06.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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But the fact is, even if you think you are bound to Windows or some other proprietary operating system, you are probably already a Linux user too. When you visit a website, the chances are that it is using an Apache2 webserver. This is free and designed to integrate with the security and operating system features of Linux. Currently more than 60% of webservers are known to be hosting via Apache.
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Desktop
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I came across a post in a forum challenging GNU/Linux experts to find a file-manager in GNU/Linux that would allow the authour to use GNU/Linux exactly the way he uses that other OS:“1. Search selected network drives / partitions / directories for files by name using wildcards
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of four stable kernels: 3.15.2, 3.14.9, 3.10.45, and 3.4.95. As usual, they contain changes throughout the tree and users of those kernel series should upgrade.
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Graphics Stack
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While nothing was explicitly stated with regard to 3D performance changes with the numerous Intel DRM improvements for Linux 3.16, I ran some basic OpenGL benchmarks on a Intel Core i7 4790K Devil’s Canyon box with Ubuntu 14.04 to look out for any performance changes when using the latest drm-next code merged into Linux 3.16.
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At the X.Org Board of Directors’ meeting yesterday, it was confirmed about two projects already failing. “Unfortunately we had to fail two students, one that disappeared right after the program start and one who failed the mid-term evaluations.” Sadly, this isn’t too uncommon for these student open-source projects funded by Google.
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Benchmarks
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The new OSX will be released this fall but a Mac OSX Yosemite beta is already available online. I don’t care much about the “wow” effect around the new Apple products, so I tested this new Operative System comparing the old OSX Lion 10.7.5 and the current Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS for the stuff I care: the UNIX and the Web performance part, because I fear the upgrade OSX dilemma.
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Applications
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Command-line lovers, allow me to introduce you to Xiki, the incredibly interactive, flexible, and revolutionary command shell. I do not use the word “revolutionary” lightly. The command shell has not advanced all that much since the ancient days of Unix. Xiki is a giant leap forward. If you’re looking for the Next Big Thing in FOSS, Xiki is it.
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A new version of the Calibre eBook reader, editor, and library management software, has been released and features even more options to edit books.
Calibre is mostly used as an eBook converter and reader, but it can do a lot of other things as well. One of the latest features added to the application is the ability to edit books, which is something that very few other apps can do.
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Popcorn Time is a P2P media player built for one purpose – to allow its users to watch the latest TV shows and Movies directly from torrent sources, without downloading the actual files. It sounds illegal, but the developers say it’s not.
Most people would say that downloading a movie from a P2P website and watching it without paying anything is illegal, but that is actually debatable and depends from country to country. Whether this is moral has nothing to do with the way the application works, so we won’t dwell on it any longer. It’s your duty, as a user, to decide if you want to employ this application or not.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Torchlight came out for Linux in September of 2012 via Humble Indie Bundle 6. It has since been available for Linux users only in the Ubuntu Software Centre which hardly encompasses all Linux users.
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After years of rumours, months of teasing and weeks of waiting, SteamOS is finally here. The beta release of the gaming distro signalled the start of Valve’s tentative entry into the hardware market. The same day as the release, the first wave of Valve’s own Steam Machines went out. These beta units, while never truly meant to grace store shelves, are the first examples of many more third-party offerings to come. This massive step from Valve is making waves around the tech and games world, so we decided to talk to a few of the people that could help us truly understand the position Valve is in, and what their next move might be.
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The developers of Unreal Tournament have another update in store for us and it sounds like it’s all coming together very nicely. If you have been living under a rock the new one is confirmed for Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Thanks again for your further support of the Randa Meetings fundraising. We have now reached almost 40% of the our goal and there is still time to go. Please help even more and spread the word. If we reach our goal we can have an even more stable Kdenlive, more applications ported to KDE Frameworks 5, further progress on Phonon, a look at Amarok 3, even better KDE educational applications, a finished port of GCompris to Qt and KDE technologies, an updated KDE Book, more work on Gluon and a new and amazing KDE SDK!
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One of the features no longer available in the upcoming Plasma 5 release is the xembed based system tray (for explanation see my previous blog post). This can result in some applications missing a system tray icon, but it shouldn’t happen. There are patches around for various toolkits which will turn the xembed icon into a status notifier item. Our KDE packagers were informed back in March about the upcoming change and which patches should be applied to which components.
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Kubuntu14.10 Alpha 1 (Utopic Unicorn) is based on KDE 4.13.2, but the developers are tracking the upcoming KDE Frameworks 5, which is now in the works. It’s been a long time since a Kubuntu development version didn’t integrate an unstable version of KDE, but it looks like users will still be able to test what the makers of this distro are preparing.
“Plasma 1 is our recommended stable offering and what you get from the default download, but is now in maintenance mode. It runs the software you are familiar with and will be getting updates and bugfixes but not new features from now on.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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I’ve done the release team duty for the GNOME 3.13.3 release this week. As I often do, I took some screenshots of new things that I’ve noticed while smoketesting.
There is quite a bit of good new stuff in this release, starting with an rewritten and improved Adwaita theme that is now part of GTK+.
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Fast forward to the present day, and Jim has conducted a set of user tests on GNOME 3.10 and 3.12, which he has analysed and presented to Jakub and me. I have started filing bugs so we can fix the usability issues he discovered. More bug reports are on their way, and we’re pushing to use Jim’s testing data to increase GNOME’s usability for the next release. (Check out the bugs if you’re interested in helping out with this!)
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The mission: use GNOME Shell as the primary desktop for an entire week. Do I choose to accept it? Yes. It’s easy enough to try something for a short time and discard it in a negative manner, which has been the case for me with GNOME Shell in the past, but perhaps it can be fun to challenge yourself to try something properly and for a longer time. Or perhaps you’re a masochist! Either way, feel free to join me…
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Frequently within the Phoronix Forums it is requested to do benchmarks with Arch Linux since its users tend to be adamant that it’s the fastest Linux distribution. In the past I’ve run benchmarks of the Arch-based Manjaro to look for speed differences as an easy and quick to deploy variant. Today the latest Arch Linux variant I am benchmarking is Antegros Linux.
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New Releases
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SparkyLinux 3.4 “Annagerman” MATE, Xfce and Base (Openbox) is out.
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Red Hat Family
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For those in need of a quick and easy place to experiment and trial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, which was released as stable earlier this month, it’s easy to do so within Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. It’s running well using a Xen HVM instance and so I have run some preliminary benchmarks against SUSE Enterprise and Ubuntu Linux.
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HP has the ability to run Red Hat’s distribution on its Helion OpenStack platform and welcomes a certification for it. So, why won’t Red Hat certify it on HP? At HP Discover 2014 in Las Vegas earlier this month, Saar Gillai, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for HP Cloud, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante on theCUBE and talked about his bewilderment of why Red Hat won’t certify on HP’s platform.
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Red Hat has made a series of moves in recent months to make headway in the cloud as it once again seeks to successfully productize an open source platform.
Red Hat Inc. has agreed to acquire Paris-based OpenStack cloud integrator eNovance. The new acquisition will help customers architect a cloud strategy, as well as set up, deploy and manage private clouds, according to the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The first alpha of the Utopic Unicorn (to become 14.10) has now been released!
This alpha features images for Kubuntu, Lubuntu Ubuntu GNOME, UbuntuKylin and the Ubuntu Cloud images.
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Unlike the previous development branch for Ubuntu 14.04, fewer developers chose to participate in the first Alpha release of 14.10. This is not something to worry about and it’s likely that the second Alpha will have more exposure.
Canonical stopped releasing Alpha versions for its operating system for some time now, and only a few of the flavors have decided to keep doing this kind of releases. Ubuntu 14.10 will only get a Beta version right before launch so, until then, users can only expect the flavors to have intermediary builds.
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If Ubuntu Linux is to prove truly competitive in the OpenStack cloud and Big Data worlds, it needs to run on more than x86 hardware. And that’s what Canonical achieved this month, with the announcement of full support for IBM POWER8 machines on Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Server.
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POWER8 is IBM’s platform for wooing enterprise users interested in Big Data and fast performance. In early June, Canonical announced the official general availability of Power8 servers running Ubuntu.
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The next version of Ubuntu is due out in October, but you can take an early build of the open source operating system for a test drive at any time by grabbing the latest nightly.
Or you can try the first Alpha release of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. While there’s not an official Alpha build of the main branch of Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, there are builds for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Cloud, which are all variations of Ubuntu with custom desktop environments and other features.
