08.03.13
Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft at 7:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Adding a monopoly layer that nobody asked for
Summary: Another reason to boycott UEFI, which is a headache to many and benefit to almost nobody except Intel and Microsoft
As regular critics of UEFI, especially for its ‘secure’ boot enablement of Microsoft antitrust abuses, it seemed reasonable for us to point out this rant from a UEFI proponent, Dr. Garrett.
“Enable freedom, not lockdown.”“32-bit UEFI,” he rants “Just say what on earth were you thinking, please, no, can’t you find a solution that doesn’t involve me getting tetanus jabs.”
The rant is about shipping of inadequate UEFI implementations, which cause unnecessary problems. Why use UEFI anyway? What are the benefits to most users? Remote network booting? No. It’s just unwanted complications marketed as progress. To most users, less is more. Use Coreboot. Enable freedom, not lockdown. When I pointed this out to the President of the UEFI Forum he did not really have a counterpoint.
Given Microsoft’s strong relationship with the NSA we now know that the NSA can brick hardware with UEFI. Remotely even, provided it also runs Windows. That is a massive risk to tolerate. Boycott UEFI. █
Found circulating in JoinDiaspora
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Posted in Google, Patents, Red Hat at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Red Hat and Google continue to be among those who disappoint by losing focus
Sen. Carter Glass (D—Va.) and Rep. Henry B. Steagall (D—Ala.-3), the co-sponsors of the Glass–Steagall Act which brought real reform after the Wall Street collapse
Summary: Distinguishing between those who say they want “patent progress” and those who actually want and pursue proper progress
“Good” patent lawyers are as few as “good” software patents (we wrote about this quite recently); there’s none. Lawyers are devouring companies and organisations that oppose software patents and then hire the wrong people to help out. Those people profit from the mess and they protect their new job by never resolving the mess. There is some new EFF initiative called Trolling Effects, which is being used to focus attention on patent trolls. As one site, Patent Progress, put it:
Many a small business has been there. In the owner’s hands a letter filled with tons of legalese that makes little sense. They stare at the letter shocked, trying to figure out what the hell they are being accused of doing and how it means they might be liable for millions of dollars. It is becoming too real a story in America today – the plight of the patent demand letter recipient.
Here’s more on this initiative, which the EFF is behind. To quote: “Wednesday also brought the launch of EFF’s Trolling Effects, a crowd-sourced database of patent demand letters, to bring transparency and attention to that troubling practice. And yesterday Matt Levy also pointed out that comedian Marc Maron (who was sued by Personal Audio, the infamous podcast patent troll) gave a great explanation and framing of the patent troll issue in a recent interview.”
The EFF’s approach towards patents as been somewhat ambivalent. Some lawyers there target just patent trolls, whereas others address (or claims to address) issues of scope. Patent Progress merely reports about the EFF, but it too seems to have lost focus on scope. As this site points out, “Comedian Marc Maron Gets That Patent Trolls Are Failed Inventors Trying to Hit the Lottery” (here is a famous example), but why focus so much on trolls? Another new post from this site says:
Yesterday, I attended a panel sponsored by the American Constitution Society, “Patent Assertion Entities: Helping or Hurting Innovation?” It was a great panel discussion, but, of course, there wasn’t time to respond to some points that needed responding to.
Rob Tiller too focuses on trolls. In Red Hat’s platform he points out:
Patent reform is hot! The momentum seems to be building in Congress for patent reform to address the problem of nefarious patent exploiters (also known as non-practicing entities, patent assertion entities, and, less politely, trolls). As previously noted here, there are a number of serious legislative proposals circulating, and the President is pressing for new legislation.
Why doesn’t Tiller ever target software patents properly? We highlighted this recurring pattern before (his tune three or four years ago was different]). Doesn’t Red Hat want them over with? Maybe its own lawyers are creating a self-feeding mechanism which keeps them necessary? This sure seems to have happened in Google, as we noted several times before. The EFF too seems to have hired too many lawyers. The real problem is patent scope and as the new article “Broward firm ordered to pay $8.1 million for software patent violations” helps show, the problem is software patents, not just those which trolls are using. Becker gets it and even some writers at the Washington Post get it (citing him), motivating posts like this new one that says:
Dislike of software patents is no longer confined to wild-eyed Redditors and Mark Cuban. The Washington Post points us to two Nobel Prize-winning economists who have recently come out against the very idea of software patents and have said that their existence is actually inhibiting innovation more than helping. Economist Gary Becker, for one, acknowledges that some software developers will lose their incentive to create software if they aren’t guaranteed intellectual property protections. However, he thinks this is an acceptable price to pay if it means freeing other software developers from the burden of high legal expenses.
Patrick Hall, who recently criticised software patents, is being slammed by patent lawyers who complain that Wired dared to give one single columns to a non-lawyer. Meanwhile, reminding us that not just trolls are a pain, Motorola gets another day in court after Microsoft sued:
This was the hearing on their RAND dispute building up to the second part of the trial in this litigation which is set to begin on August 26th, and, as is typical before a trial, both sides brought motions for summary judgment or partial summary judgment. There was a trial already, part one, with the judge only, no jury, and he set a RAND rate Microsoft should pay to Motorola, a very low rate. But there is a second trial coming up in August, this time with a jury, on whether or not Motorola breached its RAND obligations, which is what Microsoft claims, and if so, whether Microsoft should receive damages and attorneys fees. Motorola filed a motion for partial summary judgment [PDF] on those issues. Here’s Microsoft’s opposition [PDF].
FRAND is about patent cartels, not trolls, and these too are a problem. Let’s remember to focus on the real issue and not a red herring. █
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08.02.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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(Sacramento, CA, USA: July 31, 2013) – The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced a Corporate Membership Program for partner organizations interested in promoting growth opportunities in Linux and Open Source Software. The program enables partner organizations to directly develop and recruit Linux and Open Source talent through targeted multi-media, product promotions and other educational resources provided to LPI alumni and other Open Source professionals. Organizations such as Cloudera (http://www.cloudera.com), Dice (http://www.dice.com), Medialinx IT-Academy (http://www.medialinx-academy.de), oDesk (http://www.oDesk.com), Open Source Software Institute (http://oss-institute.org), Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com) and uCertify (http://www.ucertify.com) have recently joined this new initiative.
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Microsoft has two cash cows – Windows and Office suite. These two applications have made Microsoft the monopoly in the computing world with almost 80-90% people using these two applications on their desktop computers.
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Linux System is considered to be free from Viruses and Malware. What is the truth behind this notion and how far it is correct ? We will be discussing all these stuffs in this article.
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Chennai: A team of 300-odd youngsters will soon be seen on the streets of Tamil Nadu with their laptops.
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Server
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oday the Linux Foundation released a short analysis paper on 20 years of data collected by the Top500.org supercomputer list. Released each June and November, the Top500 list has ranked the world’s fastest supercomputers since 1993.
The Linux community has delighted in watching Linux become the dominant OS running on Top500 machines over the past decade. And there has been no shortage of stories chronicling the rise of Linux in supercomputing. But we found the data tells another, less obvious story as well.
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IBM announced the addition of a new PowerLinux server for analytics and cloud computing workloads.
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When you have more than a few Linux servers in the data center, manual management is no longer an option. Check out Linux server management options such as Spacewalk to administer patch enrollment and updates.
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When most of us think about supercomputers, we think about closet-sized machines loaded with exotic and expensive technologies developed at great expense. However, if you actually look at the state of supercomputing, off-the-shelf components and open source platforms are playing an important role. In fact, The Linux Foundation has released an analysis paper on 20 years of data collected by the Top500.org supercomputer list. The Top500 list has ranked the world’s fastest supercomputers since 1993. The paper shows that Linux has become the dominant OS running on Top500 machines over the past decade.
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IBM’s latest PowerLinux server arrives this week along with new software and middleware for big data, analytics and Java applications in open cloud environments.
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Big Blue bolstered its Linux on Power initiative with the new high-performance PowerLinux server as well as new software and middleware for embracing big data, analytics and next-generation Java applications in an open cloud environment.
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Like many new technologies, the Linux operating system got its big break in high performance computing. There is a symbiotic relationship between Linux and HPC that seems natural and normal today, and the Linux Foundation, which is the steward of the Linux kernel and other important open source projects – and, importantly, the place where Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, gets his paycheck – thinks that Linux was more than a phenomenon on HPC iron. The organization goes so far as to say that Linux helped spawn the massive expansion in supercomputing capacity we have seen in the past two decades.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Simon Phipps interviews five key people at OSCON 2013.
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Kernel Space
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Team members working alongside upstream (and downstream) developer Greg k-h have decided to no longer request stabilization of the vanilla sources kernel. Team members and arch teams (understandably) are unable to keep up with the 1-2 weekly kernel releases (per version), and therefore will now direct users to always run the latest vanilla sources, or to run gentoo-sources for a fully Gentoo supported kernel. We will continue to do our best effort to request and get stabilized g-s versions.
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http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_310_reiser4&num=1
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Graphics Stack
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After a delay, NVIDIA released today its SHIELD portable gaming console that’s powered by Android.
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The Nouveau driver project is back to needing reverse-engineering data dumps on select NVIDIA graphics processors, which will help in some new re-clocking work. If you’re just a Linux desktop user but wanting to help out this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver project, providing MMIOtrace dumps is a great way to contribute.
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There isn’t any major new patch-set to share today regarding PRIME support for Wayland, but a new video has been posted to YouTube that illustrates the experimental PRIME support on Wayland.
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Applications
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Not so very long ago, shipping goods over long distances was a very different matter than it is today. Numerous types of products were often jumbled together in a single vessel, sometimes with untoward consequences. Stack the bricks next to the bananas, for example, and you may have a mess on your hands when the shipment arrives.
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One of the software, I have been very fond of recently is minitube. It is a software that lets you watch youtube videos.
What makes minitube different from say a browser, is its ability to subscribe to channels without having to login. Also, it fetches metadata of new videos from your subscriptions, that you haven’t yet watched.
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Proprietary
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The third party Google Drive syncing app, Insync has finally lost it’s beta tag for the Linux version of it’s client and it brings with it some brilliant features which the native Google Drive application simply doesn’t emulate.
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Talygen, the world leader in Business Management Automation, has added a Desktop Screenshot feature to its advanced Linux Desktop Tool to give Companies and their Clients even more options to audit and review the work being performed by Employees
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Today in Open Source: Run OS X applications in Linux? Plus: Leadwerks Linux game development, and a free iOS 7-like control center app for Android
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Games
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Further to my previous post showing off the Planet Editor for Planetary Annihilation under Linux I have now recorded a video showing off creating a planet and then playing a quick game against the AI on it, also the developers have just done a new live stream talking about new stuff heading in! I even got a mention in the live stream, cool!
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You wake up in a desolated and dangerous world, where almost everything is a deadly trap. Will you be fast and clever enough to survive? This game mixes several classical gameplay-styles such as Tower Defense, Multi-player cooperation, Destructible world and Economics.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I was involved in an email/post conversation about the discussion of an XP like session for Lubuntu, which I didn’t understand because the Lubuntu default interface is already so much like XP.
I understood the need for perhaps a Mac like session or another OS because familiarity is important. I didn’t agree with both a Lubuntu session and an XP session considering the similarities.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Season of KDE is a community outreach program, much like Google Summer of Code that has been hosted by the KDE community for five years straight.
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Google Earth is a great mapping tool, hugely detailed and packed with features. Like Street View, for instance, which helps you navigate millions of miles of road all around the world, and would probably justify installing the program all on its own.
If you don’t like the program, though — or, maybe, you just don’t like Google — then there are some excellent alternatives available. The open source and cross-platform Marble, for instance, can’t compete with the photos and the imagery of Google Earth, but is still extremely powerful and has a great deal to offer.
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Through the new Project Neon initiative, daily builds of the next-generation KDE stack — KDE Frameworks 5 — can be easily installed via Debian packages for Kubuntu.
Project Neon is a Kubuntu community project powered on Ubuntu’s Launchpad to provide daily packages of the latest KDE Frameworks 5 state.
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In recent versions of Dolphin, the view sometimes looked like this just after entering a directory.
Some of the files and sub-directories have “unknown” icons, which are replaced by the correct icons later.
This will not happen any more in Dolphin 4.11.
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At KDE España we have started the ball rolling to cellebrate the release for 4.11 by starting the organization of the Barcelona event. Right now it feels pretty lonely at http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.11.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Karen was speaking at the opening of GNOME’s annual European conference (GUADEC), she said, “We are excited to have the Linux Foundation join our Advisory Board, and look forward to working closely with them. Their membership in the Advisory Board is a recognition of the value that the GNOME Project brings to the GNU/Linux ecosystem, which is something that we hope to enhance even further in the future.”
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Opening GUADEC 2013 today, Karen Sandler, GNOME Executive Director, announced that the Linux Foundation has become the latest member of GNOME’s Advisory Board. The Advisory Board is a body of stakeholder organizations and companies who support the GNOME Project by providing funding and expert consultation. It includes IBM, Google, Intel and the Free Software Foundation, among others.
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Members of the GNOME project are gathering in Brno, Czech Republic, for their annual European conference (GUADEC). The event starts on Thursday 1 August. There will be four core days of presentations, including talks on Linux gaming, Wayland, design, GTK+, documentation, LibreOffice, application sandboxing, and much much more. The full schedule can be found on the GUADEC website.
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My short term goal is to make a 3.8.x and 3.10.x releases with some fixes I’ve made.
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The development team behind the GNOME Boxes project announced a few days ago the fifth unstable release of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.10 application, a GNOME utility that allows users to manage remote or virtual systems.
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When it comes to the choice of reviewing a distro running XFCE or one running KDE there is no contest. I much prefer to use XFCE over KDE. I have never been a KDE fan.
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New Releases
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Today we are releasing OS/4 OpenLinux 13.6 and unveiling our new hardware initiative. This release comes with a lot of bug fixes and application updates. We also have brought new functionality and services.
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Today, August 1, 2013, the Arch Linux 2013.08.01 has been made available for download on mirrors worldwide (see download link at the end of the article).
As usual, at the beginning of every month, the Arch Linux developers cook an updated ISO image of the popular Arch Linux operating system, which contains a new kernel and updated packages ready for those who want to install Arch Linux on new machines.
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SMS 2.0.5 adds the Fluxbox window manager, upgrades the kernel, and brings many more improvements to the tiny server distro
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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This new Mandriva ServicePlace sports a brand new interface that enables a more compelling experience for customers. Its combination of tiled design and new colours will provide customers with clearer choices and enhance their overall experience of the ServicePlace.
