For Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 (SM-T310)

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Root 101 crowdfunding towards an open source 10-inch tablet

      There is plenty of talk of low prices when it comes to tablets. It seems many have been searching for the ‘perfect’ sub $100 tablet and while that most often seems to reflect a 7-inch model, it looks like Root 101 is aiming to launch a low priced 10-inch tablet. They aren’t going to hit that sub-$100 price point, however they have gone the crowd funding route and the pledging begins at $169.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source vision systems get the ARM treatment

  The combination of an ARM dual core Cortex-A9 processor and FPGA fabric in one SoC brings open source vision processing software to security and driver assistance systems, write Fernando Martinez Vallina and José Roberto Alvarez

  OpenCV is a library of computer vision functions widely used throughout the industry. Like all open source projects, the community is constantly developing and improving the algorithms, and there are now more than 2500 functions available.

• Open-Source Standard Demo Success

  he open-source standard for collecting and communicating real-time information from manufacturing processes and factory floor equipment from a variety of vendors, has been successfully demonstrated and tested by manufacturing researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

• QUT launches open source lab

  An open source lab launched this week at Queensland University of Technology aims to target high school students interested in open source software development.

  The idea for the lab initially came from two students who were keen for an environment that enabled them to exchange ideas with others interested in open source projects.

  The Open Source Software Group and Virtual Lab subsequently gained the support of Microsoft, Red Hat Asia Pacific and Technology One.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Rolls Out Web Audio API Support

      For Ubuntu, Windows and Mac: Good news for Firefox web browser fans. Mozilla has pushed out Web Audio API Support to Firefox 24 Nightly and Firefox 23 Aurora channels. The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • How non developers can contribute to OpenStack

    I have attended over dozen conferences and gave presentations/talks too on OpenStack. Most of the time I meet bunch of motivated students/professionals and one common question was “I am not a developer tell me how can I contribute to OpenStack?” My simple answer to their question was like any other FOSS project OpenStack too needs a lot of volunteers in many domains apart from developing the software. I would mention the areas in which one can contribute to OpenStack project.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Wasted time?

    The post had some good success and a few comments as well. One of these attracted my attention. The poster “jsc” – Jürgen Schmidt if I’m not mistaken – is obviously an Apache contributor and an IBM engineer who in a previous life was also a long time StarOffice/Sun employee . I’m grateful for his comment as he’s tried to present the work on the sidebar from his perspective and that’s of course always interesting to understand his points.

  • Try the new flat icon set for LibreOffice

  • 7 Improvements needed in LibreOffice templates and styles

    Yet despite the importance of styles and templates in LibreOffice, they remain as needlessly arcane and as lacking in certain obvious features as ever.

• CMS

  • EPAM Expands Open-Source Digital Services with Zend and Acquia

    EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE:EPAM), a leading provider of complex software engineering solutions and a leader in Central and Eastern European IT service delivery, announced its partnerships with Zend and Acquia, two of the world’s leading open-source technology companies.

• Healthcare

  • OSEHRA Announces 2nd Annual Open Source EHR Summit and Workshop

• BSD

  • The move from Linux to FreeBSD

    About 2 months ago, I had a spare VPS at my host, Hetzner. So I decided to play with FreeBSD which was being offered for Hetzner servers and VPSes.
    That’s how the whole thing started. I didn’t have much problems getting the concepts because it belongs to *nix family of OSes and I have been a pure Linux user since 2008.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Fight PRISM through the Free Software Directory

    To protect their freedom and privacy, the FSF urges everyone to avoid Software as a Service, and to support projects working for a better, safer world. One small way you can help support free software projects and encourage use of free software is to help maintain and improve the Free Software Directory.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Scotland Maps Rural Farms With Open Source, Cloud

      The way Scotland registers its crofts — its ancient network of tiny agricultural settlements — has been brought into the 21st century via a cloud and open source mash-up built by small tech companies.

    • EU unlocks a great new source of online innovation

      Today the European Parliament voted to formally agree new rules on open data – effectively making a reality of the proposal which I first put forward just over 18 months ago, and making it easier to open up huge amounts of public sector data. This is about the data that public authorities can lawfully put out there – a huge wealth of information about your public services, how administrations are spending your tax euros, geographical or cultural information, and the like.

Leftovers

• Navy ends century and a half of ALL-CAPS messages

  The US Navy has reached a new milestone in electronic communications. According to a report in the Navy Times, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Scott Van Buskirk recently issued a policy directive that used something not seen before in Navy communications: lowercase letters.

• Science

  • Mind-controlled exoskeleton lets paralysed people walk

    TWO years ago, Antonio Melillo was in a car crash that completely severed his spinal cord. He has not been able to move or feel his legs since. And yet here I am, in a lab at the Santa Lucia Foundation hospital in Rome, Italy, watching him walk.

    Melillo is one of the first people with lower limb paralysis to try out MindWalker – the world’s first exoskeleton that aims to enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Chronic Wasting Disease on the Rise in Wisconsin Deer; Will it Infect Humans?

    The rate of chronic wasting disease (CWD) is on the rise among deer in Iowa County, Wisconsin and elsewhere across the state. CWD is a fatal, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) similar to what is commonly known as mad cow disease that is caused by twisted proteins, or prions. For hunters, writes outdoors reporter Patrick Durkin, this means the disease might be affecting the herd now. For anyone who eats venison, this means greater chances that the disease could conceivably make the species jump and infect humans, according to Dave Clausen, a veterinarian whose term on Wisconsin’s Natural Resources Board expired in May.

  • Monsanto hit with class action lawsuits in mystery GMO wheat case

    American Farmers have launched two class action lawsuits against biotech giant Monsanto following the discovery of unapproved genetically modified wheat growing in the Pacific Northwest. According to farmers, the company’s negligence has ruined sales.

    Though the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has never approved either the growing or sale of GMO wheat in the US, the agency began investigating its existence when an Oregon farmer found wheat growing in his fields that was resistant to Monsanto’s patented Roundup pesticide, known by its scientific classification as glyphosate.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Former Dutch PMs facing possible charges for revealing nukes on Dutch soil

    Dutch public prosecutors on Thursday announced they are looking at possible charges for revealing state secrecy against two former prime ministers who said the Netherlands still stored tactical U.S. nuclear bombs on its soil.

    Some 22 nuclear bombs are still stored at a southern air base where they were brought during the height of the Cold War, Ruud Lubbers, who headed the Dutch government between 1982 and 1994, told National Geographic in a documentary which was first broadcast on late Saturday.

  • Nukes in Europe: Secrecy Under Siege

    The Cold War practice of NATO and the United States refusing to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons anywhere is under attack in Europe. This week, two former Dutch prime ministers publicly confirmed the presence of nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, one of six bases in NATO that still host US nuclear weapons.

    The first confirmation came in the program How Time Flies on the Dutch National Geographic channel where former prime minister Ruud Lubbers confirmed that there are nuclear weapons at Volkel Air Base. “I would never have thought those silly things would still be there in 2013,” Lubbers said, who was prime minister in 1982-1994. He even mentioned a specific number: 22 bombs.

  • Bill Clinton Suggests Obama Risks Looking Like a “Wuss” and “Total Fool” on Syria

    Bill Clinton took part Tuesday night in a Q-and-A with Sen. John McCain at a semi-private event in New York City, where the former president offered some notably sharp criticism of President Obama’s handling of the ongoing war in Syria, specifically his reluctance to get involved. The event was technically closed to the press but both the Daily Beast and Politico managed to get their hands on a recording of the remarks, as tends to happen with events like this.

  • Rachel Maddow’s Iran Misinformation

    Iran is not “apparently” developing a nuclear weapon. Some political leaders make claims to that effect, but there is no solid intelligence that has yet established that this is what Iran is doing. What is known is that the country has a uranium enrichment program that is regularly monitored by International Atomic Energy Agency, and that there is no evidence that the country’s uranium program has any military dimension.

    As to Maddow’s claim, that’s just wrong. Ahmadinejad has, like other Iranian leaders, denied the country has any intention of building any such weapon. He’s done so in numerous U.S. media appearances, denying any Iranian plan to build a bomb–a simple Google search would turn up too many such instances, like this interview from CBS last year (helpfully headlined “Iranian President Denies Iran Developing a Nuclear Weapon.”)