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Flavours and Variants
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With the release of Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Xfce, the collection of Mint flavors is now complete. Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and Xfce are the main versions, but the developers have been dabbling for some time in a Mint release based on Debian. We’ll have to wait a little more until those experimental OSes make their entrance in this branch.
Just like all the other releases in the new 17 “Qiana” series, the Xfce flavor is also based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, a distribution that will be supported until 2019. This extended support period will also be adopted by Linux Mint developers and the next three editions of this distro will use the same base, 14.04 LTS
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Ubuntu has quite a few flavors under its belt, but there are still a few ones missing, like MATE for example. A few developers, including one from Canonical, are working to make Ubuntu MATE Remix a reality and so far they have done a great job.
MATE is a desktop environment aimed at users who really enjoyed the old GNOME 2, but who also want something different from what everyone else is doing. Most of the major desktop environments are going through big changes, like GNOME and KDE, but the MATE developers are working to keep things the way they were.
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Linux Mint 17 Xfce was released today. Let’s look at what it offer to the user. This is not going to be a full-blown review, rather a quick screenshot tour in the Live session.
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Linux is great for a litany of reasons, but one of the most important is refurbishing. You see, an operating system based on the open-source kernel can breathe new life into an older computer, and effectively turn it into a new machine. This is because the operating systems are typically less system intensive than Windows.
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Before Google comes in with its own smartwatches, consumers have two mainstream devices to choose from. On one hand, there is the Galaxy Gear 2, coming from a reputed brand like Samsung and there’s Pebble Steel by Pebble Technology Corporation that gained popularity after a successful Kickstarter funding campaign for their first watch.
When we consider the turf of wearable devices, there’s nothing much to boast of, except, of course, Google Glass. Apart from Pebble and Gear, the tech industry is impatiently waiting for the Motorola smartwatch, which will be made in collaboration with Google. The wait, however, doesn’t have to be this hard. If you are someone who wants to get their hands on a smartwatch right now, both the Pebble and the Gear 2 are excellent choices. Both have their own merits, and also their own demerits. But then, which to choose between the two? Well, that’s why we are here. In this article, we’ll be doing a quick comparison between the Pebble Steel smartwatch and the Galaxy Gear 2. Let’s see who wins.
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Motorola Solutions unveiled a rugged, enterprise handheld that runs Android 4.1, 1D or 2D scanning, and offers a choice of brick, gun, or turret styles.
When Motorola split into Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions back in 2011, Motorola Mobility was supposed to be the Android company and Motorola Solutions the Windows company. Yet, the latter, which produces a range of enterprise solutions including 4G wireless equipment, has done quite well with its Android-ready enterprise handhelds.
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A Polish start-up company is claiming to have created the first industrial computer based on the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module.
Techbase, said the device which it has dubbed ModBerry is designed to be used in automation and installation markets providing multi-level user access cloud management.
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Phones
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Exciting times are ahead of application and platform developers with the release of Tizen Common as it has the ability to run on the Intel NUC DE3815TYKHE, which was one of the giveaways at the Tizen Developer Conference (as well as the Samsung Gear 2)
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Android
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The keynote of Google I/O was only and only about one thing – Android. This Linux-based operating system has become the center of Google’s universe. From cars to smartwatches, it was only about Android. That makes one wonder where was the other Linux-based platform, Chrome OS, Google has been developing for a while!
Chrome was not absent, Google did talk about Chrome OS at the event, but it was more about Android than the Chrome OS. You can see Sundar Pichai talking about Chromebook at the event, but was more about Android than Chrome OS.
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Google’s Sundar Pichai had a lot to share on stage the Google I/O 2014 keynote on Wednesday. Between Pichai and another half-dozen Googlers, the keynote ran for about 2.5 hours, bombarding attendees with information on new features for Android, Chrome and other initiatives. So it makes sense that some things only got a few minutes of attention, and one of items that was actually the most interesting came when Pichai said Android apps are coming Google’s Chrome OS.
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There have been rumours doing rounds suggesting the end of Google’s Nexus line of Android devices. Well, here’s some piece of ‘real’ news for those who are worried about this. Google will be launching a new Nexus device along with the release of its Android L by the end of this year.
It is also a fact that Google is reforming the way it will be rolling out high-end Android devices. Reportedly, the search giant is progressing on a new program dubbed Android Silver, as part of which, Google will be paying big manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and Motorola to make Android smartphones according to the specifications it offers. They will then be sold via cellular carriers like AT&T and Verizon. This is expected to materialise by next year.
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Android developers are getting their first look at the future with the new Android L Developer Preview edition of the mobile device operating system, which was unveiled by Google on June 25 at the Google I/O 2014 developers conference. The early preview version provides developers and users with glimpses of the evolution of Android as it approaches its seventh birthday in September 2014. Android L marks the first time that Google has ever provided early access to a development version of the OS to device and application developers, according to a June 25 post by Jamal Eason, an Android product manager, on the Android Developers Blog. The preview version, which is available for use as of today, will allow developers to explore many of the new features and capabilities of the next version of Android while providing tools to allow development and testing on the new platform, wrote Eason.
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SaaS/Big Data
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In a large open source project made up of lots of interacting pieces developed by different teams, how do you decide what officially becomes a part of the core release and what stays outside? In OpenStack, a formal process of incubation helps prepare fledgling projects for integration into the main code body as they develop and mature.
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This market is moving so quickly in terms of what’s happening. And if you wind back Hadoop, it started as a way of having a scale-out architecture. It allowed you to take your storage out onto the web. And around 2011, the team at Yahoo! Decided that Hadoop was a great technology and realised that it had potential far outside the four walls of Yahoo!
So they decided to take it out to be a general data processing platform, and they founded Hortonworks. We take Apache Hadoop, which is an open source data architecture, and to turn it into an enterprise-class data platform, completely in the open.
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Databases
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Google has been using, improving and boosting its Knowledge Graph search services for several years to show users how information can be linked together in graphics form to help find desired results. Now it is again pushing forward in the graph database world through the open-source release of Cayley, which will be used in the continuing development of graph databases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It’s been a couple of months since the latest development release for Oracle Linux, but the developers have had enough time to prepare the distro for the final release, although a precise date hasn’t been put forward.
“It’s an exciting day for the Oracle Linux team because the Oracle Linux 7 release candidate is now available for download from Oracle Technology Network! Head on over to the OTN Oracle Linux downloads page and have a look at the Oracle Linux Beta Programs section to get it right now,” said the developers in the official announcement.
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Oracle is a little different – First of all, I’m not even sure what the name of the thing is. I’ve heard of OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux), Oracle Linux, and a few other names. I think I’ll just call it OEL. OEL is a pay distro *BUT* they do offer free downloads of their install media as well as updates. Originally updates were pay-only but they opened that up a while back when they had a promotional campaign claiming they were faster with updates than CentOS (turns out they aren’t but close). I guess their business plan is you can use OEL for free and have updates… but there are some value add features (like Ksplice and Dtrace, etc) and support that cost extra. To download their iso install media you have to have an account on their system but that is cost-free and it just so happens I already had one because I’ve downloaded previous releases like OEL6.
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Healthcare
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GNU Health is a free software tool for healthcare facilities in rural areas and developing countries, licensed under the GNU GPL. The project got its start in 2006, and at the time of my interview with Falcon, GNU Health had evolved into a health and hospital information system used by the United Nations, public hospitals and Ministries of Health in countries like Argentina, and private institutions around the globe. Today, GNU Solidario is planting their free software and health administration system into facilities in need in countries all over the world.
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Funding
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Couchbase Inc., which helps companies manage data, raised $60 million in a funding round that almost doubled the amount it had received from investors.
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With a fresh new $20 million funding round in its pocket a new distribution strategy built on open source licensing, database startup Aerospike is bidding to become a major player in a market segment that some people believe will be the future of enterprise database management.
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BSD
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GhostBSD 4.0 continues moving along as the FreeBSD operating system focused around the MATE Desktop Environment.
GhostBSD 4.0 Beta 2 was released and it features various bug-fixes and other minor improvements over the earlier development versions.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Stallman’s speech will be part of Tails HackFest. His talk will be nontechnical, admission is gratis (and registration is appreciated) and the public is encouraged to attend.
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Openness/Sharing
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An ‘open-source’ seed initiative has released 36 varieties of 14 food crops, which the project’s leaders say could help poor farmers get access to better quality seeds.