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Since last week’s server issues over at the OpenMandriva camp, the beta has been delayed a bit as well as overshadowing what would have been an anniversary announcement. In the meantime, over at the openSUSE project, YaST Developer Lukas Ocilka blogged today that the migration of YaST to Ruby is complete with the last modules being automatically converted.
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Red Hat Family
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All these Silicon Valley marketing buzzwords can make the non-techie investor’s eyes cross, but Red Hat certainly seems set for robust growth in the future — at least if the consistent growth in net income during the last few quarters can continue. However, Red Hat has no time to rest on its laurels. Cloud computing, despite being one of the hot tech trends of the young decade, has yet to displace the server infrastructure most large companies still depend on for both Web traffic and intranet purposes.
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It’s all good. Individuals, governments, businesses, organizations large and small can all benefit from using FLOSS because the licence under which the software is distributed includes permission to run, examine, modify and distribute the code, essentially empowering the users rather than taxing them. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux, the universal operating system because folks can get most of what they need from a single place and yet not be locked in to a single supplier. Debian takes FLOSS from thousands of sources and distributes it in a tidy, easy to use package. RedHat is good, too, but it does cost more to use.
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Openfiler, a Linux distribution designed for building Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, is being ported to CentOS, a distribution which itself is derived from Red Hat Linux. That means when the port is completed, Openfiler will be using the yum package management system.
The current version of Openfiler uses the Conary package management system, a system developed by rPath, Inc., a technology outfit based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Debian Family
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Longtime Debian Developer Martin Michlmayr was named as one of 6 winners of the 2013 O’Reilly Open Source Awards. This Award recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today in Open Source: Ubuntu Edge fundraising stalled? Plus: Gnash flash player stuck, and the state of the Linux desktop
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Canonical’s bold effort to crowdsource $32 million to fund its Ubuntu Edge ‘superphone’ has generated a wave of excitement since its launch seven days ago. The company’s marketing team has been pulling out all the stops to try and reach its lofty target, offering a number of discounted ‘perks’ to try and tempt backers, while Mark Shuttleworth presided over lively discussion on Reddit to espouse the phone’s benefits. Ubuntu fanantics seem to have heeded the call, pledging exactly $7,297,624 at the time of writing to give Canonical a realistic chance of hitting its campaign target, but while this is encouraging it’s yet to entice a single backer from one of its key audiences – the enterprise.
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If you want to see desktop Linux finally get some traction with the unwashed public, Mark Shuttleworth is more likely to be the guy who’ll make that happen than anyone who’s come along so far. He’s a capitalist and for better or worse this is a capitalist world. He knows that nothing big is going to get done on this market oriented planet without the art of the deal and some hustle. He also understands something about fit and finish, which was always lacking in desktop Linux until he came along.
For too long, we’ve been sitting around wringing our hands, sometimes proclaiming this to finally be the year of the Linux desktop without doing anything to make it happen and sometimes bemoaning the fact that the world still hasn’t discovered Linux as the secret to computing happiness. The thing is, the world never knows anything about secrets until they’re not secret anymore. We’ve been wanting Linux to just “catch on,” while we’ve been blaming the OEMs for not automatically pushing our home grown geek-centric distros with the same elan they put behind their bread and butter Windows.
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At $32 million, Canonical’s audacious, ambitious crowdfunding project for the new Ubuntu phone is worth sponsoring
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With two operating system developers experiencing attacks on the same weekend, one has opened up, shared exactly what it knows, and returned its services to life, while the other has stayed silent.
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ne of the most interesting aspects of the Ubuntu Edge is that it will run both Linux and Android, instead of solely running Linux like you would expect it to. To start, people running the phone in Android mode will access Ubuntu through the Ubuntu for Android app; further down the line, Canonical will push out a native desktop version of Ubuntu for the Edge.
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Alexey Miller, the chief executive officer of Russian natural gas exporter Gazprom, seemed to be having a megalomaniacal moment. On July 16 he took to the company’s website and demanded a tablet computer that could mimic all of the functions of a PC. While Miller elicited some ribbing on Twitter because he offered to pay $3.7 million for such a device, that’s nothing compared with Mark Shuttleworth’s pitch.
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Flavours and Variants
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KDE-based Ubuntu flavor Kubuntu is now open for outside donations. The distribution was earlier funded by Canonical, but then as the company shifted focus towards mobile platform. Jonathan Riddell, the lead Kubuntu developer, who was hired by Canonical to develop Kubuntu was reassigned to other projects. Riddell quit Canonical and joined Blue Systems, which funds other GNU/Linux based systems such as Linux Mint, to continue his work on Kubuntu.
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Rikomagic UK announced two new versions of its MK802 HDMI stick computers pre-installed with Linux instead of Android, starting at 65 UK Pounds (about $100). The Cloudsto MK802III LE and MK802IV LE mini-PCs run on dual- and quad-core Rockchip processors and run a lightweight Ubuntu derivative called Picuntu.
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MSC launched a COM Express Type 6 module based on 4th Generation “Haswell” Intel Core processors. The MSC C6B-8S runs the 2.4GHz, quad-core Core i7-4700EQ processor, accepts up to 16GB SODIMM SDRAM, offers interfaces including SATA, USB 2.0 and 3.0, and three DisplayPort/HDMI/DVI ports with triple-display support, expands with PCI Express, and has a ready-to-go Linux BSP.
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Lego Group announced that its $350 hackable Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot will ship Sept. 1. Lego also unveiled a dozen new downloadable fan-built designs for the educational and hobbyist robot, which runs Linux on an ARM9 processor, and supports Bluetooth remote access via Android and iOS devices.
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Gumstix unveiled a major expansion of its Geppetto drag-and-drop custom embedded board design platform. In addition to supporting the design of custom baseboards for Gumstix’s Overo computer-on-modules, the browser-based service now lets customers create custom Linux-compatible SBCs based on the TI Sitara AM3354 SoC and receive assembled boards within three weeks.
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Robofun Create has constructed a camera based on the latest Raspberry Pi SBC — but it’s no ordinary digital camera. The “Sprite Raspberry Pi Camera” was created in response to a Sprite marketing campaign challenging hackers to build a camera that automatically inserts the Sprite logo watermark on every photo it takes.
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Trying to choose between the Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black? This article will help you decide which one is best for the job.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung has responded to allegations made by AnandTech, claiming that it is innocent of any wrongdoing. Yesterday, the site reported that Samsung engineered the Galaxy S4′s benchmarking performance by allowing the GPU to run a higher clock speed than normal (533MHz vs. 480MHz), giving an 11 percent boost that users would not be able to attain under normal conditions. Samsung’s response? “[We] did not use a specific tool on purpose to achieve higher benchmark scores.”
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Samsung is seemingly so desperate to promote the 2013 Samsung Smart App Challenge, they were willing to risk the harsh backlash now raging against them from the developer community. A digital marketing company reportedly hired to promote SSAC has been offering US$500 to users of Q&A programming site StackOverflow to get the word out.
According to Delyan Kratunov, an Android developer, he was approached through his personal blog by John Yoon, chief commercial officer at digital marketing company Fllu, about a “small partnership” to promote the 2013 Smart App Challenge. Kratunov turned them down, and posted the entire exchange for all to see.
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Android
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Google owned Motorola is marking its comeback as a leading smartphone player with the launch of Moto X. The good news is it won’t be locked to any one player and will be available to all major carriers including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. The phone will be sold for $199 (16GB) for 2 years contract. A 32GB model will also be available for $249.
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App Annie stats show Google Play is becoming a significant market for paid apps and in-app purchases though
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Android’s fragmentation is a bane and a boon. Developers have a dizzying number of devices to test if they want to make their apps available to a large swath of the market. For consumers, though, fragmentation means choice — there’s pretty much an Android for everyone. “The availability of Android in open source … has been a key ingredient in its market dominance,” said IDC’s Al Hilwa.
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Whether you’re an iOS veteran testing the Android waters with a Nexus 7 tablet or a non-techie that just ended up with a Samsung smartphone because that’s what the Verizon store recommended, you’ve now joined the ranks of hundreds of millions of other Android users.
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SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google’s Android mobile operating system is sitting pretty on eight out of 10 smartphones worldwide, according to statistics from Strategy Analytics.
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SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google’s Android mobile operating system is sitting pretty on eight out of 10 smartphones worldwide, according to statistics from Strategy Analytics.
The market research firm has released its second quarter global smartphone figures, which reveal that Android held a 79.5 percent share of the smartphone market during April through June, up from 69.5 percent in the same quarter last year.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Google’s release of the new Nexus 7 again highlights an area of concern for the overall Android ecosystem: That tablet’s hardware seems to be well ahead of many of its competitors.
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It wasn’t long ago that the iPad was unquestionably the leader in the tablet market — if not the entire market itself.
But the Android ecosystem has proven that it could catch up, thanks especially to entries that have debuted in the last two years — namely Amazon’s Kindle Fire brand and Google’s own Nexus 7 series built with mobile OEM partners.
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Great screen, fast internals make this refreshed tablet a great deal at any price.
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The SlateBook x2 is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra 4 processor, the same processor that powers many smartphones and tablet computers. Like so many of those smartphones and tablets, it is also powered by the Android operating system.
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You don’t have to contribute your code to the world to gain advantages from open source methods. An expert offers suggestions on how to use open source practices to run internal code bases effectively.
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Before I came to Red Hat as a Social Media Marketing intern, I didn’t know a thing about open source. During the application process, I did some research into what Red Hat does and what this company is all about. I found all sorts of information about Linux, software, technology, and more.
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In the community of media and journalism innovators, it is commonly accepted that releasing software with an open-source license is the best way to maximize the chance that others will use your code. Yet, by any measure, the vast majority of open-source software goes nowhere.
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One year ago, without any discernable tech skills or any practical experience within the fields of open hardware, free software or free culture, I embarked on a project to try to live as ‘open source’ as possible for a whole year. Rather than buying proprietary solutions to my day-to-day problems, I chose to hunt down, adapt or develop open source options. I did this to document the experience in writing and videos, to test out how well the open source idea could apply to areas outside of software, and to show the experience of a newbie taking his first tentative steps into the collaborative world of the commons.
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The Open source movement is playing a remarkable role in pushing technology and making it available to all. The success of Linux is also an example how open source can translate into a successful business model. Open source is pretty much mainstream now and in the coming years, it could have a major footprint across cutting edge educational technology and aerospace (think DIY drones).
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Web Browsers
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Few months ago I had made two posts “Making Fancy GNOME Apps with NodeJS, MongoDB and WebKit!” and “Run GNOME + HTML5 Applications over Network” that were using GtkWebkit on the top of a NodeJS instance. Furthermore I was illustrating how we can create Apps that can be Client/Server at the same time, and connected between them with WebSockets.
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Mozilla
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Security for Mozilla and Blackberry is set to get boost thanks to a little Peach Fuzzing.
Peach is an open source Fuzzer project that is now set to benefit from the joint efforts of Mozilla and Blackberry. Fuzzing is a well known security technique in which fault code is injected into a program to see what happens.
“At CanSecWest, one of the many conferences BlackBerry sponsors, we had an opportunity for our researchers and Mozilla researchers to meet and discuss security automation tools,” Adrian Stone, Director of Response for BlackBerry, told Datamation. “During that discussion, we determined both companies are working on similar security research projects, and we identified an opportunity to protect our mutual customers and help bolster industry security overall.”
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Fuzzing, or fault injection, can be used on any type of program input, and it can be extended to the contents of databases or shared memory. It can indicate which parts of a program require special attention such as a code audit or rewrite. Security experts also use fuzz testing to find bugs such as assertion failures — and when coupled with a memory debugger, to locate memory leaks.
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Mayer has been a vocal part of the privacy movement. Although top adtech lobbyist Randall Rothenberg described the Stanford grad student as “just a volunteer who hangs around the offices” at Mozilla, Mayer is the guy who turned off third-party cookies (which track online activity to better target ads) in new versions of Firefox.
He is vocal about not caring if limiting tracking hurts the online ad business — especially on his Twitter account — and has been a part of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Tracking Protection Working Group.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It might be dubbed “unbreakable”, but Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux website is certainly stoppable.
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Since LibreOffice 3.3 there are more then 500 new features and improvements listed on the pages that are published with the new releases.
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LibreOffice can now connect and browser Google Drive files (but not yet released nor merged 
). Although creation a session the first time takes around 3-4 seconds since we have to pass a number of steps of OAuth2 . Still, it doesn’t redirect you to a web browser like other applications. In case of Google Drive file formats, LO converts it automatically to ODF or other compatible formats before opening. Then when you save, it automatically converts back to Google formats. Handy, is n’t it? But there is currently a bug in CMIS file picker which prevents us from opening a file without an extension. We are working to fix it soon. You can also create file and folder directly in the file picker dialog.
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Education
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Knowing everything about any open source project is impossible. If you’re going to deal with a large community, you’re not going to know all the details. This is unlike reaching courses where everything is black-and-white, and there are plenty of reference texts. If you’re going to teach open source, you’re going to have to change the way you teach. Rather than a lecturer, you’re a mentor.
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Funding
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Earlier today, Michael Ossmann, founder of Great Scott Gadgets and creator of the Ubertooth One Bluetooth development platform, unleashed his latest project on Kickstarter to staggering success: in just a few hours, the campaign exceeded its $80,000 goal with no signs of slowing down. Michael’s success is yet another in a long line of extremely popular open hardware campaigns on Kickstarter, and once again proves how the community is willing to support open products.
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BSD
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Yesterday I published results that show NVIDIA’s Linux driver is very competitive with Microsoft Windows 8 when it comes to OpenGL gaming performance. It turns out that the NVIDIA BSD driver, which is still mostly shared common code with Linux and Solaris and Windows, pairs very well with FreeBSD’s Linux binary compatibility layer. The NVIDIA BSD performance is very good for OpenGL as shown in this article with a comparison of Windows 8 vs. Ubuntu 13.10 vs. FreeBSD 9.1. In fact, for some OpenGL workloads the Linux games are running faster on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.1 than Ubuntu!
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Licensing
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Historically speaking, law is a tangled mess of arcane language wrapped around a maze of pitfalls and risk, and lawyers were the only ones who could safely wield it. But a new Austin startup wants to change that. Lawful.ly, founded by Chris Murphy and Bradley Clark, a couple of entrepreneurs who are both attorneys and IT guys, is a law crowdsource website. Users can get free legal documents as they can on other sites, but instead of just blank forms, the documents will be explained by commentary about what they mean and how to use them from lawyers and other experts.
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s designed to look like a high school science fair, but the second annual New York Times Open Source Science Fair is actually for adults. The event displays some of the most innovative ideas being built on open source software, which is software that is free for anyone to use and manipulate.
