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Links 12/5/2015: Jailhouse 0.5, KDE Applications 15.04.1





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • IBM partners with Ionic to speed up mobile business app development


  • IBM Embraces Open Source RAD Platform
    To make it simpler for organizations to embrace an open source framework for rapid application development (RAD), IBM has thrown its weight behind the Ionic open source RAD platform.


  • Open Networking Foundation Taps Open Source Director
    The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced the appointment of Dr. Bithika Khargharia as the director of product and community management. Bithika’s service to ONF is being provided by Extreme Networks, an ONF member company where Bithika is a principal architect of solutions and innovation. She will continue in her role at Extreme Networks while also taking on her new responsibilities with ONF.


  • Community is More Important Than Code
    You hear it all the time: Linux and Free/Open Source software depend on contributors. After all, someone has to make all that great software. But what does this really mean? You might think you don't have any useful skills, or it will be drudgey and no fun, or people will yell at you. The Linux/FOSS universe is very large, and it is quite possible to find yourself in communities that are drudgey and no fun, and people yelling at you. Which is pointless and punitive; why bother? It's not as though we lack opportunities to enjoy pointless and punitive endeavors.


  • How Comcast is Using OpenDaylight
    Comcast joined the OpenDaylight Project today and we wanted to share how we’ve been using the OpenDaylight platform and how it fits into our long-term network direction.


  • ​How open source Apache's 'survival of the fittest' ethos breeds better software
    From HTTP Server, to Hadoop and Cassandra, there's no doubting the effectiveness of the Apache Software Foundation in fostering open-source innovation.

    Yet the other side of its collaborative, consensual approach is the freedom it gives people to duplicate software engineering efforts, which in other contexts might be seen as wasteful.


  • Share your software, says NASA guru
    He said instead of software’s inherent value being its cost, it was better as a means to an end. “The value isn’t in the software, it’s in the utility that the software provides.”

    “My call to action is ... is there something in your portfolio of products or services that you can open source.”


  • Six Ways Open Source Benefits Your Business
    Open source software projects ensure transparency, enabling community collaboration to improve overall quality. However, the guarantees that come with vendor-backed software projects help ease IT concerns and greatly benefit end users. To maximize business potential, companies are now turning to commercial open source options.

    In commercial open source, backing from a vendor ensures the availability of product support and lets users know that the product is suited for commercial use, even for non-technical end users. According to Olivier Thierry, chief marketing officer of Zimbra, the mutually beneficial relationship between commercial vendor and community creates a powerful positive feedback mechanism that improves all aspects of the software. Any ecosystem needs support from its end users and trained experts if it intends to thrive, and commercial open source creates a platform where new opportunities and innovation can be sparked by this input. However, to make it work for your business, you need to identify the main goals of your commercial open source initiative and ensure transparency, flexibility and long-term value are central aspects of your plan.

    This slideshow features six ways to leverage commercial open source software for your business.


  • EMC creates inaugural open source project


  • New technology and open source at EMC


  • Top chipmakers in open source MIPS push
    Qualcomm Atheros, Lantiq (part of Intel) and Broadcom have joined the Prpl Foundation.


  • Events



    • 15th Anniversary Linuxwochen Vienna
      As all the last year in May the event row called Linuxwochen makes it stop in Vienna and I represented Fedora there. This year it was an special event as the Linuxwochen could celebrate their 15th anniversary. And this years event was indeed special, normally this event is compared to others a smaller one as it is from Thursday to Saturday. But this year it was on Thursday already crowded and it looked some more Germans have found their way to Vienna. Also both of the workshop I gave in Vienna was an success and as always filled with people.


    • GNU Guix talk at OpenTechSummit, Berlin, May 14th


    • Minutes of FUDCon APAC 2015 planning meeting
      We had our weekly planning meeting today. Comparing to earlier Fudcon planning meeting with today's, we have done lots of progress. Most of the things are already in good shape including Travel, Accommodation, FUDPub, Website and Scheduling etc.