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Aleph Objects believes in open source 3D printing. In fact, the company was born to build open source and its philosophy of “Libre Hardware” is built into everything the company creates. “We exist for the freedom of our users and the benefits that brings,” said Harris Kenny, communications manager for Aleph Objects, a Loveland, CO-based maker of the LulzBot 3D desktop printer.
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Open Hardware
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Intel chips and 3D printing could make robots as ubiquitous, affordable, customizable and diversely helpful as smartphones.
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Programming
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PHP, an HTML-embedded scripting language with syntax borrowed from C, Java, and Perl, with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in, has been updated to version 5.5.14.
The PHP 5.x branch includes a new OOP model based on the Zend Engine, a new extension for improved MySQL support, built-in native support for SQLite, and much more.
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Ed Miliband has said a Labour government at Westminster would consider building border posts if Scotland voted for independence.
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Security
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Canonical has published details in a security notice about a GnuPG vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems that has been fixed.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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What is common between The Conspirator, Death of a President, JFK, The Day of the Jackal and Shooter? Full of twisted plots, these movies are based on President Assassination plots. A similar plot is bearing the wrath of the government of North Korea, which has taken serious offense to Seth Rogen’s upcoming film titled The Interview.
The American action-comedy is about two journalists that are given the task of assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and is now being called as an “act of war” by the government. The movie stars Rogen and James Franco as the two journos who are instructed by the CIA to assassinate the leader. In a statement issued by a local KCNA news agency, a spokesperson from the foreign ministry called Rogen as a “gangster filmmaker” and has asked for the ban of the film, reported AFP.
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This makes me wonder if there are any Hollywood films that show the assassination of a real and not a fictional US President. Or are there films that revolve around the plot of murdering the current US President? However, what I do remember is that the US Army banned the sale of Medal of Honor video game as the game allowed you to play as an Al Qaeda member and attack US troops. Do you think a writer can ever dare to work on a film plot about the assassination of the current US President?
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Is Clinton trying to pull this trick all over again? Who knows. But what’s clear is that proponents of the Iraq War are still the kinds of people that corporate media are seeking out as experts now. Getting pro-war Democrats to balance out the pro-war Republicans isn’t exactly a broad debate.
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Remember Schaft? The dextrous little robot that previously grabbed the top prize at DARPA’s $2 million Robotics Challenge. Google acquired the Japanese robotics firm in 2013, and reports emerged soon after that Mountain View was planning to pull its team from the DARPA robotics competition. The reason being the company is not keen on pursuing military contracts.
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Finance
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Poverty continues to be a pressing social problem– but it’s hardly mentioned on the network newscasts, according to a new study by the media watch group FAIR.
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Peter Phillips with guest host Marty Bennett Co-Chair, North Bay Jobs with Justice, examine the significance of the $15 an hour city-wide minimum wage recently approved by the City of Seattle and we will discuss the minimum wage and living wage campaigns across the SF Bay Area that are part of the national “Fight for $15″ campaign. Our guests include: Jahmese Myres, Policy Associate and Organizer, East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, Gordon Mar is Executive Director of SF Jobs with Justice, Derecka Mehrens, Executive Director, Working Partnerships USA (Santa Clara County) and Paul K. Sonn, General Counsel & Program Director National Employment Law Project
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Owing to its concerns over western (mainly US) dominance on the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, China is working towards establishing a global financial institution. According to two sources familiar with the matter, Beijing has proposed to other countries to double the size of the registered capital for the bank to $100bn, FT reported.
The bank, which will be named Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has so far garnered attention from 22 countries including Middle East. Initially, the model will be focusing on a revised version of the ancient trade route that connected Europe to China- silk road.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One measure of the resistance to the inclusion of corporate sovereignty provisions in TAFTA/TTIP is that the European Commission unexpectedly announced that it would be holding a three-month public consultation on this aspect in an attempt to defuse public anger.
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Privacy
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We hear all the time that the British public don’t care about mass surveillance, privacy and Edward Snowden, but we know that’s not true. It may be that those inside the Westminster bubble have been able to hide from how people really feel up to now, but it’s time to change that.
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President Obama aims to allow European citizens to sue the United States over the misuse of their personal data
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The top court in Massachusetts has ruled that an attorney charged with mortgage fraud must decrypt his computers for police, who believe they contain evidence of the alleged crime.
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Civil Rights
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Campaigners call for release of 29-year-old Mubarak Bala, who lives in Kano in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north
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The Department of Justice has asked a Detroit-area federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit against the department and the FBI filed by local horror-rap group the Insane Clown Posse and four of its fans, with the assistance of the ACLU. That’s a real thing that’s happening in the world we all inhabit. Here, watch ICP’s Joseph Bruce (aka Violent J) introduce the lawsuit on January 8:
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U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland on Monday heard arguments on a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Insane Clown Posse and a group of fans against the FBI.
ICP, a Detroit music duo known for explicit lyrics, face paint and a diehard following that created the “Juggalo” subculture, claim a 2011 FBI report caused their fans to be detained, questioned and harassed by law enforcement agencies across the country. (View the complaint here.)
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Fifteen years ago, he landed a marketing job with a network equipment maker called Riverstone Networks. Riverstone made network routers, among other things, and it sold many of these to Chinese internet service providers who then used them to block traffic on their networks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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As you may have heard, this morning, the Supreme Court effectively killed off Aereo with an unfortunate and terribly problematic 6 to 3 ruling that can be summarized simply as the “looks like a duck” test. If you’re not familiar with the history, decades back, when cable companies were first around, they started rebroadcasting network TV to cable subscribes, and the Supreme Court (rightly) ruled that this was perfectly legal. The broadcasters ran screaming and crying to Congress, who changed the law to create a retransmission setup, saying that if cable companies wanted to retransmit broadcast TV they had to pay fees. Aereo got around that by setting up a very different system — or so we thought. The majority decision, written by Stephen Breyer, really just keeps going back to the fact that Aereo looks just like what those cable companies used to do… and therefore, given that Congress changed the law to outlaw that, Congress must have meant that Aereo should be illegal as well. The majority seems to view things as a black box, ignoring everything in the box. It just says “well, to end users and to networks, this is identical to the old cable systems.” As for the very careful steps that Aereo took to comply with the law? The majority just brushes that off as meaningless.
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06.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet, once again reminds us that Linux dominates supercomputers. SJVN linked to the latest Top500 group results, showing Linux makes up for 97% of the five hundred fastest computers in the world. This is the biggest of the big iron, the top supercomputer has 1,024,000 GB of RAM and 3,120,000 Intel Xeon cores, running Kylin Linux.
With Linux being the clear OS of choice among the hot rod builders, where does proprietary Unix fit into the picture? Increasingly, the answer appears to be that it doesn’t.
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Server
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Not only does Linux power all of the top 10 machines on the June 2014 list — including China’s winning Tianhe-2, which stole the show once again with its performance of 33.86 Petaflop/second (Pflop/s) on the Linpack benchmark — but it also now accounts for a full 97 percent of the full set of 500. A mere 15 supercomputers on the list *don’t* use Linux, including 12 using Unix and just two using Windows. (The last one is described simply as “Mixed.”)
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Right now the only operating system that supports this 36 core processors, are the ones based on Linux, though it is not certain which Linux based OS MIT researchers are using.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds conducts an interview with the IEEE Computer Society to explain how he sits today in terms of his thoughts with Linux.
Torvalds is as humble and genuine as you might expect.
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Over the course of a discussion about the patch, Alan Cox mentioned that there didn’t seem to be anything particularly DRM-specific in David’s code. It easily could exist at a yet more generic layer of the kernel. And although David agreed with this, he said the DRM folks were more amenable to taking his patch and that “I’ve spent enough time trying to get the attention of core maintainers for simple fixes, I really don’t want to waste my time pinging on feature-patches every 5 days to get any attention. If someone outside of DRM wants to use it, I’d be happy to discuss any code-sharing. Until then, I’d like to keep it here as people are willing to take it through their tree.”
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Graphics Stack
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Beignet, Intel’s method of supporting OpenCL compute under open-source Linux on the graphics cores within their modern processors, is out with a very significant release today.
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The xf86-video-ati 7.4.0 driver update has an assortment of fixes but most prominently enables tiling by default for “CIK” and “Mullins” GPUs, support for server-managed FDs to use the X.Org Server without root privileges, GLAMOR support for R300/R500 GPUs, and an assortment of other updates.