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The idea of building your own airplane from scratch may seem like a crazy idea, but a handful of engineers (and a legion of volunteers) believe anyone with some consumer manufacturing tools, DIY skills and a taste for adventure should have the opportunity to it a go.
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Open Access/Content
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Six months after MIT vowed to conduct a ” thorough analysis” of any role it might have played in the prosecution that preceded Aaron Swartz’s suicide, the college has released a report absolving itself of any wrongdoing.
Although MIT called in a Cambridge police detective to help investigate the massive downloading of academic journal articles from the JSTOR database to a laptop on MIT’s network, the school never “call[ed] in the feds” or requested criminal prosecution of Swartz, the report said.
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The case of “U.S. vs. Swartz,” dating back two years, was doggedly pursued by federal prosecutors who sought jail time against the 26-year-old computer innovator Aaron Swartz [1] for his alleged theft of a massive amount of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database service available through the MIT campus network at the time. Swartz committed suicide in January shortly before his trial was set to begin this year, and his death was a shock that prompted widespread media coverage.
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Open Hardware
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The Intel-backed MinnowBoard.org project has shipped its first open source SBC for $199. The MinnowBoard runs a Yocto-compatible Angstrom Linux build on a 1GHz Intel Atom E640 with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and provides SATA, gigabit Ethernet, USB, HDMI, and PCI Express interfaces, as well as stackable expansion boards called Lures.
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Programming
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Software configuration management (SCM) isn’t just about IT, but in the space I have, I want to very briefly look at some issues in selecting the right version control system (VCS), a component of SCM, for you.
To start with, people often overlook the fact that IT is a fashion industry – but fashion isn’t a very good driver for choosing tools that may be critical to your business.
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Metaphorically speaking, the size of the workforce about to occupy Twitter’s first-ever Silicon Valley outpost in Sunnyvale is quite a few characters shy of a full tweet.
The 8,000-square-foot office, which was first reported in May, can accommodate 40 or 50 employees, a drop in the bucket for a company that employed more than 900 as of 2012. Now some of those staffers may soon be on the premises.
[...]
…must be “proficient with one or more: gdb, perf, oprofile, wireshark” and other developer tools for Linux, a computer operating system.
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Security
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Tomorrow at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, the Pwnie Express will officially unleash Pwn Plug R2, the next generation in its arsenal of penetration testing and hacking hardware. Ars got an exclusive rundown in advance on the device from Dave Porcello, founder and CEO of Pwnie Express.
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Researcher de-anonymizes forum members who post extremist views.
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An FBI program launched this week will provide companies a secure and standard way to report cybersecurity attacks in real time, an agency official said Tuesday.
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This week we have the DefCon 20 and Black Hat computer security conferences in Las Vegas — reasons enough for me to do 2-3 columns about computer security. These columns will be heading in a direction I don’t think you expect, but first please indulge my look back at the origin of these two conferences, which were started by the same guy, Jeff Moss, known 20 years ago as The Dark Tangent. Computer criminals and vigilantes today topple companies and governments, but 20 years ago it was just kids, or seemed to be. I should know, because I was there — the only reporter to attend Def Con 1.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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On the one hand, General Abdel-Fattah al Sisi’s call for the Egyptian people to support a campaign of violence against “terrorists” can only be seen as a dangerous and shameful attempt to legitimate the slaughter of scores of supporters of the former Morsi government. The implementation of an interim constitution, the appointment of former Mubarak officials to high office, the reinstitution of Mubarak’s abusive State Security Investigations Service and overall, the institution of military rule including media censorship, political arrests, and the imprisonment of Morsi himself are deeply troubling.
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Washington’s role is a story not worth telling
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More than a year has passed since a DEA-assisted drug war operation in the Honduran Moskitia killed four indigenous Miskitu civilians, and relatives of the victims are still looking for answers.
Responses have been few and far between. Honduran judicial authorities highlight a lack of cooperation from the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, impeding their investigation. A leaked State Department memo suggests high-level interference in the United States’ own investigation. And a local police official in the remote Moskitia region in northeastern Honduras told Truthout that destruction of evidence by the DEA is a regular occurrence in the area.
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Transparency Reporting
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Covering the verdict announcement on last night’s NBC Nightly News (7/30/13), anchor Brian Williams said that Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski had “covered this story from the start.”
But you’d have a hard time believing that when you heard the way he described the Collateral Murder video, one of the most talked-about aspects of Manning’s trial. It is the gunsight footage from a July 12, 2007, U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists, along with an unknown number of other Iraqis (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/7/10).
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The sentencing phase of the Bradley Manning trial currently underway is where the government is attempting to show the real world harm done by Manning and WikiLeaks. They’re not having much luck–but perhaps they should call in Time columnist Joe Klein.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Google’s climate scientists are not happy with the company’s political support for climate science denying Senator James Inhofe (R-OK).
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Two young children are forbidden from speaking about Marcellus Shale or fracking for the rest of their lives. The court action stems from a settlement in a high-profile Marcellus Shale lawsuit in western Pennsylvania.
The two children were 7 and 10 years old at the time the Hallowich family settled a nuisance case against driller Range Resources in August 2011. The parents, Chris and Stephanie, had been outspoken critics of fracking, saying the family became sick from the gas drilling activity surrounding their Washington County home.
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Conservationist’s faced a crushing blow last month as two butterfly species native to Florida were declared extinct.
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Finance
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The American economy is increasingly delivering security and prosperity to only a tiny fraction of the population.
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Official account of what many believe was British central bank’s most shameful episode revealed more than 70 years after event
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Anti-imperialista Summit taking place in this city will include in its final declaration a claim to end the U.S. blockade against Cuba, and the release of the antiterrorist fighters unjustly held in that country, according to a press release.
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A New York jury has found former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre liable for fraud in a complex mortgage deal that cost investors $1bn (£661m).
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This week marked the four-year anniversary of the last time Congress increased the minimum wage — from $5.15 in 2007 to $7.25 in 2009. Groups demonstrated across the country, demanding increases at both the state and federal level. President Obama pledged that he would continue to press for an increase in his economic policy speech at Knox College.
But there’s another problem: Millions of working Americans make less than minimum wage. In fact, more Americans are exempt from it than actually earn it.
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U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network Board Member Allan Sheahen discusses the guaranteed income bill with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television’s “Bottom Line.”
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The New York Post reports that there will be no criminal charges against Jon Corzine over the billion dollars of customer money used to keep MF Global afloat for a few extra days. The Post quotes “federal investigators” as saying there is no evidence of lawbreaking. Some of the evidence is detailed in the complaint filed by the CFTC recently, which you can read here.
The complaint says what happened to the money. It says that Edith O’Brien took the money out of customer accounts, knowing that this was unlawful. ¶ 62(d) For months, these federal investigators were saying that the big problem was foul-ups and mistakes in a mad rush in the back office. That is now inoperative.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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At least 77 bills to oppose renewable energy standards, support fracking and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, and otherwise undermine environmental laws were introduced in 34 states in 2013, according to a new analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org. In addition, nine states have been inspired by ALEC’s “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” to crack down on videographers documenting abuses on factory farms.
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The murder of British soldier Sgt. Lee Rigby on a London street in May received massive U.S. media attention. The brazenness of the attackers—who allegedly struck Rigby with a car in broad daylight before hacking him to death with bladed weapons—guaranteed coverage. That the crime was captured on videotape from multiple sources didn’t hurt either. All told, Lee Rigby’s London murder has been mentioned in nearly 500 U.S. newspaper and wire stories, according to a search of the Nexis news database.
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Breitbart.com quickly jumped on the story, suggesting that the Obama administration will use the program to push a social agenda: “The Obama administration has not been shy about attempting to use its influence – or taxpayer money – to push enthusiasm for its agenda, including Obamacare, nutrition, and gay rights.”
Fox stoked fears by hyping the program on multiple shows with little mention of its benefits. On the July 30 edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs commented on FoxNews.com’s report on the program, saying, “To many, that sounds purely like propaganda and mind control.”
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Censorship
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The word about the breadth of nudge censorship or default filtering is spreading. Categories such as “web forums” may well be pre-selected when adults enable filters.
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In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype — owned by Microsoft — was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company’s blog to deny it.
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Privacy
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For example, the system used 150 sites all over the world in countries such as Egypt, Australia, India, Pakistan, Russia, and France to collect e-mail addresses, phone numbers, web chat logs, and sites visited, among other things. Even in 2008, the system had the capability to show intelligence analysts “all the encrypted word documents from Iran,” for instance, or all users of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in that country.
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The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.
“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.
US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”
But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.
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That said, the audience seemed to largely be on his side, which surprised me. I had expected the tech-security crowd to be heavily anti-NSA, but occasional heckling was met with only scattered applause, whereas when Alexander retorted to “Read the Constitution!” with “I have. You should too,” the resulting ovation was loud and broad.
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Intelligence officials today released top secret internal briefings they had provided to members of Congress that outline the dragnet phone call metadata surveillance program lawmakers secretly knew about but could not tell Americans when publicly voting for it.
The disclosure of the classified documents back assertions from the government, and even some members of Congress, that lawmakers were well in the loop of the dragnet surveillance program disclosed by the Guardian newspaper last month based on secret documents from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Yet lawmakers were prohibited from publicly discussing the classified program, although the House and Senate subsequently authorized the dragnet in public votes on at least two occasions without the general public’s knowledge.
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NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander’s keynote today at Black Hat USA 2013 was a tense confessional, an hour-long emotional and sometimes angry ride that shed some new insight into the spy agency’s two notorious data collection programs, inspired moments of loud applause in support of the NSA, and likewise, profane heckling that called into question the legality and morality of the agency’s practices.
Loud voices from the overflowing crowd called out Alexander on his claims that the NSA stands for freedom while at the same time collecting, storing and analyzing telephone business records, metadata and Internet records on Americans. He also denied lying to Congress about the NSA’s capabilities and activities in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism in response to such a claim from a member of the audience.
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“You lied to Congress. Why would people believe you’re not lying to us right now?”
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US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has left the Moscow airport where he had been staying since June after being granted temporary asylum.
Mr Snowden’s lawyer said he had left after receiving the papers he needed to enter Russian territory from Sheremetyevo Airport’s transit zone.
The US has charged Mr Snowden with leaking details of its electronic surveillance programmes.
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As intelligence officials came under fire over controversial National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, two senators announced that they would introduce legislation aimed at reforming the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and—in an apparent response to a recent petition from technology firms and civil liberties groups—providing more public information about government surveillance.
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Last month, we discussed whether the new Microsoft Kinect could be used as an NSA spying tool. When it comes to the microphones in Android cell phones and laptop computers, though, surveillance might not be a theoretical question. The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI can already remotely activate those microphones to record conversations.
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Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.
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Civil Rights
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People of the world rise up
Right now, people around the world are speaking of rebellion against this unjust system that not only supports our lives, but controls them. Rioting is happening on the streets of Istanbul and in Brazil, the people are rallying against inequality and poverty. That’s not to mention the ongoing protests in Europe and other parts of the world about austerity cuts. On youtube and other social media there’s much blame for our political leaders and also the bankers. But who is to blame really? And can anyone really control us? If we bring this system down, what will we replace it with?…
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Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How’d the government know what they were Googling?
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In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.
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The Home Secretary yesterday confirmed plans to regulate private investigators, including a new penalty for working as an unlicensed private investigator or supplying unlicensed investigators of a fine of up to £5,000 and up to six months in prison.
In our report earlier this year, we warned that private investigators were potentially being used to circumvent surveillance law by public authorities, and also identified their work as being a major threat to privacy where the information could be used in court if it had been obtained by improper means. We are pleased the Home Office has agreed with our recommendation to regulate private investigators.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Given that everyone was in fact arguing about money no one quite got what they wanted. But the end result was that Google made inclusion in Google News opt in, not opt out. I’m not quite sure why this was so important as anyone can opt out of Google anytime they want just by changing robots.txt. But there we have it, that was the deal: and all of the newspaper publishers have opted in.
So, the end result of this fight has been pretty much nothing. Google still shows snippets on Google News without paying anyone, the newspaper publishers still get the search engine drive traffic and, well, nothing has changed, has it?
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08.01.13
Posted in Africa, Microsoft at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: The next generation of people in the former British colony can end up colonised by Microsoft with its proprietary, NSA-ready software
Not too long ago Microsoft was seen interfering with GNU/Linux in Africa and now we see that again. Last month in Oxford I spent an hour talking to someone from South Africa and he explained to me what Microsoft was doing there. He was a Free software proponent, so he was passionate about this. He explained how gentle Microsoft bribes got Microsoft into schools in there, derailing Free software and ODF plans.
iophk told us that Microsoft is “afraid of FOSS in African schools” based on this new article which says:
Microsoft is expanding the push for so-called “white spaces” broadband to South Africa, where it will help to deploy the technology in a pilot project serving five primary and secondary schools.
The pilot project is aimed at getting schools in rural parts of the country’s northeastern Limpopo province connected to the Internet. If successful, it could give South Africa a tool that would help the country reach its goal of affordable broadband for 80% of the population by 2020.
[...]
In the South African project, Microsoft will work with the University of Limpopo, government agencies and a local network builder called Multisource. The project will set up a central white-spaces radio at the university and one at each of the five schools.
This is a backdoor plan to occupy the server and desktop side, too. Schools should be made aware that students will be spied on by the United States unless they choose freedom-respecting software. With memories of apartheid they should be able to grok freedom.
“Schools should be made aware that students will be spied on by the United States unless they choose freedom-respecting software. With memories of apartheid they should be able to grok freedom.”The problem is not just Microsoft but proprietary software, especially from the United States. The NSA must already know about a lot of back doors in US-made products because it’s eavesdropping on everyone’s E-mails — HP’s and IBM’s included — and then uses legal threats against companies until/unlesss they comply with US law and obey orders of excessive surveillance. It’s not just the PATRIOT Act.
We see a lot of it in NSA-Microsoft collusion and LeftHand back doors leave room for concern in hardware appliance (it's not just LeftHand). HP admits having back doors in storage servers by stating: “All HP StoreVirtual Storage systems are equipped with a mechanism that allows HP support to access the underlying operating system if permission and access is provided by the customer. This functionality cannot be disabled today.”
Here is more in this admission:
Hewlett-Packard has agreed that there is an undocumented administrative account in its StoreVirtual products, and is promising a patch by 17 July.
The issue, which seems to have existed since 2009, was brought to the attention of The Register by Technion, the blogger who earlier published an undocumented backdoor in the company’s StoreOnce products.