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Humanity Imperiled: The Path to Disaster

    What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So, imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out what’s happening here or, for that matter, imagine you’re an historian 100 years from now—assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

    For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

• Finance

  • Greece Shuts Broadcaster in Bid to Show Resolve

    Under pressure from its creditors to cut public employment, the Greek government said Tuesday that it was closing down its state-run television and radio broadcaster, idling 2,900 people — less than 1 percent of the public work force — and outraging the country’s powerful labor unions.

  • Greece shuts down state broadcaster in search for new savings

    A government spokesman described the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation as a ‘haven of waste’

  • Obama Axes Bank-Harrassing Gary Gensler at CFTC, Plans to Install Lightweight Ex-Goldmanite

    Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.

  • Unpaid internships in jeopardy after court ruling

    Unpaid internships have long been a path of opportunity for students and recent grads looking to get a foot in the door in the entertainment, publishing and other prominent industries, even if it takes a generous subsidy from Mom and Dad.

  • Goldman Sachs HQ Is Worth $176 Million Less Now Than It Was Last Year

    The market value is one of the numbers the city Department of Finance uses to calculate an owner’s annual property tax bill. It is generally only a fraction of what the building would sell for on the open market.

  • Open-source Blender Foundation now welcomes bitcoins

    The Blender Foundation, which is behind the free and open-source 3D computer graphics program Blender, has joined the community of websites that accept bitcoin donations. While not much fanfare accompanied the decision, Blender’s website now features a bitcoin address — 17orEh51ab8HoU7g8Ezwcp76jCpeL7PabJ — for supporters who want to throw a bit of digital currency its way.

  • Raise interest rates on old student loans, secret report proposes

    Increasing the amount that students would be forced to pay back would make the loans more attractive to buyers.

    The document, prepared by Rothschild investment bank, was submitted to the business department in November 2011, but is understood to still be under active review. It has never been made public, or been seen by higher education professionals.

• Privacy

  • Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

    Suddenly, it feels like 2000 again. Back then, surveillance programs like Carnivore, Echelon, and Total Information Awareness helped spark a surge in electronic privacy awareness. Now a decade later, the recent discovery of programs like PRISM, Boundless Informant, and FISA orders are catalyzing renewed concern.

    The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate surveillance,” in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique surveillance,” in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.

  • What We Need to Know About PRISM

    A lot remains uncertain about the number of users affected by the NSA PRISM surveillance program that is taking place, the extent to which companies are involved, and how the NSA handles this sensitive data. Does the NSA regularly collect and examine a huge swath of the cloud communications of American and foreign Internet users? Does the agency present evidence and seek careful judicial review to obtain limited amounts of user data related to individual investigations? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle, with queries being constructed such that algorithms scan most or all of the accounts, identifying a smaller set of “interesting” accounts whose contents are sent to the NSA?

  • NSA leaker Snowden is lying, say leaders of House Intelligence Committee

    The NSA leaker is lying about both his access to information and the scope of the secret surveillance programs he uncovered, the heads of the House Intelligence Committee charged Thursday.

    Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/house/305409-house-intel-chiefs-snowden-lying#ixzz2W8zvRmld
    Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

  • Australians left naked before PRISM.

  • Senior politicians unite to issue call for data bill

    Senior politicians from across the political divide have united to call for UK security services to be given greater internet monitoring powers.

  • Feds hunted for Snowden in days before NSA programs went public

    U.S. government investigators began an urgent search for Edward Snowden several days before the first media reports were published on the government’s secret surveillance programs, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

  • DoD: If You See A Leaked NSA Document, Press SHIFT And DELETE To Get Rid Of It

    I’ve seen people defend these policies in the past, but they make no sense. All they do is encourage a head-in-the-sand mentality within the government, in which employees are told to pretend that public information isn’t public. As we’ve said before, in the business world, non-disclosure agreements are generally considered null and void the moment the same information becomes public via other means. Because that’s dealing with reality. Pretending that these documents aren’t out in the world, and having to fill out a report every time a government employee happens to hit a news article with one of these documents shown, seems like a tremendous waste of time and energy, all in an attempt to deny reality.

  • How NSA spooks spaffed my DAD’S DATA ALL OVER THE WEB

  • Japan proposes NSA-style agency and new snooping laws

    In a masterpiece of timing, the Japanese government is considering a new NSA-style agency to monitor internet communications in the country.

  • Yahoo reportedly fought court order before joining PRISM

    The Web company was the unidentified petitioner challenging an order to help the U.S. government spy on foreign users, sources tell The New York Times.

  • PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

  • Who holds security clearances?

  • Former home secretaries urge Clegg to drop snooper’s charter opposition

    Labour’s Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Alan Johnson and Tory Lord Baker says bill is vital tool in fight against terrorism

  • Look who’s listening

    America’s National Security Agency collects more information than most people thought. Will scrutiny spur change?

  • Only One Big Telecom CEO Refused To Give The NSA The Access It Wanted… And He’s Been In Jail For 4 Years

  • O’Reilly Discovers the Dangers of the Surveillance State

  • Leaked: NSA’s Talking Points Defending NSA Surveillance

    “There is no secret program here”? Bullshit. Why, then, have so many people, both in the Congress and the public been shocked at the extent to which the NSA is snarfing up data? This is a secret program, enabled by a secret interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act, by the FISA Court, which the DOJ and the NSA insist the public is not allowed to know. Yes, it’s a secret program. Saying otherwise is simply lying.

• Civil Rights

  • Police Trained to Treat Keystone XL Protesters as ‘Terrorists’

    It’s often difficult to gauge just how much fear activists instill in the powers that be. But on Wednesday, environmental activists protesting the Keystone XL pipeline saw firsthand how much TransCanada, the corporation in charge of the pipeline, is shaking in its boots.

  • Secret Courts: 8 nightmare scenarios now possible in Britain

    Imagine suing the government for damages for torture and kidnap, and losing your case, without ever knowing the reason why. A former lawyer who resigned from the Lib Dem party over “secret courts” describes the chilling scenarios made possible by the recently passed Justice and Security Act.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • EU in last-minute push to convince France to back EU-US trade talks

    The European Union will try to find the right ‘language’ to overcome French resistance to free-trade talks with the United States today (14 June) and keep alive plans for a deal that could boost their struggling economies by dramatically increasing transatlantic business.

  • Senator Warren: If TPP Transparency Would Lead To Public Opposition, Then TPP Is Wrong

  • Copyrights

    • Kim Dotcom releases a video of Megaupload raid

      Mini documentary shows police in helicopters, handcuffs and dogs

    • Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday Is In The Public Domain; Demands Warner Pay Back Millions Of License Fees

      Happy Birthday remains the most profitable song ever. Every year, it is the song that earns the highest royalty rates, sent to Warner/Chappell Music (which makes millions per year from “licensing” the song). However, as we’ve been pointing out for years, the song is almost certainly in the public domain. Robert Brauneis did some fantastic work a few years ago laying out why the song’s copyright clearly expired many years ago, even as Warner/Chappell pretends otherwise. You can read all the background, but there are a large number of problems with the copyright, including that the sisters who “wrote” the song, appear to have written neither the music, nor the lyrics. At best, they may have written a similar song called “Good Morning to All” in 1893, with the same basic melody, but there’s evidence to suggest the melody itself predated the sisters. But, more importantly, the owner of the copyright (already questionable) failed to properly renew it in 1962, which would further establish that it’s in the public domain.

    • Copyright Industry Demands, Gets Levies For Every XBox, Playstation Sold

      The copyright industry has decreed in Sweden that it will now collect levies for every XBox and Playstation sold – about €10 ($12) per unit. This levy is the “blank media” levy, originally used to compensate for private music copying from vinyl records to blank cassettes, that has crept over all boundaries. It is hard, not to say impossible, to justify the fairness in a single mother having to pay a levy to the richest rock stars when she buys a Playstation for her kids.