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Version 0.9.0 of the X.Org’s xf86-video-modesetting driver, which provides a universal DDX for systems with a DRM/KMS display driver, has been updated.
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Benchmarks
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Yesterday I published some performance benchmarks indicating Intel ultrabook performance might be a bit slower on Linux 3.16 when comparing a recent Git kernel against Linux 3.15 stable. Today I have some results from a very different system: numbers on the very high-end Intel Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” desktop rig.
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Applications
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Git 2.0.1, a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, is now available for download.
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Instructionals/Technical
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I’ve been quite an avid and exclusive user of Vim for a couple of years now, and in that time I’ve seen quite a lot of misinformation and misguided vitriol (for want of a better word) for what is by far the best text editor I have ever used.
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Recently the Samsung Gear 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Gear (Tizen version) have got rooted. Now this opens up more possibilities, and for the seriously tech experts you can do funky things like installing busy box on your Smartwatch.
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasmate’s UI consists of two different views. The first one is the startpage which serves the purpose of creating new packages and loading existing ones and the second one is the main window with the appropriate editor and the various dockwidgets that can be used for the specific package.
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Hello everyone. I have started porting Lokalize to KDE5. Lokalize is computer-aided translation system that can be used to translate KDE and any other open source project into differenet human languages.
Currently it starts and even loads .po files, as well as adds them to translation memory.
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Just in time before the KDE SC 4.14 string freeze applies, I merged my last AppData patches and as of now: all KDE Edu applications provide AppData meta information. This means, they will be better visible in software centers like Apper or GNOME-Software.
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This article explores where the KDE community currently stands and where it is going. Frameworks, Plasma, KDE e.V., Qt5, KDE Free Qt Foundation, QtAddons – you heard some of these terms and want to know what all the fuss is about? A set of articles on the Dot aims to bring some clarity in the changes and constants of the KDE community in 2014 and further. This is the first article, diving into the technical side of things: Plasma, applications and libraries.
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Qt 5.3 was released back in May (while yesterday marked the Qt 5.3.1 release). Qt 5.4 thus has been an active development target for many weeks now and it’s beginning to show with the development branch locking in early August.
Heikkinen Jani of Digia reminded Qt developers today the plan is to lock the development branch for Qt 5.4 on 8 August, at which point the features for this next tool-kit update should be ready.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Parsix GNU/Linux 6.0r1, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, has been released for testing.
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New Releases
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Grab this new version from our new Neptune Homepage.
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The OpenELEC makers usually follow the XMBC releases, but it’s been a while since the last XBMC version. This doesn’t mean that the devs will stay put and wait for changes to come from upstream. In fact, OpenELEC is a distro and there are other components that need to be updated and fixed, as necessary.
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Alpine Linux is not a distribution designed for beginners. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Users will need to be well accustomed to use a terminal. For example, you have to work a little just to install a desktop environment.
“The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.0.1 of its Alpine Linux operating system. This is a bugfix release of the v3.0 musl based branch. This release is based on the 3.14.8 kernel which has some critical security fixes,” said the developers in the shortlog.
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.3.0
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Where might Red Hat be looking next, as it seeks to grow its cloud computing presence, capabilities and community? As has been the case for some time, cloud computing and some adjacent technology trends, such as Big Data, DevOps and storage, are likely to drive Red Hat’s next M&A move. A prominent target might be Docker, whose open source containerization technology features prominently in RHEL 7.
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Fedora
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Between the upcoming Fedora 21 release, involvement in Red Hat’s Project Atomic, its planned re-structuring under Fedora.next, and its new leader, Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project has a lot going on lately. All of the upheaval is a sign that the distribution is doing what it must to stay relevant in the new world of distributed, scale-out computing, says Miller who took over as project leader earlier this month after his predecessor Robyn Bergeron announced her departure in May.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical is preparing for the official release of Ubuntu Touch and the company is working to build an RTM version of its mobile operating system. To do that successfully, the devs also need to work on the apps, not only on the OS, so they have announced a new “Core Apps Hack Days” next week.
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OpenELEC has been updated to 4.0.5 in this NOOBS release. In addition to the XBMC update (which is undoubtedly the most important change), there are lots of security fixes and general bugfixes — some of which were specific to the Raspberry Pi version, so this is particularly good news for RPi users. It also includes support for some more WLAN chips, updated Raspberry Pi firmware, and it even updates the Linux kernel to 3.14.7, which is even newer than what is included in the Raspbian distribution. Good stuff.
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Amptek is prepping a uClinux- and Cortex-M3 based “iCon” SBC for IoT, equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB, and CAN, and running on under half a Watt.
uClinux on a microcontroller represents the simplest expression of the Linux operating system, sort of the flipside to Android or Ubuntu on the high end. Despite this platform’s limitations, however, it draws only a smidgin of electricity, and provides a capable wireless platform while also supplying numerous industrial interfaces. All these attributes are showcased by the iCon single board computer (SBC), which probably deserves more than being stuck in the doldrums on Kickstarter, with nine days left to go.
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Since long past times, when Gugliemo Marconi has amazed the entire World broadcasting his radio signals from the Elettra ship, a subject held dear by electronic engineers has been radio transmission. After these years, the scenario has changed a lot, firstly with the appering of digital technologies (DAB, for instance) and, up to day, with the streaming of radio transmissions on internet network by the TCP/IP protocol. Is this still radio? Or we can just talk of broadcasting radio station programs by TCP/IP network?.
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Enea has unveiled version 4.0 of its networking-oriented Enea Linux embedded distribution, introducing virtualization features and an updated Yocto Project 1.6 foundation. The Swedish telecom software vendor claims version 4.0 is “the most open commercial embedded distribution on the market.” We’ll await further evidence on that score, while also noting that all the major commercial embedded Linux platforms have become more open in recent years.
Embedded Linux vendors such as Enea, Wind River, MontaVista, and Mentor Graphics promote open source much more than they used to. Not so long ago, the chief pitches were for enterprise support, testing and validation services, and real-time “hardening” of the Linux kernel for deterministic, mission critical applications. These remain prime selling points, but the vendors are also starting to promote their new Yocto-based openness.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Virtzilla used to hand full, and fully-supported, SLES licences to some vSphere buyers. As Vmware’s page describing the offering states, the licences came “complete with patches and updates”. Those don’t come free: SUSE’s support pricing page lists prices starting at $US349 per physical server and $529 for a virtual server.
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Samsung Electronics and Google have teamed up to confirm that part of the Samsung KNOX technology will be integrated into the next version of Android.
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Android
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Android has been popular in emerging markets for a long time, but Google first expressed explicit interest in this market when it launched Android 4.4 KitKat last year. It was designed specifically so it would run well on the lower-cost hardware that usually finds its way to emerging markets. At its launch last fall, Google’s senior vice president, Sundar Pichai, said: “As we get on our journey to reach the next billion people, we want to do it on the latest version of Android.” And now, with Android One, Google’s showing that Pichai’s vision has legs.
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Google launched today’s event with a 3 hour keynote presentation by unveiling ‘Android Auto’, ‘Android Wear’, ‘Android TV’ and ‘Android One’. With Google already knowing everything you do with your phone, tablet and the introduction of Glass it now seems Google also want control over your TV, your watch and even your car. If these new services are a success than Google will literally know everything you do, wear, go and see.
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At last year’s Google I/O the company revealed it had activated 900 million Android devices, and this year that number has hit the billion mark. Over a 30-day period, 1 billion people now actively use Android devices. Google’s Android and Chrome chief, Sundar Pichai, revealed the latest Android figures on stage at Google I/O in San Francisco today, including the fact that phones are checked 100 billion times each day.
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Google is working to bring Chrome OS and Android closer together, and that’ll eventually mean having Android apps running right on a Chromebook. “We’re in early days,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chrome and Android chief, said on stage today at Google’s I/O developer conference. Pichai didn’t say when the feature would arrive, but he demonstrated it already working using Android apps for Evernote, Flipboard, and Vine. The apps can appear in a tall, phone-sized window, or they can be expanded to run as they would on tablets.
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Google on Wednesday kicked off its I/O conference in San Francisco, presenting devs with a dizzying array of possibilities: a new design language for Android L; a boatload of new apps, APIs and SDKs; and expanded support for a variety of architectural and hardware configurations. “If I were a developer, I would feel real good about opportunities today,” said ABI analyst Jeff Orr.