Proprietary software is malicious and dangerous. South Africa oughtn’t touch it, and especially not impose it on children. This software comes from a country that labelled Mandela “terrorists” until 2008 and provided information to aid his arrest decades ago. █
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Posted in Dell, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet more disdain and abandonment of Microsoft as a platform
Last month we wrote about OEMs dumping Windows and Microsoft’s booster Ina Fried adds another new example, which is ASUS. The ongoing attempt to use vapourware won’t work anymore (Blue is hogwash).
“The ongoing attempt to use vapourware won’t work anymore (Blue is hogwash).”Vista 8 is a total disaster and Microsoft’s results are getting harder to game [1, 2, 3], with some people who urge Microsoft to fire Ballmer. As Pogson puts it, Microsoft is “Trying To Work For A Living” now that preinstalls of Windows are weak (Android is preinstalled more times). Here are some numbers of Microsoft’s own (rebadged) hardware sales: “Microsoft’s shares took a beating following its gloomy fiscal 2013 earnings report earlier this month, in which it wrote down nearly a billion dollars on its unloved Surface RT fondleslabs. But the software giant isn’t out of the woods yet, because new details have emerged that have the full Surface picture looking even worse than was previously thought.
“In Redmond’s annual 10-K report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), published on Tuesday, the software giant reported actual Surface revenue figures for the first time – and they’re not good.”
Also note that “Microsoft managed to mow through an $898m marketing budget in just eight calendar months – and consumers still didn’t take the bait.”
An article from famed computer expert Jean-Louis Gassée says: “Last week’s Monday Note focused on Microsoft’s conversion from a divisional to a functional organization. It resulted in interesting discussions in the comments section as well as in e-mail exchanges and conversations around a couple of Valley watering holes. Some thought Microsoft’s statements had the sincerity of a death-bed conversion, others pointed to the challenges in remaking a cricket team into a football squad, most expressed doubts about Microsoft’s ability to successfully adapt to a world where the PC no longer reigns supreme.”
Either way, even Microsoft-friendly sites take notes of growing impatience at Nokia, which despite being a Microsoft pawn has openly complained about Microsoft’s failure. Interesting times. Can Dell still rescue/salvage itself? █
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Posted in Apple, Patents at 10:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some coverage about a loss of ammunition against Android and another debate about software patents, which economists do not like
Apple is going to appeal, i.e. protest the decision to kill its pinch-to-zoom patent. Apple boosters try to deny the seriousness of this verdict from the USPTO and less biased sites put it like it is. The debate about patentability of software has just returned to the trend-setting media. “Here’s why economists hate software patents,” explains the Washington Post. It starts like this: “Should software be eligible for patent protection? With litigation over software patents increasing rapidly, it’s an important question. And a growing number of economists are concluding that the answer is “no.” The latest is Gary Becker, who made the case against software patents in a recent blog post.
““Disputes over software patents are among the most common, expensive and counterproductive,” the Nobel Prize* winner wrote. “Their exclusion from the patent system would discourage some software innovations, but the saving from litigation costs over disputed patent rights would more than compensate the economy for that cost.”
“Moreover, Becker argues, “some software innovations would be encouraged because the inability to patent software will eliminate uncertainty over whether someone else with a similar patent will sue and do battle in the courts, ”a circumstance that has become increasingly common in recent years.”
We covered his take before and it is good to see this issue in the headlines again (not just patent trolls). █
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Posted in Patents at 10:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another reminder of the disparity and the difference between corporate interests and public interests when it comes to patent policy
Serving large corporations is the norm for a government that’s funded by them. Google wants a crackdown on trolls, based on this new report, but what about software patents? To quote this report: “Dozens of major U.S. companies, including Morgan Stanley, Google, Wal-Mart and Dell, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to pass bills that they said would protect new products against “extortive demands” on patents.”
“Levy writes for a good blog called “patent progress” (worth following) and he has been focusing on patent scope for quite some time.”But what about people? Corporations are not people. Why always obey the will of huge companies and not do anything about software patents? As Matt Levy put it the other day: “The only thing that would change is whether the PTO can fully review a broader set of patents. If one agrees that “patent quality” is a problem, then it only makes sense to let the experts (i.e. the PTO) help to fix that quality problem.”
Levy writes for a good blog called “patent progress” (worth following) and he has been focusing on patent scope for quite some time. Now that even cures for cancer in the form of genetic data (naturally-occurring) get patented, this is an ethical issue and this new article tells us about “An effort to build a public database of BRCA gene variants” (genetics are being patented). This is a catastrophe even greater than software patents because it kills many people. Here is a new example of software patents doing their thing:
MotionPoint Corp., a Coconut Creek-based tech company, recently lost a verdict to New York-based TransPerfect Global over patents on its website translation software.
The jury verdict was $1 million, but the impact of the verdict remains unclear.
Who benefits from this? Neither developers nor users of software. For sure it is patent scope that’s the biggest problem; the debate about the patent system got warped in recent years. █
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07.31.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Today in Open Source: Poor countries and Linux. Plus: Linux and supercomputers, and unfaithful distrohoppers
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Welcome to post number 99 on Everyday Linux User. I would like to thank everybody who has read and contributed to the blog since its inception in 2012.
Now the headline is a real “Bazinga” of a headline. Everybody wants something for free so I know you are all waiting for the catch.
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A couple of days ago, my mother saw the Linux Magazine in a store and kindly bought an issue for me. I took the magazine home and got ready to read it, but this is what happens when someone faster sees your Linux Magazine:
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In other words, we’re not talking about the big websites that cover GNU/Linux and the FOSS world. We’re excluding popular Linux aggregators such as LXer, Linux Today or Tux Machines. Also excluded are the big all-things-to-all-people tech news sites, like ZDNet and CNET, that do as good a job covering FOSS and Linux as they do covering all other tech sectors. We’re also not talking about the great Linux information sites such as Linux Magazine, Phoronix, LWN and too many more to mention. Sites maintained by GNU/Linux distros are, too, not part of this discussion.
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There are few reasons consumers “need” that other OS. They are not heavy users of applications other than browsers and media-players which abound in FLOSS and GNU/Linux.
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Desktop
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Nobody has noticed until now, but sometime in the first months of 2013, the Linux desktop slipped into a new era.
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I am Sebastian (@Gerion80 on Twitter, +Sebastian Feiler on Google Plus), a legal trainee and Ph.D student from Cologne, Germany. After finishing my legal studies at University of Cologne, I am now in the last stage of my legal traineeship (“Rechtsreferendariat”). In Germany, in order to become a lawyer, judge or legal practitioner, you have to take two state exams, the first one at the end of your university education, the second one after completing a two-year traineeship. In addition, I am working on my Ph.D disseration in private international law.
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Around a year ago, a school in the southeast of England, Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG), began switching its student-facing computers to Linux, with KDE providing the desktop software. The school’s Network Manager, Malcolm Moore, contacted us at the time. Now, a year on, he got in touch again to let us know how he and the students find life in a world without Windows.
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Server
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IBM just pulled the curtains back on the PowerLinux 7R4, an open system that sports a scaled-down version of Watson’s brain.
The 7R4 is a four socket, 32 core server designed for analytics, cognitive computing, web-scale applications and other CPU-intensive workloads that typically run in Linux environments. The system is available with IBM’s AIX and i operating systems, as well as Red Hat and SUSE.
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With demand waning for Unix server upgrades, IBM on Tuesday stepped up its effort to capture Linux workloads by introducing the aggressively priced PowerLinux 7R4.
The 7R4 is based on the IBM Power 750 server, an all-purpose, four-socket, 32-core machine build for Unix, IBM System i, or Linux workloads. As with the previously available PowerLinux 7R1 and 7R2 (one- and two-socket servers), the 7R4 is licensed exclusively for use with Linux, and it’s aggressively priced to go after Intel x86-based competitors.
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IBM’s Power 750 server is getting a new Linux flavor. The PowerLinux 7R4 is a 4-socket, 32-core system that serves as the Linux version of the Power 750.
The Power 750 servers are notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they are the system IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system is built on. While Watson runs on Linux, IBM’s 7R4 is something a little bit different.
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“When we want to do something new, Linux on Power is one of our go-to platforms. The performance, security and cost efficiencies inherent in Power Systems make it a superior foundation for the growing number of Linux-based applications available today,” said GHY International’s Nigel Fortlage.
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IBM continues to bet on Linux and open-source databases with its new PowerLinux 7R4 server.
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Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And… they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called “Parallella,” and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013.
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Over at TI, the 2013 Intern Design Challenge is underway, an opportunity for the interns of TI to flex their engineering muscle for a few prizes and a chance to have their designs turned into actual products. We’re thinking [Max] might just pull this one out with his BeagleBone Gaming Cape, an add-on to the BeagleBone Black that turns this ARM-powered Linux board into a retro gaming system.
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Intel has shipped its first “open-source PC,” a bare-bones computer aimed at software developers building x86 applications and hobbyists looking to construct their own computer.
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“When we want to do something new, Linux on Power is one of our go-to platforms. The performance, security and cost efficiencies inherent in Power Systems make it a superior foundation for the growing number of Linux-based applications available today,” said GHY International’s Nigel Fortlage.
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Kernel Space
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IDS Imaging Development has released a special Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi embedded board in order to enable vision system integrators to take full advantage of ARM in visualization and initial feasibility analyses.
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Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the third Release Candidate in the 3.11 branch of the kernel.
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The out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system has been updated so it can be used with the stable Linux 3.10 kernel series.
While it doesn’t look like Reiser4 will ever be merged into the mainline Linux kernel, work on the file-system continues by the remaining developers. The most recent Reiser4 file-system patch was uploaded this month to its SourceForge page.
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The third release candidate is out for the Linux 3.11 kernel and it incorporates many more patches — too many more than Linus Torvalds would prefer at this time.
While Torvalds has been calling for more regression fixes ahead of Linux 3.11-rc2, now he’s saying he wants less patches — and for those to be strictly regression fixes.
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The KTAP scripting dynamic tracing tool for Linux has seen its second major release.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel has updated their “Linux Graphics Driver Installer” for making it easier to upgrade the Linux graphics stack on supported distributions.
Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers introduced the Intel Linux Graphics Driver Installer earlier in the year as a way of upgrading the Linux graphics driver for those not comfortable with pulling code from Git, building it out, etc.
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The Portland Group company has been around for more than two decades to focus on high-performance compilers for the Fortran, C, and C++ programming languages. While not too much is heard about PGI’s compilers within enthusiast circles, they have a lot of respect for their HPC compilers and in recent years their GPGPU initiatives. The Portland Group collaborated with NVIDIA over the CUDA Fortran implementation and they have also been involved with OpenACC for GPU programming and OpenCL on ARM.
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In recent days on Phoronix I have published benchmarks showing Windows 8 beating Ubuntu Linux for Intel Haswell performance and the Radeon Gallium3D driver losing to AMD Catalyst Legacy on Windows. As some good news for NVIDIA Linux users, the performance on Ubuntu Linux can beat out Microsoft Windows 8 on modern GPUs. However, the strong Linux performance can only be found if using the closed-source NVIDIA driver and not the open-source Nouveau alternative.
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This GUADEC there will be a couple of sessions on Friday afternoon from 2pm about Wayland. I’ll be giving a presentation with a brief introduction to what Wayland is, what new features we’ve worked on in the last cycle as well as what’s planned for the next one. As this is GUADEC i’ll of course be covering how we’re doing with getting Wayland integrated into GNOME. There will also be a Wayland panel discussion where you can ask your tricky questions of myself, Owen Taylor, Robert Bragg and Kristian Høgsberg – to get things started i’ve got some already prepared!
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While using the AMD-supplied, closed-source Catalyst (ex-fglrx) video driver on my Fedora 19 system has allowed my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop to run Linux with working 3D acceleration, without occasional tearing of the image and — most importantly — WITH working suspend-resume, I’ve run into the age-old problem of using the RPM-packaged version of the driver as supplied by RPM Fusion:
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The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support is quickly taking shape as the leading ARM Linux graphics driver for the (non-Android) Linux desktop.
Rob Clark of Red Hat (formerly with Texas Instruments) has been working on Freedreno the past year and he’s made a ton of progress for doing most things single-handedly and as a hobbyist project. His Freedreno Gallium3D driver is the first mainline ARM Mesa/Gallium3D driver and that’s running well and in good shape for Mesa 9.2.
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With Mesa 9.2 due to be released next month and it having a lot of new features, I figured it’s time to dive into some Git development statistics to see how the code-base is for Mesa 9.2.
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The dynamic power management support for the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver on Linux should now be in good shape.
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The latest release of the open-source NVIDIA X.Org driver is now xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.9. Features of this new update include multi-screen reverse Optimus support and NVIDIA “NVF0″ EXA and X-Video hardware acceleration.
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Marek Olšák, the very well known independent contributor to Mesa/Gallium3D and particularly for the open-source Radeon graphics drivers, is now employed by AMD.
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One of the most exciting features of the upcoming Linux 3.11 kernel is the open-source Radeon driver’s support for dynamic power management (DPM). We have already done preliminary benchmarks and found that Radeon DPM can boost the GPU’s performance in cases where the boot clock speeds are slower than their rated frequencies (as in the case of AMD APUs and modern high-end GPUs). For other GPUs, Radeon DPM can lead to lower power consumption and better operating temperatures. Here’s looking at the Linux Radeon DPM performance with the Linux 3.11 Git kernel.
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Benchmarks
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Following word this weekend that Apple and Google engineers agree on SLP vectorization by default for the LLVM/Clang compiler, I carried out some fresh SLP Vectorizer benchmarks this weekend from the LLVM Clang 3.4 SVN development code.
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Applications
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For many people out there, legacy applications make it difficult to switch to the Linux desktop. Granted, cloud computing has helped to alleviate some aspects of the legacy software challenge. Sadly though, cloud computing hasn’t been able to completely replace legacy Windows applications in their entirety just yet.
Which means locally installed applications are still needed. In this article, I’ll take a look at specific open source applications that have made my switch to Linux, possible, as well as being apps that I rely on daily.
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Writing a novel can be difficult. The very act of staring at a blank page and then coming out with intricately woven stories can be an arduous task. And, if that wasn’t enough, after you finish writing your novel, you have to organize your manuscript, format it, and then mail it to your agent. Oh, what a pain!
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This is a short list of my favorite graphical text editors for Linux that can be classified as IDE (integrated development environment). Here, I give the pros and cons of working with the following:
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Liferea, a free news aggregator capable of storing articles for offline reading and with full synchronization with Google Reader and TinyTinyRSS, is now at version 1.10.1a.
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Scribus, open source software that brings professional page layout to Linux, with a combination of press-ready output and new approaches to page design, is now at version 1.4.3.