Summary: A roundup of stories from battlegrounds for software patents “as such”

Over the years we wrote quite a lot (relative to the size of the nation) about software patents in New Zealand, where patent lawyers have been fighting/waging their PR war against software developers; local lawyers fought alongside companies like IBM and Microsoft with their lobbyists (other lawyers). Some firm called “Shelston IP” continues this PR war (warping public perception) in Lexology by advancing the pro-software patents stance. To quote:

In? Out? Either way, talk of software patents has dominated discussion of the New Zealand Patents Bill for several years, causing unfortunate delay for a much needed update to New Zealand patent law. However, resolution may be on the horizon. Following fierce lobbying by many in the New Zealand IT sector, the Government has announced a new proposed amendment to the Bill, hailed by some as an effective end to software patents in New Zealand. The reality? Unsurprisingly perhaps, much less clear cut.

[...]

n the latest development, the Government has proposed a new replacement provision, which keeps a prohibition on patents for computer programs “as such”, but includes two further clarifying principles. Firstly, a claim in a patent (or application) relates to a computer program as such, if the actual contribution made by the alleged invention lies solely in it being a computer program. Secondly, a series of factors are set out, which must be taken into account in identifying the actual contribution made by the alleged invention. Therefore it is the nature of the “actual contribution” which the invention makes to the existing art which will be the touchstone for determining patentability. If such contribution arises solely from a computer program, it will not be patentable. If the contribution is judged to arise from another aspect of the invention, it will be patentable.

[...]

At a commercial level, the decision to take a significantly narrower path in New Zealand than in Australia, may have real implications for New Zealand software developers who find that software which does not infringe any New Zealand patents, may infringe Australian patents when marketed there. We may also find that over time, the much debated question of whether software patents stifle or encourage innovation, is answered by a geographical shift in the Australasian industry, one way or the other.

Factually (barring omissions) there is something to it, but it is biased for being too selective. The reality is, software patents were explicitly demoted in this island this year [1, 2, 3].

Microsoft-friendly companies like Centrify can carry on boasting their Microsoft-taxed products (Active Directory patents) and try to sell them in places where software patents are not legitimate, hoping the public will not recognise the injustice. This a FRAND-type loophole. See the TomTom case involving FAT patents in Europe, where the “as such” loophole still exists (albeit under fire). European patents may use FAT patent legitimisation in Germany (where some silly politicians still do their thing this week) although it is now a dubious patent.

Over in Germany right now, Jimmy Schulz is doing fine work to extinguish software patents and the FSFE has this update in English:

Tens of thousands of software patents in Germany and Europe present enormous cost and liability risks, especially for SMEs. Several German SME associations welcomed the Parliament’s decision. However they warn against giving all the responsibility to Brussels, as the EU has been consistently incapable of providing software developers with legal certainty. “Germany now has to implement this decision in law, to send a strong signal towards Brussels,” says Johannes Sommer of BIKT, one of the associations.

At an expert meeting in the Parliament on 13th May, in which FSFE also participated, industry associations BIKT and BITMi proposed changes to German copyright and patent law. These proposals would also affect software patents which have already been granted. The first proposal is to add a “protective shield” clause to German copyright law , introducing a blanket ban on the enforcement of patent claims with regard to software. The second proposal to be implemented in German patent law makes sure that the effect of patent claims shall not extend to works protected independently by copyright. Both proposals would prevent that patents on software can be enforced against software developers. The FSFE supports both proposals.

“Matthias Kirschner, of the free software federation said the move is an important step to fix the software patent insanity,”says one news site. Thom Holwerda covered that as well.

Recently, one route to legitimising software patents has been the unitary patent. Spain was blackmailed for the unitary patent and there was a lot of apparent corruption in the attempt to ruin policy against software patents in Europe

According to this curious update, the swindle goes round:

Action brought by Spain against the Regulation on the unitary patent calls the judiciary character of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO into question.

My letter to them hardly made a difference.

Based on this link from Gérald Sédrati-Dinet (April, source), the “#CJEU interpreting UPC shows that #EU has exclusive competence over #UPC (unitary patent court) which is then illegal”

There are other conflicts [FR, EN] revealing entryism of sorts. To quote, “don’t forget: presented by a senator @SenateurRYung who was a former director at EPO” (the EPO is corruptible).

Richard Yung is one of the politicians who come from the patent system, then doing the lobbying (we covered other examples. As put here, “to be sure, Senator Young is a former director of EPO”

“I predict that the Bundestag request against software patents will be ignored, and that they will vote for Unipat [unitary patent] instead”
      –Benjamin HenrionDan Gillmor incorrectly says here in The Guardian that software patents are in a state that they’re not in. He is corrected with the statement: “Europe is unfortunately far away from excluding Software Patents” (just not endorsing them). The FFII’s president, Benjamin Henrion, says: “I predict that the Bundestag request against software patents will be ignored, and that they will vote for Unipat [unitary patent] instead #backdoor”

When even companies that pretend to like FOSS are collecting software patents we remain stuck between large American corporations that spy on us and gain monopolies on algorithms. It is a sad state of affairs, but that’s just where we are. █

“As discussed in our PR meeting this morning. David & I have spoken with Maureen O’Gara (based on go ahead from BrianV) and planted the story. She has agreed to not attribute the story to us….

“[...] Inform Maureen O’ Gara (Senior Editor Client Server News/LinuxGram) or John Markoff (NYT) of announcement on Aug 28, 2000. Owner dougmil (Approval received from BrianV to proceed)

“Contact Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly or Bruce Perrins to solicit support for this going against the objectives of the Open Source movement. Owner: dougmil [Doug Miller]. Note that I will not be doing this. Maureen O’Gara said she was going to call them so it looks better coming from her.”

(From Microsoft’s smoking guns)

Summary: Microsoft is playing with editorial staff of Slashdot, marketing itself as a FOSS company

We have recently given several examples [1, 2] where Microsoft’s proxy Outercurve interjected itself into geeks’ sites like Slashdot, very much by design. iophk says “Microsoft Outercurve is being peddled by /. again” (see Slashdot or direct link).

It was only very recently that we revealed Microsoft AstroTurfing in Reddit, so this is important. Slashdot should speak out about it because it’s subjected to the same problem [1, 2, 3, 4]. Someone very senior who had worked for Slashdot told me about this privately; he said they were infiltrated by AstroTurfers and asked me not to give away his name. Here is the PR being injected by Microsoft. Remember that Microsoft was exposed for also planting stories demonising its critics, such as Pamela Jones. I too got smeared by Microsoft staff, as a matter of routine (they got caught, then fled). Unlike Pamela Jones, I don’t have leaked documents to show if or how it was coordinated.

Here she is with the latest about the Microsoft-funded SCO case against Linux:

SCO has filed its reply to IBM’s response to SCO’s motion asking the judge to reconsider his refusal of SCO’s motion to reopen SCO v. IBM.

It will not surprise you that SCO doesn’t like IBM’s suggestions on how the case should go forward. IBM suggested a couple of rounds of a process, first tossing out whatever both sides agree are mooted claims, due to the Novell victory over SCO, then IBM would bring a summary judgment motion on the rest, and that would require briefing, IBM suggested, because there are new cases decided in the interim that are relevant.

The SCO case is over a decade old. Microsoft now distorts news sites, trying to give the impression that Microsoft is a FOSS authority. █

“…Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit against IBM and the Linux operating system. But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux.”

–Larry Goldfarb, BayStar, key investor in SCO approached by Microsoft

Summary: Little progress made with policy moving in the right direction, but by no means the right and absolute solution to USPTO incompetence

THERE ARE interesting rulings out this week. A very vocal proponent of software patents asks about the Versata case [1, 2, 3], “Did the PTAB Just Kill Software Patents?” Well, yes. And it matters. “On Tuesday, June 11,” he writes, “the Patent Trial and Appeals Board issued a ruling in SAP America, Inc. v. Versata Development Group, Inc., which is the result of a Covered Business Method challenge to U.S. Patent No. 6,553,350 filed by SAP on September 16, 2012. The PTAB, per Administrative Patent Judge Michael Tierney, determined that “Versata’s ’350 claims 17, and 26-29 are unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101.” Looking more closely at the ruling, however, makes it clear just how significant this ruling will be. The breadth of the 101 determination is shocking and virtually guarantees that 101 will be used by patent examiners to effectively prevent software patents from issuing altogether.”