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At Google I/O, Google previewed Android 5.0′s new UI, and also unveiled Android TV and Android Auto, while offering new details on Android Wear.
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Today at Google’s I/O (Input/Output) event Google officially announced the launch of Android TV. For some of you, this might sound familiar as back in 2010 Google launched ‘Google TV’ which quickly was dropped again due to a clear lack of interest.
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I was wondering what was ‘L’ in Android, until someone pointed out “maybe it’s Linux”. In all honestly I don’t think it’s L for Linux, but a wishful thinking doesn’t hurt given the fact that Google is putting Linux ‘everywhere’.
Linus Torvalds may have never dreamt of this day when he sent out that email back in 1991 and said, “I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”
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Gaming peripherals giant turned PC maker Razer has announced that it will be supporting Google’s Android TV platform with the launch of a microconsole device later this year.
Announced at the Google I/O conference late last night, Android TV is aimed at getting the advertising giant’s Linux-based mobile-centric software in set-top boxes and smart TVs. As well as support for streaming from Android-based smartphones, tablets and wearables, Android TV will support apps and games – the latter of which is Razer’s focus for its as-yet unnamed microconsole device.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Along with the Education 2 in 1 tablet, Intel India has also introduced the Classmate PC and Intel ECS TR10CD1 tablet. The Classmate PC features 10-inch display, runs Windows 8.1, Windows 7 , or Linux. Whereas, the Intel ECS TR10CD1 is a 10.1 inch Android 4.2-based tablet, powered by 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2520 processor along with 1GB/2GB of RAM.
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That right there is the beauty of open source and the benefit of ‘paying’ with your time. We get so used to software that forces us to just deal with the menus and settings they provide that we don’t think to suggest new features when we switch to open source, but if you do you might just get what you’d paid for.
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Cisco is open sourcing block cipher technology to, the company hopes, better protect and control traffic privacy in cloud computing systems
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This past year, Stu Bailey, founder and CTO of network management company InfoBlox, led a research team in developing a fully programmable, open source SDN switch that is not ASIC dependent. The LINCX switch runs on any off-the-shelf Linux or Xen server or on a white box switch and is not network ASIC dependent.
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Although many people at this point have heard Sage’s history of where Ceph came from, I am still often asked questions like “what was the original use case for Ceph?”
So, in honor of the 10th birthday of Ceph, I thought it might be helpful (and hopefully interesting, given how much I love to hear Sage tell the story) to share Ceph’s origin story and the road to where we are today.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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While GTK3 isn’t yet used by default with Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser, the port to the newer version of the GNOME tool-kit is making progress. As a great sign, Firefox is starting to run on Wayland with the Weston compositor!
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SaaS/Big Data
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Instead of using SSL for data in motion encryption, PLUMgrid is leveraging a new approach to keep the cloud safe.
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Joyent’s SmartDataCenter 7 package offers on-premises provisioning and management of containers and virtual machines. Watch out, OpenStack?
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ownCloud, the open source file sharing and syncing platform, is aiming to provide a “Dropbox-like” experience, in its own words—as well as to blur the line demarcating private from public clouds by letting users share file between ownCloud instances. That’s all part of ownCloud 7 Community Edition, the latest version of the platform, which has been released in beta form.
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Databases
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Delivering out-of-the-box Big Data analytics, with no specialized programming required, is the goal behind the latest version of Pentaho’s business intelligence platform. Announced this week, Pentaho 5.1 offers enhanced MongoDB support, full Hadoop 2.0 YARN compatibility and more.
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We had the chance to attend the opening day of MongoDBWorld in New York. The event, which was the company’s first user conference, was very well attended, with about 2000 attendees and made the Sheraton Time Square in New York look to small a venue for the event.
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Education
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Two years ago, when the Raspberry Pi launched, it was with the intention of improving IT education in the UK. Since then more powerful, better connected or cheaper boards have come onto the market, but the Pi retains its position as the white knight of ICT teaching.
Why? Because of the community of users that has grown up around it. To find out more we travelled west to Manchester, venue for the second annual Jamboree—a festival of educators, makers and messer-abouters focussed on highlighting how engaging the Pi can be. There, we met 75% of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s education team—Ben Nuttall, Clive Beale, and Carrie Anne Philbin—to discuss IT teaching in the UK.
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Business
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Stock believes that he is going to be able to distinguish what Zenoss is doing from all of the other competitors. Is he right?
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Openness/Sharing
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An ‘open-source’ seed initiative has released 36 varieties of 14 food crops, which the project’s leaders say could help poor farmers get access to better quality seeds.
The new seed varieties have been available for delivery globally from mid-May, says Irwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder and horticulturalist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was involved in the release.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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I’ve always liked PHP’s default syntax highlighting, that is to say the color scheme used by highlight_file(). I’ve often found myself easily grokking code examples on PHP.net when, say, looking up the parameter order for something like imageconvolution(), only to suffer some frustration once going back to Gedit.
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The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Luna release, the annual release train from the Eclipse community. This year 76 projects are participating in the release that includes 61 million lines of code and was developed by over 340 Eclipse committers. This is the ninth year the Eclipse community has planned, developed, and delivered a coordinated release that allows users and adopters to update their Eclipse installations at one time.
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Intel’s MIC run-time offload library will likely be added to the GNU Compiler Collection in the very near future.
This month the GCC steering committee approved adding Intel’s offload library to GCC that provides run-time support for their MIC architecture, which is what makes up their high-end “Xeon Phi” hardware.
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Personally I am very pro-EU. But whatever your stance on the EU, the outright dishonesty of the Cameron approach must be condemned.
I published a couple of weeks ago that Juncker does not share Barroso’s hostility to Scottish independence: as a former Prime Minister of Luxembourg he does not see the problem with small nations. The British media has been extremely keen to puff up the opposition to Scottish independence by foreign leaders. Cameron and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have invested huge diplomatic capital into persuading Barack Obama and Li Keqiang to make statements against Scottish independence, while standing next to Cameron for the cameras.
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Science
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Sharing research results through open access to publications and data is a key priority for EU says EU Commissioner for research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn
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Health/Nutrition
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Food companies have spent billions of dollars to cover up the link between sugar consumption and health problems. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
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Security
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At the beginning of the year, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) warned of the dangers of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that were leveraging Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to amplify attacks. Apparently, that warning did not fall on deaf ears, as most vulnerable NTP servers have been patched in the last six months, according to a new report from NSFOCUS.
In December 2013, NSFOCUS found that 432,120 NTP servers around the world could potentially be leveraged in a DDoS attack. In a new analysis released today and conducted during the month of May, NSFOCUS only found 17,647 unpatched servers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The drone industry’s main lobbyist wants lawmakers to think of drones as extensions of humans: The eyes that can rise above the plumes of a forest fire and the airborne sound sensors that can look for victims of an earthquake.
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The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and military officials.
The group found that more than a decade into the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.
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ISIS seems to be aware of a key aspect of the power of social media: that it is a conversation. Platforms such as Ask.fm, on which users can post questions and give answers anonymously, enable people to have direct conversations with ISIS fighters.
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In Iraq, armed and angry militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are at the gates of Baghdad. In Pakistan, government forces are mounting a ferocious campaign against the Taliban in North Waziristan. In Syria, the civil war drags on. These are “hot wars” involving the clashing of troops and weapons. Having escaped such “hot” conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, these are the sort of war Americans have made it plain they are not prepared to fight.
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The report, released early Thursday by the Stimson Center, concludes that while targeted killing operations might have protected Americans at home, they come at a heavy price abroad: Extremist groups have only grown in influence overseas and “blow back” over civilian casualties is becoming “a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations,” in places like Yemen and Pakistan.
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Throughout the 20th century the United States, more than any other country, championed the development of the international law of armed conflict. But in this century many nations accuse the United States of abandoning that leadership by using drones to conduct hundreds of targeting killings of terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, in what they see as a violation of international law. And now, with the world watching, President Obama may decide to expand the use of drones to Iraq to counter the advances of the militant group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
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America’s reliance on secretive drone missile strikes against terror suspects has set a “dangerous precedent” that could be imitated by other countries and trigger wider wars around the world, former senior US officials said in a report on Thursday.
The ex-officials acknowledged that the robotic aircraft are a useful tool that is “here to stay,” but urged President Barack Obama to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds their use, introduce stricter rules for the strikes and take a hard look at whether the bombing raids were genuinely effective.