  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS/Big Data



    • Pivotal and Mirantis forge Partnership to deliver Cloud Foundry on OpenStack
      Mirantis, the pure OpenStack company, has forged a partnership with Pivotal to integrate and deliver the Cloud Foundry-based platform-as-a-service on OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure. Under the deal Pivotal will support Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a distribution of Cloud Foundry, on Mirantis OpenStack.


    • Myth Busting the Open-Source Cloud Part 4
      The idea of open source software development projects is to bring many people and organizations together from around the world to work on a common initiative or goal. It is quite communal in nature. That means lots of different entities are going to be weighing in on code development, design, revisions, security and other issues throughout the lifetime of the project.

      [...]

      To date, more than 150 companies have agreed to support the mission of OpenStack by providing architectural input, contributing code or integrating the code into their business offerings, the community says.


    • GE Launches Cloud Foundry ‘Industrial Dojo,’ Contributes to Open Source to Foster Continued Development of the Industrial Internet


    • Mesosphere's Data Center Operating Systems Heads to AWS and Azure
      Using DCOS, developers and operators don’t need to focus on individual virtual or physical machines but can easily build and deploy applications and services that span entire data centers. Here's more on Mesosphere's news and some relevant excerpts from our recent interview with the company's Ben Hindman (shown).


    • OpenStack Kilo Cloud Platform Gains Nine New Capabilities
      OpenStack Kilo—the 11th release of the open-source OpenStack cloud project since NASA and Rackspace first launched the effort in 2010—was officially released on April 30, providing cloud administrators with new features and capabilities. A key focus in OpenStack Kilo was stability, as 7,257 bugs were fixed during release cycle. However, bugs weren't the only focus, as OpenStack Kilo also introduced a new project to the integrated release, as well as new features. The Ironic bare-metal service makes its debut in OpenStack Kilo, enabling cloud administrators to provision bare-metal services alongside virtual resources. In the OpenStack Swift storage project, erasure codes have been added, providing new data protection capabilities. The OpenStack Keystone identity project, meanwhile, gained new federation features, enabling multicloud federation. In all, 1,494 individuals affiliated with 169 organizations contributed to the cloud platform release. The top companies contributing code for Kilo were Red Hat, HP, IBM, Mirantis, Rackspace, Yahoo, NEC and Huawei. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the key innovations in OpenStack Kilo.


    • Intel and Cloudera are Making Headway on the Big Data Scene
      Cloudera and Intel, which have had a significant partnership together are out with many new details on how their Hadoop-focused partnership has accelerated innovation in big data over the past year. Through collaborative efforts they've deliered solutions focused on security, optimization of core Hadoop technology in four releases of the Cloudera distribution, and greater manageability.


    • Akanda Releases Version 1.0, the Open Source Network Virtualization Solution for OpenStack


    • DreamHost’s NFV spin-off unveils a network orchestration service for OpenStack
      Akanda Inc., the startup that spun out of DreamHost last year to monetize the network virtualization technology powering its public cloud, has released the first stable version of the software with the promise of helping organizations decouple operations from the underlying infrastructure. It has a high bar to meet from the outset.


    • Akanda and Cumulus Networks Partner to Provide Simplified Virtual Networking for OpenStack




  • Storage



  • Funding



  • BSD



    • Broadwell Graphics, HDMI 4K & Other Features Land In DragonFlyBSD
      Earlier this month we wrote about DragonFlyBSD having experimental Broadwell graphics support and now this updated DRM driver code has landed in the BSD distribution. Besides supporting the new Intel Broadwell HD/Iris Graphics, there's also a number of other new features.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



    • GCC 6 Will Look To Switch To C++11 By Default
      With GCC 5 the C compiler changed its default to C11/GNU11 and now for the next version, GCC 6, C++11 might become the default C++ language compiler target.