“The ruling was limited, so it is too early to celebrate.”Here is a news report about it (AOL). This gets somewhat overshadowed by news about a SCOTUS ruling. An inaccurate report from Rupert Murdoch’s press says “The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that human genes isolated from the body can’t be patented, a victory for doctors and patients who argued that such patents interfere with scientific research and the practice of medicine.”

This is only part of the story, as we’ll explain in days to come. Kevin Granade told me “they affirmed that isolated, unmodified DNA is unpatentable, but ruled the *transcription* of the same as cDNA patentable [...] the reporting has it wrong, the ruling regards all unmodified DNA, not just human DNA. Effectively a key lying on the ground is unpatentable, but if you make an impression you can patent the mold. Very unfortunate.”

The Guardian botched it too. The ruling was limited, so it is too early to celebrate. It’s like celebrating patent trolls getting the attention of Brand Obama. There is no action yet from the White House (just words [1, 2, 3, 4]) and it would not be the resolution of the problems, either. As this new post put it, this is not enough. To quote just the opening:

Patents may have once seemed like a good idea. At least it seemed that way to the Venetians, who in 1474 declared the publication and protection of the “works and devices” of “men of great genius” would encourage others to apply their genius and ultimately benefit their society as a whole.

This noble idea may have had a place in the Italian Renaissance, but wind forward 539 years and we have a patent system infested with “patent trolls” and seemingly endless disputes between software and technology companies expending billions of dollars over ideas that involve neither genius nor benefit to society.

The problem is scope being expanded to things which did not exist when the patent system was conceived. It predates understanding of germs, let alone genetics. It also predates software, let alone computing machines (equivalent of pen and paper). █

Summary: Microsoft publicly steps forward as part of Apple’s war on Linux/Android, making the anti-FOSS alliance more visible than before

The FRAND debate has been inadvertently dealing with whether software patents have backdoor-like legitimacy around the whole world. FRAND opposer Judge Posner [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] did the right thing, seeing perhaps how the Microsoft-Apple patents alliance uses FRAND against Google/Android. Now we see those two companies in cahoots more clearly than before: “Microsoft’s Amicus Brief in Support of Apple in Appeal of Posner Ruling – A Change in Tune on Injunctions”

Microsoft has now filed an amicus brief in support of Apple in the appeal of Judge Richard Posner’s ruling in which the judge tossed out both Apple and Motorola’s claims with prejudice, saying neither had proven damages and saying injunctive relief when there was no demonstrable harm would be against the public interest. Interestingly, Microsoft here argues in its brief that the judge didn’t rule out injunctive relief for FRAND patents.

Nice to see those duopolists so openly showing their collusion against a competitor. They are ousting their conspiracy (e.g. CPTN) to destroy Android. Will President Obama pay attention or will he only try to tackle small players? █

Summary: Microsoft’s attempts at being “cool” are not working out and the Vista series is falling to obscurity levels

Earlier this week, PRISM partner Microsoft introduced (more details about PRISM in [1, 2, 3, 4]) its DRM-laden spying box, the Xbox One, as an Internet hotspot of sorts. Accompanying the introduction, the obligatory sexism reared its ugly head again [1, 2, 3] and there was a joke about rape:

Perhaps more than any segment of the technology industry, gamer culture has had its fair share of sexism problems, so it’s not that surprising that a Microsoft presenter slipped an apparent rape reference into a Monday presentation at Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the biggest video-game conference of the year. During a demo of Killer Instinct to drum up excitement for its new Xbox One, Microsoft brought out a man and a woman to battle it out on the big screen onstage in Los Angeles. In this scripted event the man, of course, kicks the woman’s ass at the fighting game. “I can’t even block correctly and you’re too fast,” she says, playing a video game like a girl. But even more problematic than those stereotypical gender roles was the part when her adversary said this: “Just let it happen. It will be over soon.” You know, like a rape…

XBox had some less tactful advertising, as we covered before (violence and sex are a recurring theme).

“…Microsoft has been caught with their pants down and maybe the entire concept of a video game console as whole.”
      –ZiomatrixThere are other issues though. “Let them eat last gen,” wrote Ziomatrix regarding “Microsoft’s response to questions concerning its always checking online DRM.

“Even if Sony’s revelation is now proven to be a Pyrrhic victory since each publisher can set their own standards of DRM for the PS4 and Sony’s record of doing an about face when it suites them still shows that Microsoft has been caught with their pants down and maybe the entire concept of a video game console as whole.”

Microsoft is really desperate to become a hardware company because the Windows monopoly is dying.

CNET says that Vista 8 is recognised as a failure by more and more analysts:

The era of growth in the traditional PC market may be coming to an end. Things are looking worse this year than previously forecast, according to Citi.

Vista 8 is a dead end, which is why many Microsoft chiefs are quitting the company (recently the CIO). A lot of Microsoft’s business heavily depends on the common carrier, Windows. Xbox never caught on as a common carrier and neither did Windows Mobile/Windows Phone. █

Summary: There should be more to come from the whole PRISM/NSA-gate, but the ball is in the court of one activist/lawyer/blogger, Glenn Greenwald

Daily links are still flooded with stories about PRISM, which was also related to our regular scope of coverage [1, 2, 3]. PRISM is not exactly news to those who watched the NSA closely (as I did for several years). What’s new, for the most part, is concrete proof finally existing and being accessible to the public. Cablegate has been the bloodline of some valuable posts of ours, showing the importance of secret policy being made public. The Guardian did decent work, but it didn’t publish all the documents as the leaker had hoped based on some reports. This permits some companies to deny what they are doing. This means that people will carry on with their addiction to Web search and proprietary chat facilities from Microsoft and Google. It is already clear that Microsoft gives governments easy access to Skype (we wrote about it months ago, citing Microsoft's own admission) and the ‘guardian’ reminds us of that:

UK intelligence agencies made thousands of requests for information on private communications via Microsoft products last year, with demands for Skype call information outnumbering those made by US agencies.

In 2012, the UK made 1,268 requests to Skype for information such as the names of callers, their address, email account details and telephone numbers dialled. This was a quarter of all requests received by the Microsoft-owned internet call service from governments around the world. The requests could have come from British police and intelligence agencies, such as GCHQ.

As Satipera put it in identi.ca the other day, “Microsoft for security, like fencing with a baguette.” There is more to the numbers above, which is why Glenn Greenwald should pass the leaked documents to Wikileaks, making a copy of the whole lot of documents, thus permitting full publication of public policy (the ‘guardian’ won’t do it). Unless this happens, many companies will carry on evading/lying to restore public acceptance of a mass surveillance state where dissidents are the real target. █

Update: The following article has just been published: NSA Leaks Suggest Microsoft May Have Misled Public Over Skype Eavesdropping

There were many striking details in the Washington Post’s scoop about PRISM and its capabilities, but one part in particular stood out to me. The Post, citing a top-secret NSA PowerPoint slide, wrote that the agency has a specific “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection” that outlines how it can eavesdrop on Skype “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.” (Emphasis added.)

This piece of information is significant for a number of reasons. Last year, speculation arose in the hacker community that Skype, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2011 and had been difficult to wiretap, had become compliant with law enforcement demands. I pressured Skype to disclose its eavesdropping capabilities, but the company refused to discuss the matter. After a range of advocacy groups published an open letter calling for more clarity on the issue, Microsoft eventually released a transparency report detailing information about law enforcement requests for user data. The report devoted an entire section to Skype and claimed that in 2012, it hadn’t handed any communications content over to authorities anywhere in the world. Microsoft also said in notes accompanying the transparency report that calls made between Skype-Skype users were encrypted peer-to-peer, implying that they did not pass through Microsoft’s central servers and could not be eavesdropped on—except maybe if the government deployed a spy Trojan on a targeted computer to bypass encryption.