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Finally, and most troubling of all, there is no mechanism in place for independent testing of whether US practice matches the limits Obama has announced. Why can’t there be an assessment, at a minimum after the fact, as to the validity and consequences of each attack? The Israeli Supreme Court reviews each of Israel’s targeted killings, with appropriate deference to military judgment, to assure that they fall within legal bounds. We have no such review here, by a court or otherwise. Instead, we continue to operate the drone program almost entirely in secret, and have yet to admit that we killed a single innocent bystander, despite widespread reports of such deaths. Without real accountability, it is highly unlikely that the world will believe that the US is operating within the law. Why should it?
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The Obama administration’s once-secret legal justification for killing U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with a drone strike cites an Israeli court decision that allows the targeted killing of alleged Palestinian militants.
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Better late than never, Americans have been given a redacted version of a Justice Department memo that offers a legal rationale for targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born al-Qaeda figure who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The document was made public this week, after the Obama Administration decided not to appeal a court order that it be disclosed.
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Since the CIA’s robotic assassination campaign began in earnest in 2008, the skies over Pakistan’s wild tribal zones known as the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Agencies) which have given sanctuary to the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been filled with the buzzing sound of CIA Predator and more advanced Reaper drones hunting terrorists, militants and insurgents.
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Jud was killed in a rocket strike close to the family home on Tuesday night that also injured her sister and cousin. After the attack, there was much speculation over whether a Palestinian rocket or an Israeli drone was to blame. The evidence of both is visible on a dirt track in Beit Lahia, one of Gaza’s poorest neighbourhoods. To Arafat, as he stands near the site just after dawn, it does not matter.
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On Monday, a US court ordered the publication of a secret memo outlining the government’s legal justification for killing an American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki.
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Thus the murder of Awlaki was organized over a protracted period of time. It was a cold-blooded extra-judicial killing by the state.
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But the legal opinion doesn’t – and can’t – explain why Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was killed by a drone strike while Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Libyan suspected of leading the 2012 attacks on our missions in Benghazi, taken alive?
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I was blacklisted by some major US TV networks on the orders of the Bush White House – which claimed to be invading Iraq to bring democracy and free speech to the benighted Arab world! The entire US media was bullied or threatened into following the party line on Iraq. Members of Congress clapped for war like trained circus seals. It was one of the darkest periods in American history.
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If Russia is “preparing to send more,” that implies that it’s already sent some–and that the New York Times has evidence that this is the case. There has been no shortage of coverage attempting to explicitly link Russia to these rebel groups, but the stories have often fallen apart under examination (FAIR Blog, 4/23/14).
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How the White House refused to address the question that Americans need answered on targeted killings.
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A wave of air strikes by the Pakistani military in the country’s tribal northwest has killed at least 291 people, including a minimum 16 civilians, over the past six months.
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Mohana Ravindranath writes the CIA awarded the contract to AWS in 2013 and the cloud computing platform is scheduled for deployment in the summer.
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Once in a while the inconsistencies in American foreign policy become sufficiently clear to reveal the consistency in American foreign policy. Three contemporary inconsistencies in Iraq and Syria, all clearly connected, converge to throw America’s consistent foreign policy into sharp relief.
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When reports surfaced in Washington this month that the Obama administration has been holding secret back-channel talks with Hamas over the last six months, the denials came swiftly. “These assertions are completely untrue,” proclaimed State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. “As you all know, Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization. … Per long-standing U.S. policy, we do not have any contact with Hamas.”
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Key members of ISIS it now emerges were trained by US CIA and Special Forces command at a secret camp in Jordan in 2012, according to informed Jordanian officials. The US, Turkish and Jordanian intelligence were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region, conveniently near the borders to both Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the two Gulf monarchies most involved in funding the war against Syria’s Assad, financed the Jordan ISIS training.
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Managing the new Syrian conflict will be a challenge for years to come. The threat of hardened veterans bringing the jihad and their combat skills to the global battlefield is now more likely than has been in the past. Sadly, it seems “bleedout” is back.
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Transparency Reporting
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Text messages sent by the two women plaintiffs were seen by defence lawyers in 2010, but copies of the messages were not issued to them.
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The founder of the Wikileaks website Julian Assange says he fears for the safety of his family.
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The day before, the lawyers submitted an official request to the court of Stockholm, asking the latter to provide them with the copies of an SMS-message that “could prove that there was no reason for Assange’s arrest.” Earlier, Assange said that one of his supposed victims sent him SMS-messages, which showed that she didn’t want to sue him and was shocked by his arrest.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Events in Iraq are headline news everywhere, and once again, there is no mention of the issue that underlies much of the violence: control of Iraqi oil. Instead, the media is flooded with debate about, horror over, and extensive analysis of a not-exactly-brand-new terrorist threat, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). There are, in addition, elaborate discussions about the possibility of a civil war that threatens both a new round of ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the embattled government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
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It turns out that there may far more contamination from fracking than once thought. Scientists have found that the oil and gas extraction method known and hydraulic fracturing may contribute more pollutants to groundwater than previous research has suggested.
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Finance
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Leonhardt dismisses these concerns over debt as “scare stories.” He seems to think that the proper message to give indebted graduates is: Don’t worry, be happy.
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Open-source bitcoin ATM manufacturer Skyhook has announced that it has shipped 150 units since its May launch, and that 70 units have been sent to customers since the beginning of June alone.
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B.J. Gulliot is a Republican running for Washington State’s 2nd Congressional district, and he wants your Bitcoin.
Gulliot doesn’t appear to be a run-of-the-mill Republican. First off, he is a Republican in Washington State, which just legalized marijuana. He also drives the 100 % electric Nissan Leaf and loves to travel outside of the country. Not exactly the image that comes to mind when you think of the grand ole party.B.J. Gulliot is a Republican running for Washington State’s 2nd Congressional district, and he wants your Bitcoin.
Gulliot doesn’t appear to be a run-of-the-mill Republican. First off, he is a Republican in Washington State, which just legalized marijuana. He also drives the 100 % electric Nissan Leaf and loves to travel outside of the country. Not exactly the image that comes to mind when you think of the grand ole party.
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Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland prepared an analysis of the leak that I recommend that everyone read. She, appropriately, emphasizes that any analysis must be tentative because we have only a partial, stale draft through the whistleblower(s).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Instead, the contract requested help transporting children who have already been apprehended within the U.S., moving the migrants to temporary shelters while they await deportation proceedings.
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Rupert Murdoch’s money washed through the ‘trial of the century’ like a Rolls-Royce. The story behind the News of the World scandal was not about journalists behaving badly, but the power of money and its abuses
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Censorship
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Bloomberg’s Hans Nichols reports on Google removing search results following a privacy ruling from the European Union and looks at the excitement in Germany for today’s match between Germany and the United States. He speaks on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”
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US TV network concede online advert to promote Sundance hit had removed the word ‘abortion’
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On the one hand we have racism, with special legal privileges to censor offensive comment.
On the other we have sexism and homophobia that do not enjoy the same protections.
Yet even without them the preparedness of Australians to tackle sexism and homophobia has been on full display.
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Encryption software has been enjoying a prolonged day in the sun for about the last year. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the NSA’s seemingly limitless capabilities, security experts have been pounding the drum about the importance of encrypting not just data in transit, but information stored on laptops, phones and portable drives. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put a dent in that armor on Wednesday, ruling that a criminal defendant could be compelled to decrypt the contents of his laptops.
The case centers on a lawyer who was arrested in 2009 for allegedly participating in a mortgage fraud scheme. The defendant, Leon I. Gelfgatt, admitted to Massachusetts state police that he had done work with a company called Baylor Holdings and that he encrypted his communications and the hard drives of all of his computers. He said that he could decrypt the computers seized from his home, but refused to do so.
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On June 2nd, the Supreme Court rejected New York Times reporter James Risen’s appeal of a 4th Circuit decision that ruled the government can compel him to reveal his source under oath. The case, one of the most important for reporter’s privilege in decades, means that Risen has exhausted his appeals and must now either testify in the leak trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, or face jail time for being in contempt of court. Risen has admirably vowed to go to prison rather than comply.
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Privacy
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At the most dangerous end of the scale, cybercriminals could potentially hijack the technology upon people’s lives depend, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers. Last year, former US Vice President Dick Cheney revealed that his doctor had ordered the wireless functionality of his heart implant disabled, due to fears it might be hacked in an assassination attempt – a scenario depicted in popular TV drama Homeland.