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Proprietary
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Talygen, the world leader in Business Management Automation, has introduced an enhanced Linux Desktop Tool to give companies and their clients even more options to audit and review the work being performed by employees.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Subsurface is an open source application that aims to help users track their diving activities under Linux, and was initially created by Linus Torvalds and currently developed by a wide active community.
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If you’re working with SAP ERP, it is very likely that you use a computer with the Microsoft Windows operating system. SAP GUI for Windows is the most common way to log into the SAP ERP backend system.
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Games
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leadwerks logo 87×29 Leadwerks Is Bringing Game Development To LinuxThere’s an ongoing Kickstarter drive for a small game engine company named Leadwerks to port its development environment to the Linux platform. According to the company, the market for native Linux games is set to increase exponentially over the next few years. With Valve’s digital distribution platform, Steam, Linux gaming finally has some legs under it. More to the point though, the company cites recent listings for Linux developers at major game studios like Crytek as evidence that the Linux platform’s importance is growing.
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Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition, a collection of games developed by 3D Realms and General Arcade, will arrived on Steam for Linux.
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In Wayward, there is a large focus on simulation, survival and openness. There are no classes; there are no levels. Progression of your character depends on individual skill and stat gains by your interactions with items or objects in the world. You are free to play and explore the game in any fashion you wish.
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After a series of Mesa commits today by Marek Olšák, the R600 Radeon Gallium3D driver is now handling Unigine Heaven 3.0, the visually impressive OpenGL tech demo. There’s also been other important Mesa Git commits that happened today.
R600 Gallium3D had worked for earlier Unigine Heaven releases, but the version 3.0 release from last year had failed with R600g. (Since that point, Unigine Heaven 4.0 was released along side Unigine Valley 1.0 earlier this year.)
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE SC 4.11 is due for final release in little over two weeks with several interesting and exciting new features. However, according to Eike Hein, the task manager has received its share of work lately too. Hein says lots of bugs have been squashed and the codebase has been cleaned up, but the end-user may not notice it.
Hein said one of the reasons for rewriting the task manager was so it could keep up with the rest of KDE as it moves towards “the QML era” or Plasma 2. That’s when he said that visual and operational changes were “kept to a minimum,” instead focusing on “a regression-free port, but a leaner and meaner codebase along with QML’s designed-in flexibility.”
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The task manager for the KDE Plasma desktop is much-improved in the upcoming KDE 4.11 release with some parts of it being rewritten from scratch to address longstanding issues while other improvements are making it ready for QML.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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i have been active in the gnome project for a long time. over the years, i have seen and heard a lot of criticism and praise, but there is one thing i never quite understood. people were always complaining if a feature was removed. sometimes, that specific feature was replaced by something better, sometimes the feature had been evolved and sometimes that feature was dropped.
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The GNOME Projects announced a few days ago that the fourth maintenance release of the GNOME Settings Daemon 3.8 package for the GNOME desktop environment is now available for download.
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NOME recently raised $20,000 to fund security and privacy enhancements to our software. We are extremely excited by this, and want to thank everyone who contributed.
One person who we are especially grateful to is Gavin Ferris, who was a particularly generous contributor to the fund raising campaign. We recently spoke to Gavin about his reasons for donating to GNOME.
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So GUADEC is kicking off on Thursday here in Brno. The upcoming event is creating quite a bit of excitement here in the office as many members of the Red Hat team here in Brno has been helping out with the organization of the conference this year, being in the hometown of our biggest engineering office in the world. A series of last minute meetings, calls and arriving banners and packages help create a good buzz ahead of the opening of the conference. We have managed to get a bigger contingent of the Red Hat Desktop team this year than usual, including some members of our X.org/Wayland team, our Spice team and our LibreOffice team, so it will be a great opportunity for our global team to meet face to face in addition to meeting the other members of the community.
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A week ago Bastien Nocera (maintainer of G-Videos) informed Gnome Community that he might won’t have the refresh UI of Videos ready for 3.10.
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The GNOME annual developer conference, GUADEC, is beginning this week in the Czech Republic. At this GNOME-focused open-source event, the developers will be joined by Intel Wayland developers as they plot their eventual departure from the X.Org Server.
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If you are interested in penetration testing (pentesting), digital forensics, and in playing with software applications that hackers use on a daily basis, there are several Linux distributions that make those applications readily available.
These are niche or specialty distributions that have been packaged with all the Free Software applications that the best in the business use, and that anybody with a computer can download and install.
There are just a handful of these distributions and all have had at least one article about them published on this website. In alphabetical order, they are:
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The Microlinux Enterprise Desktop is a full-blown production desktop based on the latest stable Slackware Linux release and Xfce. It is currently used by various small town halls, public libraries and schools in South France.
MLED is not some derivative distribution. It consists of a collection of roughly 150 custom packages installed on top of an unaltered Slackware base system (except for a handful of multimedia apps rebuilt against the full Monty of audio and video codecs). It focuses on the Xfce desktop environment, with many enhancements.
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With so many (partly free) Cloud storage services to choose from, people seem to have forgotten that storing data locally is the best way to deal with the privacy and security issues that come with the Cloud storage services. And that behind those Cloud storage offerings are computers running operating systems and services that most users can set up on their local machines.
So if you would like to setup up a local storage server, using a network attached storage (NAS) distribution is the way to do it. And anybody can set up a NAS server using one of these distributions in about 5 minutes. When properly setup, you can give yourself a local “cloud” server for use in your internal network. The distributions that you may use to do just that are given in this article.
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New Releases
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This release of Clonezilla live (2.1.2-20) includes major enhancements and bug fixes.
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Screenshots
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Possibly the perfect audio editing suite based on Linux, especially for one that’s ready out of the box so to speak. The real time kernel option is a great feature for sound engineers, reducing down on audio latency, and there’s a lot of driver and hardware control for everyone else.
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Gentoo Family
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Slowly but surely Gentoo documentation guides are being moved to the Gentoo Wiki. Thanks to the translation support provided by the infrastructure, all “reasons” not to go forward with this have been resolved. At first, I’m focusing on documentation with open bugs that have not been picked up (usually due to (human) resource limits), but other documents will follow.
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Arch Family
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For Linux power users, it’s highly desirable to be able to completely customize your system. Sometimes, that can be best achieved from the start — by piecing together the components that you’d like to include on your system. This way, as there are usually multiple programs that achieve the same result in different manners, you can pick those applications which you’re most fond of. Having to piece together can also let you take a deeper look at the system for maximum control. Most common desktop distributions don’t make this high level of customization very possible (as it’s not ideal and more difficult), but Arch Linux isn’t like most distributions.
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Hello again everyone! By this point, I have successfully installed ArchLinux, as well as KDE, and various other everyday applications necessary for my desktop.
Aside from the issues with the bootloader I experienced, the installation was relatively straight forward. Since I have never used ArchLinux before, I decided to follow the Beginner’s Guide in order to make sure I wasn’t screwing anything up. The really nice thing about this guide is that it only gives you the information that you need to get up and running. From here, you can add any packages you want, and do any necessary customization.
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Red Hat Family
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Easing the path for organizations to launch big data-styled services, Red Hat has coupled the 10gen MongoDB data store to its new identity management package for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution.
“The beauty of Identity Management is that it has a central infrastructure that companies can use to manage identities across many different types of applications,” said Kelly Stirman, 10gen director of product marketing. With MongoDB linked to Identity Management, those shops already using RHEL will find it much easier to set up and run applications that run on MongoDB data.
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Get certified in OpenStack for Red Hat with a new course, get 10% off this and any other course with the special Summer Offer
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Fedora
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Installing Linux on a single box is easy, but try extending that to a room, or even building, full of computers and you’ll face a massive headache. To save you from running back and forth between all those computers, we’ll show you how to set up an automated network install.
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I was much more impressed with Korora’s KDE desktop version than the GNOME version. The KDE menu provided ready access to all of the features and software. Plus, the KDE desktop has a panel bar at the bottom of the screen. For example, the Software Manager, Apper, was readily available on the Favorites panel in the KDE menu. The Software manager app was not so easy to find in the GNOME version.
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Installing Linux on a single box is easy, but try extending that to a room, or even building, full of computers and you’ll face a massive headache. To save you from running back and forth between all those computers, we’ll show you how to set up an automated network install.
This project has two main stages. Firstly, a working boot server must be established. Secondly, a Kickstart file must be created in order to satisfy the installer and ensure that it does not require any interaction from the administrator.
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Debian Family
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Ian Murdock, the father of Debian (and the “ian” in the name Debian), posted this tweet a couple of days ago:
“Is it me, or does it seem like Ubuntu is increasingly a solution in search of a problem?”
The tweet ends with a link to the Steven Vaughan-Nichols article on Ubuntu Unity on ZDNet.
Just sayin’, Ian: No, it’s not you, and you nailed it right on the proverbial head.
See you all tomorrow on Blog Sunday.
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Derivatives
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The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up today. This is the release announcement:
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical wants to build a smartphone unlike anything on the market, and the company wants your help to do it. Last week the company announced plans to raise $32 million for the project through crowd-funding site Indiegogo.
That’s more money than anyone’s ever raised for any crowd-funded project. But the Ubuntu Edge project got off to a very strong start, raising millions of dollars in less than a day.
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I recently penned a post titled, “10 criteria Ubuntu Edge must meet if it’s going to succeed”. A few days after that post went live, someone pointed out a fact to me that was – dare I say – bit disheartening. That fact? Ubuntu Edge is for enthusiasts only and will not be made available to the public at large.
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By now you’ve definitely heard of Ubuntu for Android and the Ubuntu Edge’s ability to run as both a smartphone and a full-fledged computer once you connect it to a monitor. But how well does it manage to do both? To answer that, Canonical’s Victor Palau has uploaded a video that shows him using the Ubuntu desktop on a monitor connected to an LG Nexus 4 that’s running Ubuntu for Android.
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The new Ubuntu Edge smartphone by Canonical was launched on popular crowd-funding site Indiegogo, and in just over one week they have raised a staggering $7,226,673. The money raised so far is amazing considering the most ever raised was $2 million, but the Ubuntu Edge campaign is still behind schedule because they want to get a total of $32,000,000.
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Canonical is just about to flatline in their campaign to get the Ubuntu Edge smartphone built for launch in 2014.
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Call it too ambitious, ahead of its time, or just plain not a very good idea – it doesn’t really matter at this point: former Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu-powered smartphone crowdfunding campaign has all but fizzled at this point.
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Ubuntu Linux for tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices is coming. And its arrival may be sooner rather than later, as Canonical engineers appear intent on redoubling their efforts to make Ubuntu Touch work on a wider profile of hardware. Here’s a look at the present state of things, and where they’re headed.
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A fantastic way of supporting the Ubuntu Edge campaign is to embed the campaign widget into your website. It looks like this…
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As announced previously, there was a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. The Ubuntu Forums are now back up and running. What follows is a detailed post mortem of the breach and corrective actions taken by the Canonical IS team. In summary, the root cause was a combination of a compromised individual account and the configuration settings in vBulletin, the Forums application software. There was no compromise of Ubuntu itself, or any other Canonical or Ubuntu services. We have repaired and hardened the Ubuntu Forums, and as the problematic settings are the default behaviour in vBulletin, we are working with vBulletin staff to change and/or better document these settings.
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Telstra has said that it is looking beyond iOS, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry to Firefox and Ubuntu for future phones.
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The compromise of an individual account and configuration settings led to the recent issue with the Ubuntu forums.
According to a blog post, the Linux user forum is back up and running after an attacker accessed a moderator account and post announcements and private messages to three forum administrators.
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Ceph, the open source distributed storage system for the cloud and Big Data, is designed to store information remotely. But Inktank, the company behind the project, hopes to promote the software through a series of hands-on workshops called Ceph Days, which will occur this fall in three international cities. And Canonical, the vendor for Ubuntu Linux, is getting in on the action, too.
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While at times the world of crowdsourced funding for promising open source projects may seem like a crapshoot, there are some significant projects launching with money chipped in at online sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. In fact, as of Tuesday morning this week, the Indiegogo campaign for funding the much talked about Ubuntu Edge mobile phone from Canonical has surpassed $7 million in crowdsourced funding.
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One of the feature limitations of using the Mir Display Server up to this point has been when using multiple monitors (or say a laptop connected to a projector) the only display configuration possibility is using a cloned mode whereby the screens are the same. Canonical’s Mir developers have begun working on improved multi-monitor handling.
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Flavours and Variants
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Remember Bespin, the planet with the city in the clouds in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? Cloud City was the place Han Solo and Princess Leia flew to in hopes of temporarily escaping the wrath of the Empire. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out very well for them since Darth Vader nabbed all of them (though Luke did show up eventually to try to save them).
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IEE announced a Linux-based thin-client touchpanel computer for harsh military environments. The highly rugged touchpanel computer is equipped with a 1GHz ARM processor and a 10.4-inch, 1024 x 768-pixel resistive touchscreen with backlighting and high contrast, and is usable over an extended temperature range of -46 to 70°C.
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Gateworks Corp. announced a family of six Linux-ready single board computers for network processing running Freescale’s ARM Cortex-A9-based i.MX6 processors. The Ventana SBCs range from a dual-core 800MHz model with one mini-PCIe slot, to a quad-core 1GHz board with HD video and six mini-PCIe slots, and can be expanded modularly using a choice of four stackable mini-PCIe, PCI, and Gig-Ethernet (copper and fiber) boards.
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MediaTek announced a quad-core system-on-chip with dual ARM Cortex-A15 and dual Cortex-A7 cores that is said to be the first Big.Little SoC to operate all four cores simultaneously. The tablet-focused MT8135 is further equipped with a new PowerVR Series6 G6200 GPU from Imagination Technologies, and will be followed by an eight-core “True Octa-Core” Big.Little SoC with similar heterogeneous multi-processing capabilities.
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AMD announced the most power-efficient model yet in its new line of Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-chips. The dual-core, 1GHz GX-210JA SoC offers a low 6W TDP and 3W “expected average power,” making it well suited for a wide range of fanless embedded devices.
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Phones
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Android
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Two of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones scored higher grades than the three current iPhone models in a survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
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I never missed any Microsoft products on my Mac, GNU/Linux or Android devices – especially the Microsoft Office as there is LibreOffice for desktop and many office suites for Android. Since I covered at length how Microsoft gamed the system and got its OOXML approved as an ISO standard by ‘buying’ votes, I stay away from Microsoft formats and products. Microsoft’s own implementation of OOXML is a huge interoperable mess.
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One of the common complaints late in the life of the original Nexus 7 was slow storage I/O performance, leading to an inconsistent user experience. After a fresh flash, the Nexus 7 was speedy and performant, but after months of installing applications and using the tablet, things began slowing down. This was a friction point that many hoped would be fixed in the new Nexus 7 (2013) model, which it was. There’s even more to the story though, it turns out Google has fixed that storage I/O aging problem on all Nexus devices with the Android 4.3 update.