But the NSA “PRISM Skype Collection” guide casts doubt on whether any Skype communications are beyond the NSA’s reach. That the NSA claims to be able to grab all Skype users’ communications also calls into question the credibility of Microsoft’s transparency report—particularly the claim that in 2012 it did not once hand over the content of any user communications. Moreover, according to a leaked NSA slide published by the Post, Skype first became part of the NSA’s PRISM program in February 2011—three months before Microsoft purchased the service from U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Macs No More: After Edward Snowden, Time to Come to the Penguin

  The devil some of us have most sold our souls to isn’t Apple or Google or Amazon but Adobe. How can we be creative without our “Creative Suite”? If we’re actually creative, though, I bet we can. Besides, there are more-or-less functional people-powered alternatives to a lot of those programs, which are a bit less forgiving and a lot more customizable for the clever. It’s a better way to go in the long run anyway. Shiny new equipment tends to breed shiny fake art.

  Then there’s the steampunk thrill of the UNIX terminal at the heart of your new OS. The terminal means going back in time to a text-only screen — now with customizable colors in transparent windows! — and telling the computer what you want with magic spells on a command line. Slow tech is addictive. This article is being written in a terminal program that’s almost 40 years old, and thanks to a devoted community of hackers it works better than ever.

  That’s the open-source ethic: If it still works, build on it — don’t design for obsolescence. And when a new improvement comes along, everyone can benefit. When there’s an error, the community (eventually) corrects it.

  For example, ghost-of-Steve Jobs: It’s “think differently.”

• Server

  • Tulsa’s Community Collaboration Model for Supercomputing

    Two weeks ago the Tandy Supercomputing Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma launched as the home to one of the country’s first shared, publicly available supercomputers.

    The project — born of a collaboration between The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma State University, The University of Oklahoma, Tulsa Community College, the city of Tulsa, business owners and nonprofit foundations — gives community members equal access to a $3.5 million, 100-node supercomputing system at a fraction of the cost to build their own.

  • BeyondTrust Extends Password Security to Linux, Unix

    Last week, security vendor BeyondTrust combined its “context-aware” approach to vulnerability assessment with user-privilege management on Windows. Today, it has taken another step in the same direction with new software that delivers similar features for systems reporting, analytics and password security on Linux and Unix servers. Read on for the details, and what the emphasis on context-awareness means for the channel.

  • Securing Your Linux Server

• Kernel Space

  • IBM to bring Linux KVM virtualization to its Power server line

    Linux has its own built-in hypervisor, KVM, for x86 virtualization, and now IBM is porting it to its Power architecture.

  • Graphics Stack

    • CUDA 5.5 release candidate out for some

      Members of NVIDIA’s Registered Developer Programs can now start testing out the CUDA 5.5 release candidate. According to the announcement, the features in the next release of the platform and architecture for parallel programming include multi-process MPI debugging and profiling, step-by-step guided performance analysis and a static CUDA runtime library.

    • Updated Nouveau Graphics Driver Released

      It’s been a while since the last Nouveau DDX driver update, but xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.8 was released this morning. This updated Nouveau X.Org driver comes with nearly two dozen changes.

    • Reasons For Losing Motivation In Wayland

      While many are super excited about Wayland and the thought of X11 finally going away in the coming years, some who have been enthusiastic about Wayland/Weston are starting to lose interest. Here’s the reasons by one Wayland enthusiast for losing motivation in the project.

      Darxus, a Wayland enthusiast and Phoronix Forums moderator, shared on the mailing list what killed his motivation to play with Wayland. He was once very involved with the upstream Wayland community, but that’s not so much the case anymore. Here’s a synopsis of his reasons:

  • Benchmarks

    • 11-Way Linux, BSD Platform Comparison

      Building upon last month’s eight-way Linux vs. BSD operating system comparison, out today is an expanded 11-way OS showdown. The new OS test results available are for the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, Debian GNU/Linux, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The other competitors include PC-BSD, DragonFlyBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mageia, and openSUSE.

    • SNA Acceleration Works Great For Intel Core i7 Haswell

      To complement the Intel Haswell Linux OpenGL benchmarks that we have been publishing on Phoronix for the past week, up today are some Intel Linux 2D performance benchmarks of Haswell with the Intel Core i7 4770K CPU. The 2D performance is comparing Intel’s default UXA accelerated code-paths against the experimental SNA acceleration back-end.

• Applications

  • Great Little Radio Player Tunes In Simplicity

    Why should you try GLRP? Well, it offers a fast and simple way to play streaming radio with a barely there interface. Also, having 400 radio stations available from worldwide locations is pretty cool. Remember, all of these are free. You do not even have to sign up for a free subscription. There’s no limit to how many additional stations you can add, either.

  • What speech recognition application are you most looking forward to?

    With the rising popularity of speech recognition in cars and mobile devices it’s not hard to see that we’re on the cusp of making speech recognition a first-class input method across our devices.

  • Getting Comfortable With The Fish Shell

    Fish is the Friendly, Interactive SHell, a shell that takes a modern look at the command line. Fish includes syntax highlighting, tab completion, and auto-suggestions by default, making your time in the terminal faster and more efficient. But beyond those features, which are available in other shells, Fish is a philosophy on application development and design. Fish is a command line interface built to be easy to use.

  • ‘Final Term’: A Promising Terminal Emulator for GNU/Linux

    It is true that almost all the major desktop environments come with a terminal emulator of their own. Yet, in terms of features (especially), they all look pretty much the same and there is always room for improvements too, is it not ?

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Lock-Free Multi-Producer Multi-Consumer Queue on Ring Buffer

    • Retroshare: A Next Generation Secure Communication and File Sharing Platform

    • Using RoundCube Webmail With ISPConfig 3 On Debian Wheezy (Apache2)

    • HotShots: Lightweight Screenshot and Editing Tool for Ubuntu

    • Customize BASH

    • How to auto-close the terminal after a certain period of inactivity

    • How Firefox Can Beat Google Chrome

    • How I compile Vim

    • detox: Cleanup crew

    • Run the same command on many Linux servers at once

  • Games

    • Native Port Of Dear Esther Now Available

      The native port of Dear Esther, a unique game powered by the Source Engine, is now available to Linux gamers.

    • Title Bout Championship Boxing 2013 Now Available

    • Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to Linux!

      The recreation of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee named Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to Linux, pretty awesome news as it’s probably one of the best platformers around.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • builds.kde.org tests report for 4.11 release – 11 June 2013

    • My work in basysKom

      Another big contribution to KDE came last year when basysKom sponsored me and other developers to rewrite Ark (KDE’s archive program). All the changes we did are in basyskom branch in Ark’s repository. I will talk about the changes we implemented in another post.

    • Experimenting with user interfaces for todo lists

    • Choqok will back soon

      Good news is that I received several comments and emails from people who would like to work on Choqok and keep it up. And I asked kde sysadmins to give us a choqok-devel mailing list, to use it for communication between Choqok developers. will announce it when it become ready.

    • Calligra 2.7 Beta 3 Released

      The Calligra team announces the third beta release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite. This release is a bugfix release in preparation for the final release of Calligra 2.7 in June.

    • Dolphin bugs fixed in May 2013

    • Quo vadis, Dolphin? More results from the user study.

      We conducted a large study about strength and weakness of file managers in may 2013. In this article we present the first part of the statistical analysis.

    • Features Baking For KDE 4.11

      The KDE 4.11 Beta is due out anytime now and so with that here’s a look at some of the features you can expect from this major KDE4 update.

    • Back on track for Sound Menu

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 19th May 2013

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mageia releases new Mageia 3 ISO images

      The Mageia project has released new ISO images for the Mageia 3 edition using the distribution’s classical installer. A configuration fault with the images meant that users who specified the use of online repositories inadvertently switched their distribution updates to receive development packages. The developers fixed this problem on the server infrastructure, but that caused problems for users actually wanting to use the development repositories.

  • Arch Family

    • Pogoplug Pro/Video/v3 [End of Life]

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Launches Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2

      Red Hat Brings Storage Live Migration and Third-Party Plug-in Framework to Enterprise Virtualization Offering

    • Red Hat Integrates OpenStack with Enterprise Linux [VIDEO]

    • Red Hat Launches Linux-Based OpenStack Platform, Targets VMware For Control Of The Data Center

      Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider.

      Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide support for web and mobile oriented applications that are more cloud aware. It will serve as the main platform for Red Hat’s cloud strategy.

      The news is significant as it positions Red Hat as a clear leader for building out OpenStack clouds. The company is also using OpenStack to offer an alternative to the virtualized environments long dominated by VMware.

    • Video: 20 Years of Red Hat

      Red Hat Summit is going on in Boston this week. Here is promo video they released about Red Hat turning 20.

    • Red Hat emphasises cloud focus in JBoss EAP

      In the lead-up to this year’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat has released version 6.1 of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). Like its predecessor, the platform is based on version 7 of the Java application server JBoss; it supports the Java EE 6 platform as well as frameworks such as Spring and Struts. JBoss EAP also works with tools including the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Maven, Eclipse Hudson and Red Hat-sponsored technologies such as Hibernate and Arquillian.

    • Red Hat’s OpenShift Online opens for paying customers

      Red Hat has announced the commercial launch of its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud, OpenShift Online. The new service has been in preview or beta since May 2011 and has been developed alongside an on-premises enterprise version, OpenShift Enterprise, released in November 2012, and drawn its technology from open source basis for the platform, OpenShift Origin, released in May 2012.

    • CentOS Makes Its Mark in the Cloud

    • Red Hat CEO: Open Source is Not Just About Cost

      Red Hat is a company that generates over $1 billion a year in revenues from open source software.

      It should come as no surprise then, that the CEO of Red Hat sees being open as the key to innovation. Speaking at the opening keynote for the Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst stressed that open isn’t just a marketing slogan, it’s the only way that modern IT companies can survive.

    • Red Hat, HP, Intel Partner on Big Data Storage

      Red Hat has teamed with CommVault, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Supermicro to develop reference architectures for data backup, content clouds, Big Data storage and other industry-specific storage solutions.

    • RHEL 7 Linux To Use GNOME 3 Classic Mode

      For those not out in Boston this week for the 2013 Red Hat Summit, new details on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 have emerged.

    • Red Hat confirms GNOME Classic Mode for RHEL 7

      The engineering director for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Denise Dumas, has said that the upcoming version of the company’s enterprise Linux distribution will use GNOME 3′s Classic Mode by default. Dumas was talking to TechTarget ahead of the 2013 Red Hat Summit that is currently ongoing in Boston. RHEL 7 is scheduled to be released in the second half of this year and Dumas says the decision to use Classic Mode instead of GNOME’s default interface, which she calls “modern mode”, was made to not inconvenience RHEL’s enterprise user base – “the last thing we want to do is disrupt our customers’ workflows.”

    • Run Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Free on the AWS Cloud

      While it was announced fairly quietly, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog recenlty confirmed that the AWS Free Usage Tier, which lets users run applications and operating systems in the cloud, now includes 750 hours of Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage.

    • Fedora

      • Video: 10 Years of Fedora

        This came out a couple of months ago but I just noticed it.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Developers Get User Input on Systemd

      Systemd has been taking it on the chin lately because a lot of users just don’t like it. There are varying reasons and Debian developer Michael Stapelberg has identified several through a recent user systemd survey. Developers hope the data will help them minimize the difficulty when the transition from SysVinit to Systemd begins.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu holds its own

          My mother is the ultimate bargain hunter. Her cellular contract decisions are not based on device, data bundle or minutes, but rather on what she gets for free… an extra phone, perhaps a TV, maybe a gaming console. As long as it’s free, it doesn’t really matter if she already has five phones; you never know when a sixth will come in handy.

          A few weeks ago, she produced a netbook she had received with her most recent contract. “I don’t know how to use it,” she said, as she handed over the gadget. The reason she couldn’t figure it out was because her limited computing skills meant she was familiar with Microsoft, and only Microsoft. When I pointed out that the netbook ran on Ubuntu, I got a blank stare in return. “Okay, well, you can have it then.”

        • Canonical Working On Mir’s Performance, Mir On Mir

          This past week Canonical developers made a little more progress on their Mir Display Server stack and the next-generation Unity desktop interface.

        • Ubuntu Still Looks To Chromium Default Browser

          Ubuntu developers are still likely to be switching from Mozilla Firefox as the Linux distribution’s default web-browser to now using Google’s open-source Chromium platform.

          For weeks now developers have been talking of making the transition in Ubuntu 13.10 of going from Firefox to Chromium. Among the reasons this is being considered is that Chromium is being used on the Ubuntu mobile front, Chromium has become just as fast (or faster) than Firefox, and the features are also very competitive. Firefox will continued to be offered through the Ubuntu package archives, but it wouldn’t be installed by default.

        • Ubuntu’s Best Selling Apps for May 2013

          What hasn’t been revealed is a surprise. Stormcloud, a desktop-based weather app, remains the top-selling app on Ubuntu for the 5th consecutive month in a row, selling 78 copies between May 1st and May 31st.

• Devices/Embedded

  • World’s smallest dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 module

    Variscite announced what it calls “the world’s tiniest Cortex-A9 system-on-module,” measuring 52 x 17mm. The Linux- and Android-compatible DART-4460 module is based on a 1.5GHz dual-core TI OMAP4460 SoC, is available with up to 1GB of DDR2 RAM and 8GB eMMC flash, and can run at 400MHz on only 44mA, says the company.

  • Compact webserver can host web apps on a Pi

    Real Time Logic announced an Linux-compatible embeddable webserver designed for supporting server-side web applications. Based on the Lua scripting language, Mako Server integrates technologies such as Apache, SQLite, and SMTP and HTTPS clients, and is said to be compact enough to host web services on a Raspberry Pi.

  • Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorms to be united by BrickPi

    Lego Mindstorms has been used to build robots since its introduction, but a small company by the name of Dexter Industries is now set to add a far more advanced brain to those robots, by installing a Raspberry Pi at the core, in a project called BrickPi. The project launched a Kickstarter campaign in May to raise just under $2000; with four days to go, the campaign has so far raised $96,000. Dexter Industries specialises in creating sensors and other enhancements for Lego Mindstorms equipment.

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • Move over Nokia, Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom offers 10x optical zoom lens

        Nokia may be struggling as Microsoft’s hardware delivery boy, where the only USP its flagship devices seem to have are cameras, Samsung has updated its Android powered cameraphones.

      • Samsung unveils Galaxy Ace 3 smartphone

        The device comes with Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean), a 4-inch display, and a 5-megapixel camera.

      • Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom marries smartphone and camera

        Catering to customers who want a point-and-shoot camera built into their smartphones, Samsung offers an Android device with a 16-megapixel camera and 10x zoom lens.

    • Android

      • CyanogenMod to get Incognito Mode

        The revelation NSA survillance has encouraged developers to safeguard people’s personal data. While companies like Canonical are working on pushing users towards sending more and more personal ‘meta’ data to their servers via features like Dash Search, CyanogenMod developers are working in opposite direction. They are working towards protecting user’s personal data.

      • CyanogenMod is working on privacy mode for apps

        CyanogenMod founder Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik has taken to Google+ to announce that the developers of the popular open source third-party firmware for Android phones are working to implement a privacy sandbox for applications. The planned feature will be unique to CyanogenMod and will enable users to isolate the private, personal data stored in their Android phone from applications on an app-by-app basis. Kondik has not given a date for when the feature will be included in CyanogenMod, but he is hopeful that it is “coming soon”.

      • SpiderOak Launches Open-Source HTML5 Android App

      • Open source HTML5 secure file sync for Android

        File sync specialist SpiderOak has bolstered the Google Play Android app market with an open source secure sync tool.

      • Halo by Paranoid Android video demo, open source project

        The Paranoid Android team has announced that its new HALO project will become open source, and this will bring an array of new features, we have included a demo video of Halo in motion on a smartphone.

      • Paranoid Android HALO goes open source

      • Apple iOS 7: Android copycat?

        Some people think Apple’s forthcoming iPhone and iPad operating system iOS 7 is awesome. Others think it’s awful. I think it’s a derivative copycat not only of Android but of almost every other major mobile operating system out there.