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When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: However bad you think it is, it’s worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America’s 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form. We certainly know a lot more than we did a year ago about what the government is capable of knowing about us. We’ve also recently learned a good deal about “big data” and what corporations can now know about us, as well as how much more they may know once your house is filled with “smart” technology.
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Sir John Sawers is believed to have wanted to leave his post in the shadowy Secret Intelligence Service before next year’s general election.
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The German government has canceled a contract with U.S. telecoms firm Verizon Communications inc as part of an overhaul of its internal communications prompted by the row over United States government spying.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel can finally hold phone talks with no fear of being tapped by foreign agents, as she now has a secure, German-upgraded Blackberry, Bild reports. Merkel’s contacts now need to install a 2,500 euro crypto-chip to talk to her.
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No surprise there. It was, after all, the paper that initially broke the story that News International’s subsidiary, News Group, had allegedly paid over £1 million to settle cases out of court that might have otherwise revealed the newspaper chain had illegally hacked phones to get stories. And, of course, the Guardian was one of the first points of contact for Edward Snowden who, four years after the News of the World hacking scandal broke, fed the paper an unknown (but allegedly huge) amount of files from the NSA, detailing how it monitors personal metadata for, well, basically everyone.
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Boehner never really challenges the NSA Stasi does he? That is other than the standard lip service that is paid by the pack of thieves, liars, grifters, obstructionists and de-facto lobbyists when it comes to putting an end to bulk collection of metadata (a limited hangout) but not real reform or accountability. He also is one of the many rats in high places who has referred to Snowden as a “traitor” for his act of great service to the American people. Just like the slime-coated Darrell Issa with his abuse of taxpayer funds to conduct his inquisitions into Benghazi and the IRS allegedly targeting right-wing political front groups abusing non-profit status Boehner is all about his own political survival. That is because his survival means a permanent tax payer funded occupation of his congressional seat where he can suckle at the teat of the very big government that he decries for the purpose of his own self-enrichment and aggrandizement. Neither Boehner nor Issa will do one damned thing about the rogue activities of the NSA nor address the executive order that their idol Reagan imposed upon the American people that has led us to the brink of turnkey totalitarianism. No, it is all about sticking it to the BLACK guy in the WHITE House and nothing fires up the rabble in an off year election than some good-old fashioned race baiting, we saw it in 2010 and will see it again in 2014.
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Wickr, an app that lets you securely send self-destructing text, audio, and video messages, announced today that it has raised a second funding round of $30 million. The round was led by Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, who’s also joining the company’s board.
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Russian Internet giant Yandex has rolled out a new feature for its cloud storage service Yandex.Disk that allows users to siphon their photos from Facebook, including the ones they’re tagged in, to a safe place in the cloud. In addition to Facebook, users can import photos from popular Russian networks VK.com and Odnoklassniki, while support for Instagram is coming soon, Yandex told TNW.
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Privacy advocates are mounting a campaign against Facebook’s recently announced plans to extend their harvesting of users’ personal data beyond the Facebook site.
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More than 30 privacy and civil-liberties groups are asking the Justice Department to complete a long-promised audit of the FBI’s facial-recognition database.
The groups argue the database, which the FBI says it uses to identify targets, could pose privacy risks to every American citizen because it has not been properly vetted, possesses dubious accuracy benchmarks, and may sweep up images of ordinary people not suspected of wrongdoing.
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After all, Alexander established the systems that let Snowden download thousands of top secret documents, then closed the barn door after the cows left with a belated two-man rule.
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Nick Clegg has issued a clear warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that there will be no revival of her “snooper’s charter” legislation this side of the general election despite her claim on Monday that it was “quite simply a matter of life or death”.
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Britain’s Home Secretary is pushing for new spying powers to access social media and email accounts. Theresa May argues that it’s a “matter of life and death,” and has dismissed claims the government wants to spy on citizens.
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At least 20 cases have been dropped by the National Crime Agency (NCA) in six months as a result of missing communications data, according to the Home Secretary.
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Thailand’s censorship regime has grown ever more pervasive since the military took over last month, with punishments aimed at both speakers and consumers of prohibited media. On the streets, Thais have been arrested for wearing the wrong message on a T-shirt, or reading George Orwell’s “1984″ in public. Online, according to the regime’s own reports, hundreds of new websites have been added to the Thai government’s official blacklist including politics and news sites covering the coup. Now the authorities are deceiving Internet users into disclosing their personal details, including email addresses and Facebook profile information, when they try to visit these prohibited sites.
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The Supreme Court brought the constitutional right of personal privacy into the digital era Wednesday, ruling unanimously that police may not search a smartphone or similar device without a warrant from a judge.
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The Home Secretary altered key sections of a speech she gave on Britain’s surveillance powers, The Telegraph discloses
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Police in Massachusetts are luring children to get them to hand over their biometric information in exchange for…I’m not sure what. Officials imply that putting children’s biometric identifiers in the “missing persons” database is a good thing to do. For the life of me I really cannot figure out why.
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Schindler has taught at the college since 2005. He also is a fellow at Boston University, according to its website. His resume says he was a senior intelligence analyst with the NSA from 1996 to 2004.
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No matter how much we say we’re angry about the NSA scandal, we still use all the services that – in some way – are tied up in surveillance. In Europe some are trying to get us to stop.
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Slides leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), reveal that the NSA has entire factories devoted to installing special bugs in electronics shipped to Americans and foreigners. Skepticism about whether such bugs are technically feasible, much less in widespread uses has raged in recent months, but presentations at DefCon 22, held in Las Vegas, Nev. from Aug. 7-10 may help to demystify the strange and terrifying tools the NSA is using to spy on us.
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There is now an entire generation of people, the so-called Millennials, who have grown up with the internet. These “kids” expect the internet to be there all the time. And not just that, they expect it to be secured and private, using encryption like SSL, so that no one can snoop on their Instragram updates and their Snapchats. Hey there’s nothing wrong with that — I’m older, but I feel exactly the same way. Excuse me while I check my top-secret tweets for mentions of the hottest Millennial today, Edward Snowden. His revelations about the NSA may have gotten him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, yet the actual depth of state surveillance goes beyond even his paranoia.
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While the amendment passed with bipartisan support, a MapLight analysis of campaign contributions from employees and PACs of defense contractors and other defense industry interests indicates it failed to gain the support of lawmakers who received the most contributions from defense contractors. MapLight is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that reveals money’s influence on politics.
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Now we know… at least partially. The app used is called RCS/Galileo by an Italian company, The Hacking Team. The app allows for full control of the data on the phone and allows users to activate the microphone on Android, iOS, and Blackberry devices. In short, this is what Snowden feared.
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The National Security Agency says it has not been able to find a single recorded case where former contractor Edward Snowen raised complaints about the agency’s operations.
The claim, revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from investigative reporter Jason Leopold, undercuts Snowden’s claim that he raised concerns with his superiors before leaking top-secret spy agency documents to the press.
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Singlehandedly, Snowden has changed how people regard their phones, tablets, and laptops, and sparked a public debate about the protection of personal data. What his revelations have not done is bring about significant reforms.
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It is understood that leaking information such as troop movements or counter terrorism tactics can be harmful to the country and its citizens and anyone who perpetuates such a leak, needs to be held responsible. However, if the leaked information talks about how a government is lying to its citizens under the guise of “protecting” them, then the source needs to applauded and more importantly, protected. This calls for changes in the existing Whistleblower Protection Act.
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The National Security Agency (NSA), the US technical intelligence organisation, used private corporations to snoop on India and several other countries, reveal the latest documents released by journalist Glen Greenwald. Marked “Top Secret”, these are documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden to Greenwald.
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The quote originally came from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), whose beef with Amash is longstanding. Ellis has received big bucks from his party’s establishment donors, and Amash’s Republican colleagues in the Michigan delegation have left him out to dry. But Amash, a charismatic disciple of former Rep. Ron Paul, has access to a rich grassroots fundraising network of his own, as well the generous support of the Club for Growth and the DeVos family, one of Michigan’s most powerful political families.
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The defendants have filed their motion to dismiss in a lawsuit that alleges the National Security Agency conducted surveillance and intelligence-gathering programs that collected data from American citizens.