    • Musl Libc Support Lands In Mainline GCC
      Musl has long aimed at being a lightweight, simple, free, and correct libc library. However, hindering its adoption has been out-of-tree patches required against GCC for supporting the Musl C library. Fortunately, Musl support has now been merged into GCC.


    • GNU inetutils 1.9.3
      The GNU inetutils team is proud to present version 1.9.3 of the GNU networking utilities. The GNU Networking Utilities are the common networking utilities, clients and servers of the GNU Operating System.




  • Project Releases



  • Licensing



    • Why doesn't the FSF release GPG-signed copies of its licenses?
      While verified copies of our licenses can be useful, this is unfortunately a project that sounds straightforward at first, but all the corner cases found in the wild muck it up.

      One relatively frequent request we receive is for the FSF to provide GPG-signed copies of our licenses. GPG is a tool that lets users cryptographically sign or encrypt documents and emails. A GPG-signed document lets anyone who receives it know that they have received the exact same document as the one that was signed. By providing signed documents, users will be able to easily ensure that they have received an unmodified copy of the license along with their software. It's also possible that some system of signing the documents could help projects tracking the use and adoption of various free software licenses. Providing these signed documents is a simple task: run a command and publish the documents. A trivial investment of resources, or at least that is how it appears at first.


    • SPDX v2 simplifies open source license dependency tracking
      The Linux Foundation has updated its SPDX standard to v2.0, enhancing the ability to track complex open source license dependencies to ensure compliance.

      The Linux Foundation (LF) released version 1.0 of the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) standard in 2011, promoting it as a common format for sharing data about software licenses and copyrights. Now the LF’s SPDX workgroup has released version 2.0 of the standard, with new features that let you relate SPDX documents to each other to provide a “three-dimensional” relationship view of license dependencies.


    • Linux Foundation's SPDX Workgroup Announces New Open Compliance Standard


    • SPDX Updates Open Source License Compliance Standards
      Software licenses aren't very useful if no one adheres to them—and adhering to licenses gets tough quickly when you're dealing with complex supply chains of software whose numerous, ever-moving parts are licensed differently. That's why the Linux Foundation's Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) working group has rolled out an updated specification designed to make open source licensing simpler.


    • Protecode Announces Support for SPDX 2.0




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Project To Build Open Source, Street-Legal EV Underway
      Some of the world’s greatest minds are hard at work developing an affordable, long-range electric car for the masses, but the technology needed to do so may already be out there. The Luka EV project at HackaDay is utilizing readily-available open-source information in an attempt to build a 186-mile EV that weighs less than 750 kg/1,653 lbs and only costs around $22,000.




  • Programming





Leftovers



  • We thought we could tweet our way to a socialist paradise. The election changed that
    One of the biggest shocks of this election is the realisation that you can’t get a socialist paradise on Earth by tweeting. Or even by putting up really angry statuses on Facebook. Who knew? Actually, as people who do this kind of thing all follow each other, it seems that many of them still don’t realise. In the echo chambers some of us inhabit online, everyone not only votes Labour but crows about it in 140 characters.


  • Vicious Tories
    The Tories will be even worse in this parliament.


  • After Labour Loses With Austerity, US Media Tell Them to Move to the Right
    While it promised to “reverse the Government’s top-rate tax cut, so that those with incomes over €£150,000 contribute a little more to help get the deficit down,” it also vowed to “not increase the basic or higher rates of income tax or national insurance.”


  • Nepal earthquake, magnitude 7.4, strikes near Everest
    A major earthquake has struck eastern Nepal, two weeks after more than 8,000 people were killed in a devastating quake.


  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



  • Transparency Reporting



    • Swedish court rejects Assange arrest appeal
      Sweden's highest court has rejected a bid by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to overturn the arrest warrant against him for sexual assault allegations, which means he could yet be sent to the Nordic country for questioning.