      • Seamless Photo Transfer and Backup with Android

        If you want to keep your photos safe when travelling, you don’t need to schlep a notebook or netbook around: an Android device can be used to pull photos from the camera’s storage card and back them up on an external hard disk or upload them to a cloud storage. The easiest solution is to use a USB On-The-Go (OTG) cable to connect an external storage device like a portable hard disk or a high-capacity USB stick and use them for storing backup copies of the photos. However, this approach requires an Android device which supports the USB OTG functionality, and not all smartphones and tables do that. This also means that you have to remember to pack yet another piece of hardware. An alternative solution is to set up a wireless backup system which enables you to seamlessly back up photos on a remote storage device or service using your Android device. Here is how this can be done.

Free Software/Open Source

• Grace Hopper Open Source Day: register now!

  Are you planning to attend this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, taking place on October 2-5 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US?

  Created by the Anita Borg Institute, this annual conference is named for Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computing who worked on the first large-scale commercial computer—UNIVAC—and led the team that created the COBOL programming language.

• Open source SDN initiative sees daylight

• By the numbers: Open source highlights from May

  Here’s what was hot, what you may have missed, and what the chatter was all about last month.

• Events

  • HP’s Dave Donatelli Speaks On Open Source, Software-Defined “Everything” [Exclusive VIDEO]

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Google Launches Cube Slam, An Open Source Pong Clone, To Show Off The Power Of WebRTC And WebGL

      Google today launched Cube Slam, an open source pong clone that you can play against the computer or a friend in the browser. That by itself wouldn’t be all that exciting, but Google created this game to show off the power of WebRTC, Web Audio and WebGL.

      For most people (or at least for developers), WebRTC is now synonymous with plugin-free video conferences in the browser and Cube Slam uses this to show you a live video and audio stream of your friend on a virtual screen while you’re playing.

• SaaS/Big Data

  • HP builds out OpenStack infrastructure, adds public cloud services

  • Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. : AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server Achieves Certification for Red Hat OpenStack

  • Red Hat Inc : Red Hat and Mirantis Partner across Products and Services to Accelerate Adoption of Red Hat OpenStack

  • Red Hat Announces OpenStack-powered Product Offerings to Deliver on Open Hybrid Cloud Vision

  • The Secret(s) to OpenStack’s Overnight Success

• Databases

  • Spring Batch plugs into Neo4j and MongoDB

  • Review: 4 free, open source management GUIs For MongoDB

  • Talend, Couchbase: Open Source NoSQL for Big Data

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice Bug Confirmation (triage) Contest

  • The Power of Brand and the Power of Product, Part 2

    The Apache OpenOffice project should be gratified that their efforts have paid off, and awareness of the product is increasing, as well as market share. This goes contrary to some loudly expressed concerns that the OpenOffice brand would languish at Apache. Clearly this is not so. The brand is growing, as well as the market share.

  • Apache devs: ‘We’ll ship no OpenOffice before its time’

    Even as the open source LibreOffice productivity suite readies its next major release, the competing Apache OpenOffice project says not to expect it to ship a new version until it’s good and ready.

  • Java EE 7 reference implementation GlassFish 4.0 released

    With the Java Community Process (JCP) committee responsible for Java EE 7 having signed off Java EE 7 in April, Oracle has now added a reference implementation for the specification in the form of GlassFish 4.0. Following 89 “promoted builds” and a good 20 months of development, the next major version of the Java application server is therefore now finished. By its nature, the open source GlassFish is the first server compatible with the enterprise Java standard. In contrast, the number of application servers compatible with the previous version of the standard – Java EE 6 – now exceeds ten.

  • Oracle officially releases Java Enterprise Edition

    With the relevant members within the Java Community Process (JCP) having already approved Java Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE) back in April, Oracle has now announced the availability of the associated documentation, tools and other resources.

  • PhotoAlbum – new feature in LibreOffice 4.1 Impress

• CMS

  • Five Essential WordPress Plugins

• Healthcare

  • VA CIO shares forthcoming open source contributions

    Pledging “more motion and more outputs” of its own VistA developments, acting Veterans Affairs CIO Stephen Warren offered a glimpse of what the department is planning to turn over to the open source community.

  • Doctor, your patient will see you now

    If doctors can’t be as accessible and transparent as the tablet or smartphone that lay in the hands of their patients, they can’t expect to gain the respect of those they try to heal.

    Today, technology has empowered many a consumer, and patients are quickly following suit. For they too, are consuming healthcare as they begin to incur more of its cost. So, what does this more scrupulous and savvy patient mean for healthcare providers? It means change is coming—it’s time to embrace it—or face extinction from the rise of the e-patient.

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Atlassian rebrands Confluence and JIRA add-ons

      Atlassian has announced that the company will be rebranding a number of its add-on applications to “make it easy for customers to distinguish stand-alone products from Atlassian add-ons” and to simplify its product list. The software products themselves will not change; Atlassian is only changing their names and logos to make it clearer how they work with its core life-cycle management applications JIRA and Confluence.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • FSF polo shirts have arrived at the shop!

    Responding to the overwhelmingly popular demand on our Ideas page for FSF polo shirts, the shop is now selling these stylish maroon polos for $35! It has two white buttons, and features the Free Software Foundation logo embroidered in white stitching over the left chest. This polo shirt is perfect for a free software sysadmin to wear at the office.

  • GNU teseq 1.1 released

• Project Releases

  • VLC 2.0.7 fixes regressions

  • FLAC 1.3.0 release brings RF64 and Wave64 support

    In their first release since 2007, the Xiph.Org Foundation has updated its Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) with several improvements in version 1.3.0 and the developers have also moved the code to a new Git repository. The release also includes a number of bug fixes and minor interface changes. FLAC is a royalty-free, lossless compression codec that is used by music enthusiasts to store music collections without compromising quality and by recording artists and broadcasters to transfer their work over the internet.

  • GStreamer SDK Now Supported On Apple iOS

  • Evolution 3.8.3 Brings Several Improvements and Fixes

    Yesterday, June 10, the development team behind the Evolution groupware suite has announced the immediate availability for download of Evolution 3.8.3.

• Public Services/Government

  • Berlin rejects open source plan, looks to open standards instead

    he German city-state of Berlin won’t migrate to open source software. Instead, its parliament decided in principle to choose workplace IT based on open standards.

    Berlin’s Green party had proposed to have 25% of its standardized IT workplaces running open source software by 2018, according to the proposal that was voted down by the state parliament on Monday.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Global Open Data Initiative to coordinate open data projects

      The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has announced the formation of the new Global Open Data Initiative (GODI). Joining the OKF in forming the new initiative are the Open Institute, Mexico’s Fundar, the Sunlight Foundation and the World Wide Web Foundation. The initiative is intended to act as a global voice for open government data and to support open data initiatives across the world. It will develop a research agenda and evidence base in support of open data and aggregate resources from across the world. It hopes to become a “central point of reference for governments and CSOs (civil society organizations) interested in open government data.”

• Programming

  • Some Thoughts On Algorithmic Complexity, Part 1

  • Eclipse publishes data for Kepler release train

    As is traditional in the run up to its yearly release, the Eclipse Foundation has now published statistics related to the projects included in the Eclipse 4.3 release train, code-named Kepler, which is expected to be released on 27 June. Wayne Beaton, Director of Open Source Projects at the Eclipse Foundation, writes that he expects 72 projects to make the release train this year, which mirrors the Eclipse Juno release, which also included 72 projects.

  • Pydoop: Writing Hadoop Programs in Python

    Installed as a layer above Hadoop, the open-source Pydoop package enables Python scripts to do big data work easily.

Leftovers

• Shape Up! Google and Other Tech Firms React to Government Snoops

  How secure is your sensitive data online? That question has been making headlines lately with the NSA scandal, but big technology companies have long acknowledged that world government bodies make requests for data that many users would never expect to be disclosed. In fact, as we’ve reported, according to Google’s regularly issued transparency reports, in the last six months of 2012 Google received over 21,000 requests for data on over 33,000 users.