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Google Preparing to Dump Android?
Apple Insider has a fascinating article that explores the possibility of Google dumping Android for Chrome OS. You might at first think this is a crazy notion, given the popularity of Android phones in particular. However, it’s not as far fetched an idea as it might seem initially.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Asus has announced a new Intel-powered 10-inch Android tablet with its MeMo Pad FHD 10 slate. The new tab features a hyper-threaded 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 SoC, which according to Intel is specifically optimized for Google’s Android OS.
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Why the lowly computer remains the big gadget on campus
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Encryption is not fun and easy. I fooled around a bit the Pretty Good Privacy and found it frustrating and complicated to use. Fortunately, Edward Snowden’s revelations of just how intrusive the national security surveillance state is has now provoked efforts to create user friendly encryption.
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Why is it suddenly news that US technology companies have been ripping off customers in Australia (and, indeed, most of the rest of the world) by charging them exorbitant prices?
Could it be because some politicians have suddenly thought it would be a good idea to form a panel and act like heroes by questioning the big tech companies in public? Just to demonstrate that they are on the side of the public – an act that would certainly not be detrimental to their fortunes with elections around the corner?
Anyone who is half-savvy knows that this kind of over-charging is an old game. The local dealers are no angels either. Back in 1999, I recall buying a CD-ROM drive from Harvey Norman for $110 for a wealthy client of mine. A few weeks later, after being introduced to the wonderful world of computer swap meets by a friend who was more down-to-earth, I bought a similar drive for $60.
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1: Linux and open source
Linux and open source have not only matured into a business-ready platform, they have pushed innovation forward on a number of fronts. From the server all the way up to the desktop, Linux and open source have helped force the competition to reevaluate how the user and business interact with hardware and customers. The Linux desktop has proved that more can be done with a user interface than the worn-out Start button/task bar metaphor. And with the power of the Linux server, businesses can work with tools like customer resource management, human resource management, and other platforms they might not otherwise have access to. Along with this innovation comes considerable cost savings.
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Leading carmaker AUDI AG has chosen the open source specialists, NETWAYS GmbH to help migrate their monitoring systems to Icinga.
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Today we are happy to celebrate three years of open collaboration and development of the OpenStack Foundation and cloud computing platform. The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry. The OpenStack Foundation has followed the principles of open design, open development, open community, and open source to bring to life a ubiquitous cloud platform that allows anyone to run on it, build on it, or submit improvements.
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Open source software offers the promise of a revolutionary transformation in defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and government technology at a cost and pace that satisfies the competing requirements of shrinking resources and constantly accelerating global operations. While this technological transformation is emphasized by engineers and developers within industry and the acquisition community, it is often perceived as tangential to those with an operational focus.
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The idea of virtual data centers has been around since IBM first virtualized the mainframe nearly 50 years ago, but a few companies today may be close to achieving the same feat across the entire distributed data center.
IBM’s pioneering work in mainframe virtualization was an inspiration for VMware’s launch many years later. And just as IBM virtualized what was then the entire computing environment – the mainframe – so today companies like VMware, Citrix and Red Hat are trying to do the same thing across the entire data center infrastructure of servers, storage and networks.
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The fifth development version of the upcoming Totem 3.10, now known as Videos (or Movie Player in Ubuntu), multimedia player for the GNOME desktop environment is now available for download and testing, as posted on the main GNOME FTP server earlier today, July 29.
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Booking a cab is getting easier for passengers thanks to the advent of apps that let you book your cab straight from your smartphone. But implementing those apps and booking systems isn’t always the easiest—or most affordable—option for taxi companies.
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Events
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Cawley’s keynote trumps the usual corporate song-and-dance with actual singing and dancing — from real developers, to boot
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In 6th July 2013 (Sat), I’ve been in Okinawa, Japanese hottest prefecture, to attend Open Source Conference (OSC) which is one of series of most famous FLOSS related events (OSC 2013 Okinawa’s official site is here; only in Japanese).
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Web Browsers
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Video hardware acceleration is being worked on for WebKitGTK+ with composited video support.
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Mozilla
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The tenth beta release in the new Firefox 23.x branch has been made available for download by Mozilla for all available platforms.
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In a huge announcement from Mozilla in April, the nonprofit entity behind the Firefox browser and other open source tools detailed significant changes to its executive management, including the fact that CEO Gary Kovacs would step down after running the company for more than three years. The shakeup came amidst other executive changes designed to help Mozilla align strategically around its new Firefox OS mobile platform.
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In the constant dance between software bug squashers and bugs themselves, “peach fuzzing” has become an interesting trend. Peach is an open source platform that helps organizations perform large scale automated testing of code and software. It lets developers and security researchers yield security and bug-related insights, including insights on mutations of existing code.
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Mozilla continues to build the Web as a platform for security which is a crucial part of our mission to move the Web forward as a platform for openness, innovation and opportunity for all. Today this platform for security is being advanced through Mozilla and BlackBerry collaborating on advanced automated security testing techniques known as fuzzing and Mozilla introducing Minion, an open source security testing platform intended to be used by developers and security professionals. These research efforts are some of the many ways Mozilla helps make the Web more secure and protect Firefox users.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Is the market becoming flooded with too many OpenStack distributions and services? Is there a risk of too much fragmentation with such a new and important open platform? That’s a question I considered in a recent post called “In Five Years, Expect Far Fewer OpenStack Service Providers.” Citrix officials and others have repeatedly made the point that there is much more press and hubbub surround OpenStack than there are deployments. And several big companies have been departing from their original plans with OpenStack. Could it be that there are too many cooks in the kitchen with this platform?
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When the OpenStack project was launched in 2010, IBM was one of many vendors in the industry offered the opportunity to participate. And though OpenStack launched with a nearly unprecedented list of supporters, IBM was not among them. In spite of their lack of a public commitment to an existing open source cloud platform – they had their own service offering in SmartCloud – they declined to join the project.
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We’ve covered Hadoop on many occasions here at OStatic, and it has quickly become essential to many organizations interested in crunching Big Data and yielding insights from data that were inaccessible before. As Hadoop’s influence has grown, so has Cloudera’s. Cloudera provides support, services and training for Hadoop and helps organizations leverage custom analyses tailored to exactly the information and questions that they have.
Now, Cloudera has launched new Community forums. An alternative to traditional mailing lists, the Cloudera community forums offer search functionality to help users ask and answer more questions, especially about Hadoop, while creating a name for themselves in the community. For Cloudera customers, questions will be escalated to support cases whenever a thread remains unsolved for two days.
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Databases
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“We think that the infrastructure technology of the future is going to be open source. So it is not a surprise that all of the leaders in the NoSQL space are all open source companies. There are some companies that have proprietary software in the NoSQL market, but they have not gotten very much traction in the market. We see open source playing a huge role as the industry continues to grow.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It might be dubbed “unbreakable”, but Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux website is certainly stoppable.
The online support network feeding the enterprise-grade distro with fixes and updates will be taken offline by the database giant on Friday. It will be down for three hours from 3pm Pacific time (11pm UK) on 2 August, the company said, citing “scheduled maintenance”.
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CMS
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Open Java CMS (content management system) company Magnolia is now offering a free online training course programme.
The new modules are claimed to be able to give a Java developer a good basic grasp of the system within 48h.
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BSD
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In the two months since the launch of Intel’s Haswell processors there’s been a lot of coverage on Phoronix for this latest-generation hardware under Linux, including some of Windows and OS X too, but no BSD testing yet. That has now changed with our first report of using PC-BSD / FreeBSD 9.1 on an Intel Core i7 4770K.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Version 3.2.3 (released 2013-07-30)
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GNU Combine is a utility for working with text files in their original formats to reformat them, join them together (without requiring sorting), and to keep track of the results of joins.
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Gnash, the Free Software Foundation project to have an open-source implementation of Adobe’s Flash/SWF run-time, hasn’t seen a release in almost exactly one and a half years. While it’s been 18 months without a new release, development continues and there’s been a number of features committed.
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Public Services/Government
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The Green/EFA Group in the European Parliament, the Free Software Foundation Europa and the United Kingdom’s Open Rights Group are pressing the European Parliament to produce two reports on its use and development of free software and open ICT standards.
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Data doesn’t always have to be big data to have a huge effect on the way we live. Whether it’s big data or small data, data management is increasingly a thorny issue.
For NASA, data management is at the heart of a key challenge: improving human-to-robot communication to make space exploration easier and safer.
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A robust IT platform is critical for Nexor, which provides IT services and email gateways to defence and intelligence and government organisations. But the company was finding it increasingly difficult to deliver IT services and develop products on an ageing, proprietary operating system.
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There are only a few days left to apply. Code for America is looking for developers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and product managers for their 2014 Fellowship. It’s a chance to make a difference with code, design, data, and much more.
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Licensing
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The GPLv2 continues to be the most widely used FOSS license, but has been rarely interpreted by courts. Most of these decisions have come from Germany as a result of the enforcement actions of Harold Welte. The recent Fantec decision in Germany is the latest such decision and provides guidance on the requirements for companies to manage their use of FOSS and the lack of ability to rely on statements from their suppliers.
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Openness/Sharing
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A science fair for adults in Midtown exhibits the achievements of people who have created innovative, new projects using free, open-source computer code. NY1′s Technology reporter Adam Balkin filed the following report.
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Modder Andy Rawson needed an easy way to find air leaks in his 100-year-old house in order to improve its energy efficiency. Not wanting to spend thousands of dollars on a thermal imaging camera, he decided to go the DIY route. He built a box containing a 64-zone temperature sensor, and managed to connect the device to his iPhone via the dock. By overlaying the temperature data onto the iPhone’s camera display, the $150 attachment instantly turns the iPhone into a cheap thermal imaging camera.
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Aircraft technology usually seems so amazing that it has to be expensive, but the Maker Plane team is going to change all that. On the back of a crowdfunded open source initiative, they are designing a light sport aircraft that can fly two people. You should be able to buy it for $15,000. That’s just about the same price as 3,000 cronuts.
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Nuand has employed Lime Microsystems’ programmable RF silicon for its bladeRF, which – the two companies say – takes open-source RF hardware into the mainstream
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After a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision guarded genetic data on breast cancer from Myriad Genetics, the nonprofit coalition Free the Data! launched a campaign to open troves of molecular information about widespread tumors with the help of big data software outfit, Syapse.
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Open Access/Content
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Statement by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, on MIT’s report, released today, on the University’s actions in the Aaron Swartz case:
“MIT’s behavior throughout the case was reprehensible, and this report is quite frankly a whitewash.
Here are the facts: This report claims that MIT was “neutral” — but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case. We have an institution to contrast MIT with – JSTOR, who came out immediately and publicly against the prosecution. Aaron would be alive today if MIT had acted as JSTOR did. MIT had a moral imperative to do so.
And even now, MIT is still stonewalling. Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen FOIA’d the Secret Service’s files on Aaron’s case, and judge ordered them to be released. The only reason they haven’t been is because MIT has filed an objection. If MIT is at all serious about implementing any reforms to stop this kind of tragedy from happening again, it must stop objecting to the release of information about the case.”
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The report says that MIT never told the prosecutor that Aaron’s access was “unauthorized.” They indicated that his machine was not supposed to be plugged into the ethernet jack it was plugged into, but there is no law against abusing an ethernet jack. The law regulates authorized access to a network. The whole predicate to the government’s case was that Aaron’s access to the network was “unauthorized,” yet apparently in the many many months during which the government was prosecuting, they were too busy to determine whether indeed, access to the network was “authorized.”
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But I believe we have have now sufficient facts to reach a solid conclusion as to what was the problem. And what still is, since the letter states with bravado that we will surely understand from the report that “MIT’s decisions were reasonable, appropriate and made in good faith.” No. I do not so conclude.
[...]
I conclude that MIT needs a new president.
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Open Hardware
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There are some things in this world we’re not sure are improved by the 3D printing process, like firearms and food. Aircraft might also be on that list, but no amount of dubiousness will stand in the way of MakerPlane’s open source plane. The aviation company’s ambitious Indiegogo campaign went live last week (check out the video below), but its quest for funding looks like it’s going to be a major uphill climb. At the time of this writing, the campaign had yet to breach the $800 mark, a far cry from its $75,000 goal. While part of the reason for the slow funding can be chalked up to a certain level of skepticism when it comes to a plane made with 3D printed parts and open sourced avionics software, the lack of plane-related rewards might also be holding the company back from reaching its endgame.
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Most of us are familiar with open-source software like Mozilla Firefox, the Linux operating system and its popular offspring, Android. To encourage innovation, open-source software developers copyright their work, but allow others to make changes and distribute it.
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Programming
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I am currently working on a personal programming project. Once completed, the eventual binaries will actually be launched by either running a Python or Perl script. Experimenting with some Perl stuff has given me the chance to review a nice Perl scripting IDE called Padre.
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To complement the LLVM 3.4 SVN compiler benchmarks from yesterday that were looking at the impact of using the SLP Vectorizer that’s soon to be enabled by default for some optimization levels, here are some more LLVM Clang compiler development benchmarks. This time around are fresh benchmarks of the open-source C/C++ compiler when trying out the different compiler optimization levels, including -O0, -O1, -O2, -Os, -O3, and -Ofast.
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To complement the LLVM 3.4 SVN compiler benchmarks from yesterday that were looking at the impact of using the SLP Vectorizer that’s soon to be enabled by default for some optimization levels, here are some more LLVM Clang compiler development benchmarks. This time around are fresh benchmarks of the open-source C/C++ compiler when trying out the different compiler optimization levels, including -O0, -O1, -O2, -Os, -O3, and -Ofast.
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Google has begun making public the details concerning their Portable Native Client (PNaCl) implementation.
Portable Native Client comes down to compiling Google Native Client applications to a subset of LLVM bitcode that can then basically run anywhere that Native Client is supported.
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Standards/Consortia
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If everything had gone according to plan, the Internet as we know it would never have sprung up. That plan, devised 35 years ago, instead would have created a comprehensive set of standards for computer networks called Open Systems Interconnection, or OSI. Its architects were a dedicated group of computer industry representatives in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States who envisioned a complete, open, and multilayered system that would allow users all over the world to exchange data easily and thereby unleash new possibilities for collaboration and commerce.
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Inspired by the work of Zephyr Teachout and Zach Brugman, and aided by the work of two research assistants, Dennis Courtney and Zach D’Amico, the lawyers at the Constitutional Accountability Center and I have submitted this amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the upcoming McCutcheon v. F.E.C..