    • Assange appeal rejected by Sweden's supreme court
      Sweden’s highest court has thrown out Julian Assange’s appeal against his arrest warrant, dashing his immediate hopes of an end to his three-year confinement in Ecuador’s embassy in London.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife



    • What Do Iran Trade Sanctions Have to Do With California Pistachios?
      Amid an epochal drought with no end in sight, farmers in California's Central Valley have entered a veritable well-drilling arms race to capture water from fast-depleting aquifers, causing large swaths of land to sink and permanently reducing its ability to hold water. But none of that has reined in the pistachio industry's relentless expansion. Acreage devoted to pistachios grew more than 20 percent between 2012 and 2014; at a conference in March, nut magnate Stewart Resnick, co-owner and president of Wonderful Pistachios, urged growers to plant more, more, more, claiming that the tasty nuts deliver an even tastier $3,519 average per acre profit. (Resnick's team also beseeched growers to invest some of their windfall in lobbying to maintain industry-friendly water rules.)






  • Finance



    • EU's New Digital Single Market...Isn't
      It is one of life's little ironies that the market where geography plays a diminished role – the online sector – is also one where national boundaries are still a huge problem, particularly when it comes to material under copyright, which is often "unavailable in your country" – a ridiculous situation. That's also the case for the European Union, one of whose core features is the single marketplace. That may be true for analogue goods, but it certainly isn't for digital ones.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Oh THAT Bernie Sanders: Meet the Press Resumes Talking About Clinton’s Chief Challenger
      The reference to Sanders “suddenly getting into the teens” appears to be a reference to polling of Democrats in New Hampshire, where the Vermont senator got 18 percent support in the last Bloomberg poll, and in Iowa, where he was the choice of 15 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll.


    • Feds Spent $3.3 Billion on Charter Schools, with Few Controls (Part 1)
      “The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education just last month.

      Yet, he is calling for a 48% increase in the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) quarter-billion-dollar-a-year ($253.2 million) program designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—an initiative repeatedly criticized by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls.

      CMD’s review of appropriations reveals that the federal government has spent a staggering sum, $3.3 billion, of taxpayer money creating and expanding the charter school industry over the past two decades, but it has done so without requiring the most basic transparency in who ultimately receives the funds and what those tax dollars are being used for, especially in contrast to the public information about truly public schools.




  • Privacy



    • Worker fired for disabling GPS app that tracked her 24 hours a day [Updated]
      A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone—an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.


    • ​Facebook to Release Its Own Search Engine
      It seems that Facebook is taking an aim at Google by experimenting with its own search engine which will prevent users from leaving the platform.


    • British Snoops GCHQ Openly Recruiting Hackers As Government Seeks More Surveillance Powers
      Now that the Conservative Party has secured a majority government in the UK, it’s pushing ahead with plans to expand the surveillance state with the Communications Data Bill, also known as Snooper’s Charter, which would require communications providers from BT to Facebook to maintain records of customers’ internet activity, text messages and voice calls for a year. This may have emboldened GCHQ, the British spy agency and chief NSA partner, which has, for the first time, openly called for applicants to fill the role of Computer Network Operations Specialists, also known as nation-state funded hackers.

      According to a job ad for a Computer Network Operations Specialist, a student or graduate will have to have, or soon have, “a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree incorporating ethical hacking, digital forensics or information security”.


    • Warrantless airport seizure of laptop “cannot be justified,” judge rules
      The US government's prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran was dealt a devastating blow by a federal judge. The judge ruled Friday that the authorities illegally seized the businessman's computer at Los Angeles International Airport as he was to board a flight home.


    • Nowhere to Run or Hide in the Technology Age
      Free tech is about much more than free software. It’s more than just being able to see and modify code and deeper than the rivalry between proprietary and FOSS or Windows versus Linux. It’s not just about computers. Free tech is also about freedom and rights, and keeping our lifestyle from being destroyed by the misuse of technology.
    • Amateurs Produce Amateur Cryptography
      Anyone can design a cipher that he himself cannot break. This is why you should uniformly distrust amateur cryptography, and why you should only use published algorithms that have withstood broad cryptanalysis. All cryptographers know this, but non-cryptographers do not. And this is why we repeatedly see bad amateur cryptography in fielded systems.