• Security

  • Piecemeal patches from QNAP

    Shortly after the disclosure of several security holes in QNAP’s NAS and network video recording systems that enabled potential attackers to gain full control, the company has started to release updated versions of its software; however, the security updates are only being released bit by bit.

• Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • NSA leaker Edward Snowden: U.S. targets China with hackers

    Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker of secret surveillance documents, claimed Wednesday that the United States has mounted massive hacking operations against hundreds of Chinese targets since 2009.

  • Beijing Reacts to Snowden Claims U.S. Hacked ‘Hundreds’ of Chinese Targets

    The China Daily, the Chinese government’s English-language mouthpiece, couldn’t have been handed a better story. On June 13, Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency who exposed a vast American electronic surveillance program before fleeing to Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, that the U.S. has for years hacked into Chinese computer systems. After days of silence about the presence of a U.S. whistle-blower on Chinese soil — albeit in a territory governed separately from the rest of the country — the Chinese state media swung into action. “This is not the first time that U.S. government agencies’ wrongdoings have aroused widespread public concern,” opined the China Daily in an editorial. In a separate news article, the official state newspaper wrote that “analysts” believed the bombshells dropped in the Snowden affair are “certain to stain Washington’s overseas image and test developing Sino-U.S. ties.”

  • Pre-emptive Policing

    The rounding up, arresting and beating of groups of protestors before they had even begun to protest is so taken for granted in London now that I can find no reflection in the media of the outrage I feel. If an old duffer like me feels completely alienated from the authoritarian state in which I find I now live, how do younger, more radical people feel? There seems a terrible divide between the corporate-political elite surrounded by their massive Praetorian guard at Bilderberg, and everybody else. Society is not stable.

  • The Secret War

    INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.

  • Turkish PM’s chilling warning: ‘these protests will be over in 24 hours’

    Turkey’s prime minister defied a growing wave of international criticism on Wednesday and issued a chilling warning to the protesters who have captured central Istanbul for a fortnight, declaring that the demonstrations against his rule would be over within 24 hours.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • The fracking story comes closer to home

    On Monday, The New York Times wrote about an “unlikely resistance” building in “energy-friendly” Greeley, CO. “As [oil and gas] companies here and across the energy-rich West look for new places to drill,” reported the Times’s Jack Healy, “they are increasingly looking toward more densely populated areas, and bumping into environmentalists and homeowners.”

    Forty-five minutes northwest of Greeley, in Fort Collins, people once thought that oil and gas extraction and the questions it raises about environmental hazards were concerns for elsewhere, according to Fort Collins Coloradoan reporter Bobby Magill. While oil drilling has been going on in this part of the state for decades, in recent years oil rigs have started showing up near residential areas and, in February, an area well blew out, sending a gusher of oil and hydraulic fracturing chemicals into the sky near homes and families.

  • Farmers fail to feed UK after extreme weather hits wheat crop

    The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop.

    “Normally we export around 2.5m tonnes of wheat but this year we expect to have to import 2.5m tonnes,” said Charlotte Garbutt, a senior analyst at the industry-financed Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. “The crop that came through the winter has struggled and is patchy and variable. The area of wheat grown this year has been much smaller.”

• Finance

  • Wisconsin’s System Increasingly Rigged Against the Unemployed

    With the latest Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index ranking Wisconsin 49th out of 50 in economic outlook, high unemployment in Wisconsin is a problem that is not likely to go away any time soon. But, instead of trying to fix the economy in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker’s Department of Workforce Development (DWD) is finding new ways to disqualify the unemployed from collecting benefits. This is unlikely to do anything but compound Wisconsin’s economic woes.

• Censorship

  • Today was the first time I deleted a comment

    Moderating blog comments is a very sensitive task. It is not easy to strike a balance between chaos and censorship.

    [...]

    What I do not accept, though, is a comment which, to me, seems to be aimed solely at ticking me off. Starting a comment with “I think KDE applications in general looks like crap” is not setting the mood for constructive criticism. Continuing by listing things one does not like about KDE applications (but most of which are simply not part of the HIG yet) is not helping either. And then concluding your main point with “I think the user interface KDE brings up stinks. As such I don’t want people to follow whatever guides suggest to do applications that way.” will get your comment deleted by me.

    [...]

    So here is the rule: Criticize me all you want, but do it in a polite and constructive manner. And please actually look at things before criticizing them. This helps a lot in turning a troll post into constructive criticism.

• Privacy

  • Edward Snowden and the State-Identified Journalist

    Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (6/11/13) wrote about Edward Snowden yesterday in a way that helped make it clear why so many in the press seem upset that the former NSA consultant revealed the extent of U.S. spying programs aimed at the American public.

  • Caspar Bowden – How to wiretap the Cloud (without almost anybody noticing)

    Independent privacy advocate and ex-Microsoft employee Caspar Bowden gives the crucial legal context to PRISM and FISAAA. Bowden explains how the 4th Amendment does not apply to non-US citizens leaving the US government able to conduct mass surveillance of the cloud. This timely ORGCon2013 talk is essential viewing!

  • (1). How to wiretap the Cloud (without anybody noticing) by Caspar Bowden (PRISM)

  • Baroness Ludford amendment – opening the door to FISAAA?

    Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford has proposed an amendment to the Data Protection Regulation that would mean your data could be transferred to the USA without you being informed.

  • Good News! You’re Not Paranoid – NSA Oversight

  • NSA leaker’s purported online activity, interests come to light

    Posts on the Ars Technica site under the username “TheTrueHOOHA” show an interest in technology, gaming, and online anonymity.

  • NSA revelations only ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ says Dem lawmaker

    The federal surveillance programs revealed in media reports are just “the tip of the iceberg,” a House Democrat said Wednesday.

    Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the spy programs at the National Security Agency (NSA) during a briefing on Tuesday with counterterrorism officials.

    “What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.”

    Lawmakers are barred from revealing the classified information they receive in intelligence briefings, and Sanchez was careful not to specify what members might have learned about the NSA’s work.

    Read more: http://thehill.com/video/house/305047-dem-rep-lawmakers-learned-significantly-more-about-surveillance-programs-in-nsa-briefing#ixzz2W6SkR9ps
    Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

  • The IRS is in your internets, watching your financial transactions

    Richard Satran at US News has a scary little piece out about how The Internal Revenue Service collects more than your taxes: “It’s also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it’s never gone before.”

  • It’s Time to Rewrite the Internet to Give Us Better Privacy, and Security

    It’s not too late to restore confidence, writes “digital Cassandra” Lawrence Lessig, but we need to start by asking the right questions.

  • So Just Exactly What Is NSA’s Prism, More Than Reprehensibly Evil?

    The US NSA’s PRISM program appears to be a set of specialized deep-packet inspection filters combined with pre-existing wiretapping points at high-level Internet carriers in the United States. Since the program’s revelation the day before yesterday, speculations have ranged far and wide about who does what to make this surveillance state nightmare possible. Adding it all together, it would appear that the social tech companies did not, repeat not, supply bulk data about their users at the US Government’s will – but that the situation for you as an end user remains just as if they had.

  • More Americans see man who leaked NSA secrets as ‘patriot’ than traitor: Poll

• Civil Rights

  • Former Goldman Sachs Programmer Back To Court

    Sergey Aleynikov is set to go back to court. Aleynikov was previously a programmer for Goldman Sachs who was tried and convicted of theft of trade secrets in federal court – a conviction that was overturned on appeal. Now Aleynikov is facing charges under New York State law for the same actions that were ruled legal by the appeals court.

  • Protest treated as anti-social behaviour

    Powers given to the police to deal with anti-social behaviour are increasingly being used to gather information on participants in political protest.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Kim Dotcom Releases New Raid Footage Captured By In-House CCTV

      Following the high-profile raid on his New Zealand mansion in 2012, Kim Dotcom released dramatic film of the event taken from police helicopters. Now the Megaupload founder is back with new footage captured by his own in-house CCTV system. Among other events, the new material shows police carrying machine guns fitted with silencers, arrests of staff and the towing of his cars. Dotcom’s sense of humor still shines through though, with an ending fit for a Hollywood blockbuster.