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Maintainers of The Old Reader have announced that the service will no longer be accepting new registrations, the service itself will be shutting down in two weeks and existing accounts migrated to a private site.
The Old Reader, which got that name because it is a continuation of Google’s old RSS reader code, was started as a hobby of sorts by a very small group of friends. It was one of several online RSS Feed services that was promoted as an alternative to Google’s online RSS Feed service after Google announced that its service will be shutting down (it has since shut down).
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Science
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This might sound like a typical evening on Netflix but here’s the catch: The melting of the permafrost is not science fiction and it’s not gonna go away unless we provoke major changes… right fuckin’ now.
As the New York Times reported in 2011: “Experts have long known that northern lands were a storehouse of frozen carbon, locked up in the form of leaves, roots and other organic matter trapped in icy soil — a mix that, when thawed, can produce methane and carbon dioxide, gases that trap heat and warm the planet. But they have been stunned in recent years to realize just how much organic debris is there.”
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Health/Nutrition
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Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer has pledged his support for single-payer health care in the past, but his recent efforts to bring zero-cost sharing primary and preventive care to Montana government employees and retirees may be doing something that most progressives would only dream could happen in America: bringing NHS-style, socialized medicine to Montana.
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Security
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Cyber security measures and heightened awareness are lacking at selected US ports, and no facility is prepared for a cyber attack, a recent Brookings Institution study found.
The study, The Critical Infrastructure Gap: US Port Facilities and Cyber Vulnerabilities, emphasized that “port facilities rely as much upon networked computer and control systems as they do upon stevedores to ensure the flow of maritime commerce that the economy, homeland and national security depend upon. Unfortunately, this technological dependence has not been accompanied by clear cybersecurity standards or authorities, leaving public, private and military facilities unprotected.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Celebrating 2012’s best examples of broadcast journalism, the George Foster Peabody Awards attracted the likes of D.L. Hughley, Amy Poehler and Bryant Gumbel to the Waldorf-Astoria’s four-story grand ballroom in New York this past May. In a gaudy ceremony hosted by CBS star-anchor Scott Pelley, National Public Radio’s This American Life received the industry’s oldest and perhaps most prestigious accolade. The 16-member Peabody Board, consisting of “television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts,” had selected a particular This American Life episode—“What Happened at Dos Erres”—as one of the winners of its 72nd annual awards on the basis of “only one criterion: excellence.”
This American Life’s host Ira Glass had once conceived of the weekly show, which reaches 1.8 million listeners each episode, as an experiment to do “the most idealistic, wide-eyed things that can do…to provide a perspective on this country that you couldn’t get elsewhere.” As is typical for the program, Glass weaved personal narratives and anecdotes together with broader context in “What Happened at Dos Erres,” which focused on a 1982 massacre of 250 Guatemalan civilians at the hands of their government’s elite military commandos—the Kaibiles.
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Deputy defense minister’s security clearance is revoked over his alleged preference and his close personal ties with the head of Rafael.
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The FBI has told Congress it does not need to get a warrant to conduct surveillance with drones, in a letter laying out some of the top federal law enforcement agency’s policies for how it uses unmanned aerial vehicles.
In a July 19 letter to Sen. Rand Paul, Stephen D. Kelly, assistant director for the FBI’s congressional liaison office, said the agency has used drones in 10 instances, including twice for “national security” cases and eight times for criminal cases. The FBI authorized the use of drones in three other criminal cases but didn’t deploy them.
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As geopolitical shifts grip Latin America, Empire examines what challenges may yet lie ahead.
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Another officer involved shooting went viral on YouTube Sunday. A member of the Toronto police department has been suspended with pay following the shooting of a teen. After nine shots and a tasering the boy died and the officer is now being investigated for charges of excessive force.
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The “next phase of drone warfare” will extend “far beyond traditional, declared combat zones,” the Washington Post reports.
Africa, according to the report filed July 20, will see an enormous increase in the sorties of unmanned aerial vehicles remotely piloted by U.S. airmen. The commander of U.S. forces in Africa has purportedly requested a “15-fold increase in surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering on the continent.”
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A journalist and a researcher have sued the Justice Department for access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s records on the late journalist Michael Hastings.
The lawsuit follows the FBI’s failure to respond to separate Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Hastings submitted by journalist Jason Leopold of al-Jazeera and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro.
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A Yemeni military official says a suspected U.S. drone strike has killed three alleged al-Qaida militants in one of the group’s strongholds in the south of the country.
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A Yemeni military official says a suspected U.S. drone strike has killed six alleged al-Qaida militants in the group’s southern strongholds.
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US drones strikes in Yemen nearly tripled in 2012 compared to 2011, from 18 to 53, according to the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank.
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Six ‘Suspects’ Killed in First Strike, Two Rescuers Killed in Second
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A TV documentary has sensationally claimed that US president John F Kennedy was accidentally killed by a secret service agent.
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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has agreed to consider a second case against Poland over allegations it allowed the CIA to run a secret jail on its soil, intensifying pressure on Warsaw to reveal how closely it was involved in the U.S. “war on terror”.
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Diplomats are “overt intelligence collectors,” and the “end-product” of diplomatic reporting and clandestine intelligence-gathering “can be the same,” John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence and deputy secretary of state, says on this week’s episode of Conversations with Nicholas Kralev.
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Polish officials continue to deny accusations that the CIA operated prisons on Polish soil and claim that they are conducting a full and fair investigation into the allegations. “Poland is obliged to reply to the complaint by the deadline of September 16 of this year. The case is currently being analyzed by the legal services of the ministry,” the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said after receiving documents of the second case from the ECHR.
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The story cites a CIA inspector general’s report that showed more than half of the agency’s analysts who were resigning or contemplating in 2009 it had cited bad bosses as the main reason.
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Sabrina De Sousa is one of a number of Americans who were convicted in absentia in Italy for being involved in the CIA kidnapping of the Muslim Egyptian cleric Abu Omar from the streets of Milan in 2003 and then bringing him to Egypt for interrogation.
De Sousa claims that the agency inflated the threat posed by the preacher. After the incident was uncovered by Italian authorities, she claims that the U.S. allowed Italy to prosecute her and others in order to shield George W Bush and other high U.S. officials from their responsibility for approving the operation.
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Transparency Reporting
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The government transparency website Cryptome.org has published 1,350 names and email addresses of corporate titans, media figures and policy executives who are on the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This month, Austria went ahead with its plans to ban imports of nuclear power to the country. Electricity is to be labeled to ensure that no power from nuclear reactors is purchased from abroad. The EU is not pleased about the move, which has gone practically unnoticed in reports in English.
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Fracking company Cuadrilla Resources are trying to start drilling in Balcombe, West Sussex and the community is trying to stop them. Over 250 people stopped 15 trucks bring on equipment on Day 1 (Thurs). On Day 2 more than 100 police were used to break the blockade and escort trucks onto the fracking site. On Day 3 the community continued to resist attempts to force trucks through the blockade but gave up early afternoon. On Day 4 Cudrilla did not attempt to bring any trucks onto the site. On Day 5 Cuadrilla continued to try to push trucks through the blockade and the community have continued to resist. Camp is still going strong and renewed efforts are being made to defend Balcombe. See Fracking In Balcombe: A Community Says No for background to issues involved. Scroll down for photos.
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Oil groups BP and Total and two other energy firms have taken stakes in a consortium which will build a trans-Adriatic gas pipeline seen as key to help Europe reduce its dependence on Russia.
The so-called Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) consortium announced Tuesday that BP of Britain, Total of France, Socar of Azerbaijan and Belgian gas network company Fluxys had each taken shares in the group.
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On June 25, 2013, a federal judge approved a subpoena, to be served by Chevron to Microsoft, granting Chevron private Internet data related to 30 email addresses, including those related to environmental nonprofits, activists, journalists and lawyers.
This information forms part of a larger fishing expedition seeking information related to approximately 100 email addresses in an attempt to gather enough information to bring a lawsuit against those who won an $18 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador in February 2011 for dumping 18.5 gallons of highly toxic waste into the streams and rivers in the rainforests in the Oriente region of eastern Ecuador. Chevron’s suit claims that “this judgment is the product of fraud.”
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Greenhouse gases produced over the lifetime of a wind turbine – including for its manufacturing and installation – are less than that of fossil-fuel based energy sources and most other renewables, a new study from the US shows. Only ocean energy (wave and tidal) and hydropower have lower emissions than wind…
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Shocking pictures show how a beautiful beach in Thailand turned black after a devastating oil spill
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Finance
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Earlier this month, Marino Murillo, vice president of the Cuban Council of Ministers, announced that during the rest of this year and through the next the state would enact and carry through the next phase of its privatization and austerity measures, creating “the most profound transformations.”
The measures, which were first announced in 2010 by Cuban President Raul Castro as part of a 300-point plan, represent the deepest changes to the Cuban economy since the taking of power by the Castro regime in 1959. Like austerity plans being carried out elsewhere in the world, the aim of these measures is to make the working class pay for the world capitalist crisis through mass layoffs, privatization, speed-ups, and the elimination of social welfare measures.
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IFS says independent Scotland could discard ‘poorly designed’ Westminster reforms – but would face higher bill as result
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From prisons to rail franchises and even London’s Boris bikes, Serco is a giant global corporation that has hoovered up outsourced government contracts. Now the NHS is firmly in its sights. But it stands accused of mismanagement, lying and even charging for non-existent work
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The £1 million spent on making the newly born Royal’s living quarters fit for a prince could have saved 256,410 newborns from easily preventable deaths.
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Competition for cable-television providers looks safe at least for a time, as the result of two copyright suits link here. In one, Aereo TV captures from antennas and delivers regular programming via the internet for a monthly fee; this allows the subscriber to record the programs playing them back when he wants. In the other, the satellite Dish provider offered a service, Hopper, which allowed the customer to eliminate ads on home recorded programs. Neither service allows the broadcaster to charge for its programs since the courts ruled that they could not use copyright to enforce payment.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One of the most important tenets of corporate political journalism is the elevation of the “center” as the ideal. Partisanship, which implies disagreement and/or strongly held views, is often seen as one of the big problems in Washington. And the way this message is communicated is often by pundits and journalists advocating for the Democratic Party to “move to the center”–which is, of course, moving to the right.
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Kaczynski asked “Is this the most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done?” due to the host’s inability to accept that Aslan, who is Muslim, would have any legitimate interest in a scholarly work about Jesus.
[...]
A Rolling Stone profile of Ailes quoted a source close to the Fox boss who claimed he “has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”
These beliefs have been reflected by a number of the network’s on-air personalities.
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It’s not easy to get into the Newspaper of Record. But if you’re the commander of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and you want to send a message that those troops need to stay in the country past 2014, apparently you just tell the New York Times that you’re ready to talk.
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Fox News continued its campaign to demonize programs that provide necessary food assistance to millions of Americans by attacking the AARP’s effort to enroll eligible seniors in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, baselessly claiming the program was an effort to buy their vote and change “what America really is” and dismissing the fact that many eligible seniors find it difficult to enroll in the food assistance program they need.
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For many years now, the Center for Media and Democracy has joined with Public Citizen, Common Cause, People for the American Way, Move to Amend, Free Speech for the People, and other good government and grassroots groups in an effort to build momentum to overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Through countless collective and individual efforts, we are on a roll. In total, 16 states and roughly 500 communities have asked Congress to initiate the process of overturning Citizens United by amending our constitution. The Nation magazine dubbed it the “most successful and uncovered” political movement in America.
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New documents show that former Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett — who now heads Florida’s schools — overhauled Indiana’s much-heralded school grading system to guarantee that a charter run by a major campaign donor would receive top marks. These revelations shine a light on the big bucks behind the education privatization agenda, its continued failure to meet the need of students, and provides another instance of cheating to cover up poor educational outcomes.
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Censorship
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Imagine that last week you’d read a blog post. It was post about porn blocking, and how there are other things we as a society should focus on if, say, we wanted to prevent child sexual abuse. It was a post about porn blocking from an abuse survivor.
One of the many people you follow on Twitter or are friends with on Facebook posted the link, and you followed it. You read the post, maybe you thought the author had made a good point or two, then you closed the tab, and that was that. Then a couple of days later you found yourself discussing porn blocking with a colleague, or a friend, and you thought, “Damn, I should link them to that post. Wonder how I find it again.”
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Astroturfing — the process of a faux “grassroots” effort, often set up by cynical and soulless DC lobbyists pretending to create a “grassroots” campaign around some subject — is certainly nothing new. It’s been around for quite some time, and it’s rarely successful. Most people can sniff out an astroturfing campaign a mile away because it lacks all the hallmarks of authenticity. A separate nefarious practice is fake Amazon reviews — which have also been around for ages — amusingly revealed when Amazon once accidentally reassociated real names with reviewers’ names to show authors giving themselves great reviews. Over time, Amazon has tried to crack down on the practice, but it’s not easy.
So what happens when you combine incompetent astroturfing and fake Amazon reviews? Check out the reviews on Susan Crawford’s book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. Now, I should be clear: while I respect Crawford quite a bit, and often find her arguments compelling and interesting, I found Captive Audience to go a bit too far at points, and felt that the book lost a lot of its persuasive power in really overstating the case. We agree that the broadband market is not even remotely competitive, but we disagree on the solution to that. Still, I think the book is very much worth reading, and an important contribution to the discussion on broadband/telco policy.
[...]
Basically, no matter how you slice it, there’s some sort of statistical anomaly going on here that makes it pretty clear that someone was pushing a ton of fake astroturfing reviews on Crawford’s book, and didn’t even care to take the time to hide it well. As I said, even if you don’t fully agree with the book, I’d hope we can all agree that this is a pretty disgusting move by whatever lobbyists/shills/think tanks dreamed up this astroturfing campaign just because they don’t like what the book says. Can’t fight on the merits, huh?
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Specifically, UK internet service providers will be required to block sites that the government deems unacceptable—including porn, violent material, extremist sites, pro-anorexia and pro-suicide sites, alcohol and smoking, web forums, esoteric material and even software for circumventing the block. Individual users will be able to opt out of the filter, though it will be set “on” by default. – See more at: http://www.ultraculture.org/uk-forcing-internet-censorship-even-esoteric-sites/#sthash.qHIEqdkc.dpuf
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…make an “unavoidable choice” on whether to switch on default filtering.
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The Twitter abuse debate has moved on significantly, onto the question of what the police are doing, and what difference that can make.
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“Preselected” parental filters are now official policy, and should extend to small ISPs, according the the DCMS’s new strategy paper.