    • BitTorrent’s encrypted P2P chat app Bleep launches publicly for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac
      BitTorrent today launched its encrypted P2P chat app Bleep. You can download the first stable version for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac from bleep.pm.




  • Civil Rights



    • The CIA Did Not Drug Detainees Before Interrogations, Says the CIA
      The CIA subjected "war on terror" detainees it held captive at black site prisons to sleep deprivation, rectal feeding, waterboarding, ice-water baths, painful stress positions, beatings, mock executions, mock burials, and threats of sexual abuse.


    • Government Tells Jeffrey Sterling He's No General Petraeus; Defends 20-Year Sentence Recommendation
      No sooner had General Petraeus received a mild scolding for handing over pages and pages of classified information to his biographer/mistress than the defense team handling Jeffrey Sterling's case saw a point of entry to argue that the proposed sentence of 19-24 years in prison was too severe.

      Petraeus, who was also a CIA official, received two years probation and a $100,000 fine. The defense has asked for something more in line with recent prosecutions of whistleblowers and leakers: something between Petraeus and John Kiriakou (30 months), as it were.


    • Prosecutors: Ex-CIA officer in leak case is different from Petraeus, others
      Federal prosecutors on Thursday defended their use of the Espionage Act to prosecute a former CIA officer who leaked information to a New York Times reporter and suggested it was “mistaken” for him to receive a sentence far below what federal guidelines call for because he gave materials to a journalist, rather than a foreign government.


    • CIA leaker Sterling sentenced to 42 months in prison
      A federal judge sentenced ex-CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling Monday to serve 42 months in prison for leaking to a New York Times reporter details of a clandestine agency program aimed more than a decade ago at impeding Iran from developing nuclear weapons.


    • Bangladesh blogger Ananta Bijoy Das hacked to death
      A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-eastern Bangladesh in the country's third such deadly attack since the start of the year.


    • Bangladeshi secular blogger Ananta Bijoy Das hacked to death in third fatal attack this year
      Ananta Bijoy Das, a Bangladeshi writer known for advocating science and secularism, was hacked to death by masked men wielding machetes while on his way to work Tuesday morning.

      Das died instantly in the attack, police in Sylhet city told the Associated Press. He is the third Bangladeshi writer to be killed in less than four months.


    • Ralph Nader
      Consumer advocate and political reformer Ralph Nader speaks with Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff about his latest book “Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President 2001-2015;” the conversation covers topics from trade treaties and Democratic presidential candidates, to Gaza, Israel and AIPAC.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint
      With a month left before net neutrality complaints can be filed to the Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers are continuing to sign agreements to prevent network congestion and a potential scolding from regulators.


    • Lawsuits and Opposition Aren't Slowing Down the FCC's Net Neutrality Overhaul
      In March of this year, the FCC's 400-page net neutrality order arrived, and made waves because of the agency's vote to reclassify broadband as a regulated telecommunications service. The FCC argued that it created "clear and enforceable rules" to protect consumers, but broadband providers and others bristled at the regulation proposals.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Small ISP stands up to Rightscorp’s “piracy fishing expedition” and wins
        Online copyright enforcer Rightscorp contacts alleged Internet pirates, sometimes on their cell phones, and demands $20 per song from them. It's a business that has led to tens of thousands of payment demands, but Rightscorp is far from profitable.


      • Rightscorp Fails in Bid to Unmask Pirates Using DMCA
        Anti-piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has failed in its bid to unmask alleged Internet pirates. The company attempted to use the DMCA to force ISP Birch Communications to expose its customers' identities but the company stood strong. A federal judge in Atlanta has now ruled in favor of the ISP by quashing Rightscorp's subpoena.








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