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Snowden and Manning
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Due to PRISM, non-U.S. firms are avoiding Stateside cloud providers, but government access to cloud data can’t be stopped
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We’re not fans of conspiracy theories and we can never be. They don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny and as a geek site we have a soft spot for science, tech and logic. Well, at least science and tech, logic is overrated.
Silicon Valley security expert Steve Blank now says there is a very good chance that AMD and Intel processors ship with a very nice feature for totalitarian regimes. They might have a backdoor that allows spooks to access and control computers. Furthermore security expert Jonathan Brossard recently told the Financial Review that CPU backdoors are attractive attack vectors.
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Voices of reason are rising now in the public discussions of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the email and phone records the U.S. government’s NSA (National Security Agency) collects. Forbes.com published an interesting view from a member of the information security community on July 30. This article is expanding on the points Forbes made.
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Senators will have a chance to grill intelligence officials on Wednesday over the extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
How critical senators are of the programs at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing could be a gauge of the Senate’s interest in reining in the surveillance.
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Most politicians who voted “for” the NSA last week say they want changes, too.
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Some officials say the whistleblower was lying. The journalist who brought his revelations to light wants them to say it under oath.
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Chinese PC vendor said it is “looking closely” into claims its products have been banned from use within classifed networks.
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Of course, imagine an internet without the kind of encryption we have today. While it still doesn’t go nearly far enough it is one of the few things that really can significantly protect some aspects of privacy. Not only that, but it’s really been key to many of the things that we now take for granted online, including e-commerce and online money transactions. Of course, if the NSA had had its way, we might not have that today — or at least it wouldn’t be nearly as trustworthy, meaning there would be a lot less of it.
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German member of Parliament was slightly injured during weekend protests in Hamburg over Berlin’s alleged role in the NSA spying scandal, organizers said.
Free Democratic Party Bundestag Member Burkhard Muller-Sonksen was being booed while speaking at a rally Saturday when a protester climbed onto the speaker truck, grabbed his microphone and shoved him to the floor, a spokeswoman for alliance that organized the protest told Die Welt.
The Hamburg event was one of a series of protests in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Karlsruhe that drew hundreds of angry residents who denounced reports Germany is a “key partner” with the U.S. National Security Agency in its PRISM digital anti-terrorism surveillance program.
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In an interview on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell” show, Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there were “violations of court orders” by the NSA.
The remarks by the Oregon Democrat come as U.S. intelligence officials are preparing to declassify and publicly release new documents about the so-called telephone metadata program, including two “white papers” that have been provided to Congress and a “primary order” by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the collection, officials tell NBC News. Another document – a Justice Department legal memo submitted to the court – may also be released later this week.
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US officials say that certain details of the NSA surveillance programs that have been unveiled by Edward Snowden will come to light “as early as next week” when some of the documents related to the program and FISA oversight will be declassified.
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The FBI tried to enlist the father of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to fly to Moscow to try to persuade his son to return to the United States, but the effort collapsed when agents could not establish a way for the two to speak once he arrived, Snowden’s father said Tuesday.
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Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs this summer, wants New Jerseyans to vote for Rush Holt, the veteran congressman and a big believer in protecting Americans’ civil liberties.
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‘Secret law’ is anathema to our democratic traditions and the rule of law. We have introduced legislation to change this
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As part of the NSA’s ongoing mission to research the finer arts of computer security, it funds and promotes a lot of academic research. And on July 18 it announced the winner of its first Science of Security (SoS) competition after a distinguished academic panel had considered 44 entries covering the latest academic output on the topic.
The winner was Google security engineer Dr. Joseph Bonneau for his paper, “The Science of Guessing: Analyzing an Anonymized Corpus of 70 Million Passwords”, which was hailed by Dr. Patricia Muoio, chief of the NSA research directorate’s trusted systems research group, as “an example of research that demonstrates a sound scientific approach to cybersecurity.”
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Fifty-six percent of people in the United States say that federal courts should impose tougher restrictions on the government’s ability to collect phone and Internet data, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center.
The poll, which was released on Friday, shows a dramatic swing in public opinion in recent years in favor of stronger civil liberty protections.
The poll found that 43 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of Democrats believe that anti-terror policies have gone too far in restricting civil liberties. Only 25 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats held the same view in 2010.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/314043-poll-most-americans-favor-new-limits-on-nsa#ixzz2abSKk8jU
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Privacy and digital rights groups have dug in for a longer fight against massive surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency, even after the House of Representatives voted last week against an amendment to curtail the agency’s data collection.
The House last Wednesday narrowly defeated an amendment to a defense spending bill that would have prohibited the NSA from the bulk collection of phone records from U.S. carriers and cut off funding for the phone records collection program as currently designed, but digital rights groups have said the close vote gives them hope of weakening support for the NSA programs in Congress.
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The National Security Agency’s massive collection of all Americans’ phone records breaks laws without making the country safer, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee argued Tuesday night, saying the practices must be reformed.
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Way back in 2011—when “Snowden” was just a quiescent indie band from Atlanta—I wrote two posts here at the Cato blog trying to suss out what the “secret law” of the Patriot Act that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and others were raising alarms about might involve: “Atlas Bugged” and “Stalking the Secret Patriot Act.” Based on what seemed like an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence—which I won’t try to summarize here—I speculated that the government was likely engaged in some kind of large scale program of location tracking, involving the use of the Patriot Act’s Section 215 to bulk collect cell phone location records for data mining purposes.
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Six activists from the anti-surveillance group Restore the Fourth paid an unexpected visit to the office of a New York Congressman in protest of the vote which allowed the National Security Agency to continue collecting Americans’ phone records without a warrant.
The action is intended to call out Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and the more than 200 other members of Congress that voted down an amendment last week aimed at curtailing the NSA’s collection of domestic calling records. The group said they wouldn’t leave until Meeks apologizes for his “no” vote and commits to fighting against surveillance programs which collect data on Americans without a warrant or suspicion of wrongdoing.
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The verdict for Manning was predetermined, and the show trial in a kangaroo court – a post-modern American remix of China in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution – just signed, sealed and delivered it.
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A military judge issued the verdict today in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier prosecuted for releasing US government information, which included evidence of torture, war crimes, abuse, corruption and other misconduct, to WikiLeaks.
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As a non-lawyer who has been following the trial only intermittently, it can be a very confusing trial. It is full of lawyers making incomprehensible legal motions and questioning of witnesses—here, one has to interpret the subtext in the lines of questioning that initially appear bizarre, in order to understand how they relate to either side’s case.
I work as a computer programmer, and one thing that started to become apparent to me is how Manning’s case is essentially a computer crimes case. I wasn’t really thinking of Manning’s whistleblower case in these terms before attending the trial, although in retrospect it’s clear.
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‘It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Manning’s trial was about sending a message: the US government will come after you’ – Widney Brown
Despite an acquittal on the most serious “aiding the enemy” charge against him, today’s verdict against the US Private Bradley Manning reveals the US government’s misplaced priorities on national security, said Amnesty International this evening.
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A divided federal appeals court ruled today that the government does not need a probable-cause warrant to access mobile-phone subscribers’ cell-site information, a decision reversing lower court decisions that said the location data was protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is the third federal appeals court to decide the privacy issue. Adding to the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court might take up the topic, New Jersey’s high court two weeks ago ruled that warrants were required for the location data.
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It’s possible we’ve been overly generous in our assessments of the intelligence gathering capabilities of the NSA. They would have responded to our FOIA request, you see, but they had the wrong address – and there was no way for them to get that address but to email us and ask for it.
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The Moscow metro plans to install sensors that will trace passengers by tracking the SIM cards in their mobile phones. The measure is aimed at helping police retrieve stolen gadgets, but rights activists have sounded the privacy alarm over the initiative.
Police operations chief of the Moscow metro, Andrey Mokhov, told Izvestia newspaper that the sensors will become part of the subway’s intelligent security system. According to Mokhov, the action radius of each reading device is five meters. For the system to be successful, he said the devices would have to be installed into every CCTV camera inside stations, lobbies, and metro cars.
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The NSA doesn’t have to intercept and read all your messages to know what you’re doing — and neither do many Internet businesses.
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Tune in at 1pm ET for the Democracy Now! special live broadcast of the Bradley Manning verdict. We will be interviewing journalists, activists, scholars and more.
Today’s verdict follows just three days of deliberation in court martial of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning for the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history. Manning faces up to life in prison for the most serious of the more than 20 charges against him — aiding the enemy — after he leaked more than 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks in an attempt to spark a national debate about U.S. foreign policy. He has pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges which could carry up to 20 years in prison.
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An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents, a striking rebuke to military prosecutors who argued that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.
The judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with, including several counts of violating the Espionage Act. She also acquitted him of one count of violating the Espionage Act that stemmed from his leak of a video that depicted a fatal U.S. military airstrike in Farah, Afghanistan.
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So, the details aren’t out yet, but the headline message is: Bradley Manning has been found “not guilty” of “aiding the enemy” but has been convicted on other charges, including violating the Espionage Act — which seems a bit crazy, because what he was doing wasn’t espionage in any sense of the word.
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President Transparency, in the interest of protecting his Administration’s spotless record of least transparent ever, has decided to erase sections of his original campaign website so that inconvenient and broken promises (i.e., every single thing he said) can’t be so easily exposed. Although clearly no one goes to the campaign site for groundbreaking news, it had served as a useful platform to compare candidate Obama to the George W. Bush clone he has become as President. From Policy Mic:
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Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of 136 years in military jail after he was convicted on Tuesday of most charges on which he stood trial.
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This column over the weekend, by the British academic John Naughton in the Guardian, takes us one more step in assessing the damage to American interests in the broadest sense– commercial, strategic, ideological – from the panopticon approach to “security” brought to us by NSA-style monitoring programs.
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The laughable plan: train millions of federal workers to psychologically profile all their coworkers
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The Obama Administration has a comprehensive “insider threat” program to detect leakers from within government. This is pre-Snowden. Not surprisingly, the combination of profiling and “see something, say something” is unlikely to work.
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On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, this doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
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Civil Rights
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Tim Cook has tried to be a better person. Or at least, to look like one. Last year, Apple’s CEO personally flew to China to have a look around Foxconn, the company’s controversial supplier. Reports about migrant laborers’ deplorable working conditions and low pay, as well as a spate of suicides were damaging Apple’s image, so Cook promised improvements and also scouted around for new factories where the company’s iPads, iPhones and computers could be produced. One of Apple’s new partners is the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company Pegatron, which operates several factories in China. But it recently transpired its workers are even worse off than those at Foxconn.
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Pak Kok Heng used to make sweaters for the Pine Great Factory in Phnom Penh. Now, he and his former colleagues spend their days standing outside the Ministry of Social Affairs in the Cambodian capital.
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A California prisoner has died in solitary confinement while reportedly participating in a hunger strike to protest inmates’ conditions, prison activists said on Monday. But state corrections officials say the death is being investigated as a suicide.
Bill “Guero” Sell, 32, was found dead one week ago inside Corcoan State Prison’s Secure-Housing-Unit (SHU) – a solitary confinement cell. Activists say that Sell’s death was a result of his participation in the California hunger strike – a movement of approximately 1,000 inmates who are demonstrating against state prison conditions, including an increasing reliance on solitary confinement as a punishment.
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We noted recently that it has become official Obama administration policy that leaking governmental wrongdoing to the press is considered aiding the enemy. This is ridiculous on multiple levels, not the least of which is the suggestion that “the enemy” is the public, and that truthful information about government overreach and excess could somehow be counterproductive to the country’s interests. Of course, that issue hadn’t really been put to test in any sort of court until now, in the military trial of Bradley Manning. Tragically, the judge has announced that the “aiding the enemy” charge will not be dropped, despite the near total lack of evidence to support the idea that Manning knowingly released the documents to Wikileaks recognizing that it would “aid the enemy.” It is still possible he could be found “not guilty” of aiding the enemy, but dismissing the overall charge would have sent a more powerful message.
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A Romanian committee investigating crimes committed by the former communist government asked the general prosecutor on Tuesday to bring charges of aggravated murder against a prison commander for the deaths of six political prisoners.
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Over the last few years we have highlighted various privacy concerns about a range of government databases, from the National DNA Database to the DVLA database. Our report in 2011 found how nearly 1,000 police officers had been disciplined for unlawful accessing information over a three year period. Violations of the Data Protection Act included running background checks on friends and potential partners and passing on sensitive information to criminal gangs and drug dealers.
Today The Register has revealed that the RSPCA is able to access information from the PNC, despite not having any formal prosecution powers and not being a statutory-organisation. The information handed over is subsequently going unaudited by the Association of Chief Police Officers Criminal Records Office (ACRO) – run by the Association of Chief Police Officers – who also charge for the access. This is despite the PNC User Manual specifically stipulating that auditing is required for organisations that have had access to ‘sensitive information’. If auditing is not being carried out, it is impossible to know whether the RSPCA are using the sensitive data under necessity and proportionately and if they are deleting it when their investigation has concluded.
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Amber Lyon speaks at Harvard Law School on the threats the National Defense Authorization Act poses to journalism worldwide.
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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected a challenge to the sections of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that could allow for indefinite military detention of those who are suspected of substantially supporting terrorism.
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The Justice Department will pay $4.1 million to a California college student left in a Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell for four days without food or water last year, the student’s attorney announced on Tuesday.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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“For at least the past year, I’ve suffered from ridiculously awful YouTube speeds,” Hutchinson tells me. “Ads load quickly—there’s never anything wrong with the ads!—but during peak times, HD videos have been almost universally unwatchable. I’ve found myself having to reduce the quality down to 480p and sometimes even down to 240p to watch things without buffering. More recently, videos would start to play and buffer without issue, then simply stop buffering at some point between a third and two-thirds in. When the playhead hit the end of the buffer—which might be at 1:30 of a six-minute video—the video would hang for several seconds, then simply end. The video’s total time would change from six minutes to 1:30 minutes and I’d be presented with the standard ‘related videos’ view that you see when a video is over.”
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In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network.
At issue is Google Fiber’s Terms of Service, which contains a broad prohibition against customers attaching “servers” to its ultrafast 1 Gbps network in Kansas City.
Google wants to ban the use of servers because it plans to offer a business class offering in the future. A potential customer, Douglas McClendon, filed a complaint against the policy in 2012 with the FCC, which eventually ordered Google to explain its reasoning by July 29.
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“Neutrality” is one of those empty words that somehow has achieved sacred and context-free acceptance — like “transparency,” but don’t get me started on that again. But there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be “neutral” is simply to be wrong.
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La Quadrature du Net welcomes all hackers and activists to join its village1 at Observe, Hack, Make (OHM2013), the previsibly awesome Dutch hacker camp that will take place from the 31st of July to the 4th of August!
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