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A healthy democracy demands transparency from its government and privacy for its citizenry. Only if we know what our government is up to can we exercise our responsibility as citizens to ratify or veto their actions at the ballot box. And only if we can be assured that our conversations are not being monitored by government officials will we have the space to develop our critical faculties, pursue intimate associations, try out new political ideas and flourish as human beings.
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Greenwald found time during his current book tour to speak with YES! Executive Editor Dean Paton—about government threats to his reporting, as well as what citizens can do to protect and bolster civil liberties in the digital age. Their conversation has been lightly edited.
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The quotes: “[The alliance] is downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security. … Complete bullshit. We’ll get in conflict with the Germans, Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blow job. Losers. Complete losers.” This TMZ-worthy quote came from one of Poland’s top officials.
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Already, the amended USA FREEDOM Act would increase the number of calls the government has access to because the bill would apply to all U.S. telcos and to both wire and wireless calls. Inserting a data retention mandate would further increase the amount of information subject to government orders.
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Is New Zealand an independent global citizen, or a US ally in all but name? Answering that question has been the task of journalists and commentators as John Key visited New York and Washington last week. The visit was overshadowed to a degree by the domestic agenda – notably the Donghua Liu donations issue. But Key’s visit was fascinating because it provided a contrast of an apparent New Zealand independence in New York, at the United Nations, and a seemingly new alignment with the United States in its position on the crisis in Iraq.
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How regional networks may replace the World Wide Web
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Facebook is giving itself permission to snoop a little further into your web browsing.
The social media platform announced on its company blog recently that it’s making changes to the way it manages advertising on the site and its apps by offering your web browsing history to advertisers for targeted advertising.
Read more: http://www.choice.com.au/media-and-news/consumer-news/news/facebook-snooping-on-your-browsing-27062014.aspx#ixzz35k7j6rWl
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People who wear the $1,500 wearable camera called the Google Glass are fighting back against the businesses that don’t allow them inside their establishments.
“If they’re not going to accept me as I am with my prescription glasses that happen to have this piece of technology on them I’m not going to spend my money there,” said Nick Starr, who said he’s been asked to leave at several businesses on Capitol Hill because he was wearing the Glass.
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NSA WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden isn’t a fan of living in Russia, and has said that he wants his right to travel restored.
Speaking to the human rights parliamentary assembly in Strassbourg on Tuesday via a video link from Moscow, Snowden coughed on his true feelings for his present location.
“I didn’t choose to be in Russia,” he said. “If the Russian government had a choice I’m sure they’d prefer me not to be here. Since I came here I’ve been very open in saying I want to restore my right to travel… live a normal life.”
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Revelations about the National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance of online activity has roused the ire of social media firms, but it also reveals the extent to which these companies are at least partially to blame. How much of this personal data would be available if these companies weren’t collecting and mining it for profit in the first place?
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The intelligence services are merely obedient arms of the executive branch, which itself in turn dutifully heeds the call of corporate mandates [7]. Or perhaps you haven’t noticed that our financial elite are essentially above the law [8]? After all, the large banking houses have the resources necessary to reward government leaders who serve their interests while in office.
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When you think about your personal tax information, where do you assume it’s being stored?
With the Canadian government — or with a foreign corporation?
We’ve discovered our information is actually being stored by an American company, and a local privacy association says that is a concern.
The Canada Revenue Agency has confirmed a contract was awarded in May of last year to Mobilshred Incorporated, operating as Recall.
Our information has been stored there since January.
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Proposed legislation would open the door for those in Europe to sue in the US over the release of personal data.
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U.S. attorney general Eric Holder promised at a U.S.-EU meeting of home affairs and justice ministers in Athens on Wednesday that legislation would be sent to Congress to extend the U.S. Privacy Act to EU citizens.
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The entire community has been talking about “Multistakeholder Model” for long that would help address IG issues, but no substantial work on it has been done so far. All the stakeholders appear tied to each pole vertex of polygon, shouting out their view point, without listening to other set of stakeholders. If issues have to be addressed, and bottom up consensus driven decision making is to be realized, we need to follow Mahatma Gandhi’s principle – “Placing ourselves in other’s position and understand their viewpoint”. Without it, discussions will continue to happen, not decisions!
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Having successfully challenged the US power structure in returning to America despite implied threats of his arrest and imprisonment – where he likely would have been tortured – Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book “No Place to Hide”. This really must burn the Obama regime to no end although due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness they have other fish to fry with percolating foreign spats with Russia, Syria and now Iraq and having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity – especially in an election year.
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Civil Rights
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I guess it’s no surprise that the CIA would be institutionally against things like transparency and freedom of information. However, in the last couple weeks there have been two separate lawsuits filed by well known Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) activists over the CIA’s general bad behavior in response to FOIA requests. First up is Michael Morisy and Muckrock, who have sued over a variety of failures by the CIA to adequately respond to a long list of FOIA requests that really should not be problematic at all.
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Six to 18 hours later you arrive at a military base and are water boarded, sensory deprived, and stress positioned at the very least. You are held indefinitely and without due process. Being stripped of due process can include:
No formal charges will likely ever be filed against you.
No right to call a lawyer, your family, or your pastor.
No judge or magistrate will ever see you.
No right to remain silent.
And best of all, as the law reads, you are held, “until the end of hostilities.”
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How a former CIA officer’s efforts to get Congress to investigate the rendition and torture of a CIA captive failed
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Water boarding was one of the six CIA’s approved torture methods during Bush’s administration.
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A military judge isn’t backing down from his order to the U.S. government to give defense lawyers details of the accused USS Cole bomber’s odyssey through the CIA’s secret prisons, but may let prosecutors shield the identities of some agents, according to people who have seen a secret Guantánamo war court order.
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US government loses attempt to keep accounts of torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri secret
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Today Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro, commonly known as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) warriors, upped the ante in their fight for more transparency from the CIA relating to its Bush-era torture and rendition program. Leopold, a freelance investigative journalist, and Shapiro, a researcher at MIT, have filed a lawsuit against the CIA compelling the agency to release documents about their spying on Senate lawmakers who were tasked with investigating CIA torture.
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Fried chicken chain KFC said two different investigations have not found any evidence that an employee asked a 3-year-old girl and family members to leave because injuries she suffered in a pit bull mauling disturbed customers.
KFC spokesman Rick Maynard said Tuesday the company considered the matter closed after an internal investigation by the franchise restaurant in Jackson and an independent probe. Maynard said the company would honor its commitment to donate $30,000 to help with medical bills for Victoria Wilcher.
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On Monday, the White House memo used to justify drone attacks on U.S. citizens was released, and it appears to confirm the worst suspicions of its libertarian critics. The Obama administration had sought to keep the memo secret, and now we know why: Because there are no checks and balances; there are no classified courts. Indeed, the memo reveals that the president of the United States ordered the targeting killing of U.S. citizens overseas — in violation of their constitutional right to due process — sans any type of oversight outside of the executive.
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Julian Assange, the Wikileaks publisher, has begun his third year confined in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. He fled there, receiving political asylum, when Sweden sought his extradition to answer sexual assault allegations. Although both Assange and Ecuador are on record that he was willing to go to Sweden, he feared Sweden would hand him over to the United States. A US grand jury has been investigating him for four years in relation to the case against Chelsea Manning, who was convicted in July 2013 for leaking a massive trove of secret diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.
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Last Saturday night I attended one of the most invigorating talks combining my two passions – politics and film – with Hollywood film legend Oliver Stone, the man behind some of the most seminal American films like JFK, Platoon, Born On The 4th of July, Salvador and On Any Given Sunday! Stone is a complete package – a great, firebrand filmmaker, a man of the world, a former Vietnam war veteran who’s turned anti-war and a fierce critic of American imperialism and exceptional ism seeped in bloodshed and killing of innocents around the world!
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His removal – which followed a treaty between Britain and Jordan guaranteeing his right to a fair and open retrial – won widespread plaudits for Theresa May, the Home Secretary.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In order to restrict what you can do and where you can go online, ISPs would need to watch what you do online.
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So when mere months after his death Edward Snowden released his cache of internal NSA files, and we the public and the media all struggled to understand it and figure out what to do, it was hard not to miss Aaron immensely. It was a surprise of sorts seeing that I wasn’t the only one who looked to Aaron for guidance, and that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time without him. Remember when Wikipedia blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA? A lot of people wondered why something similar didn’t happen in protest of the NSA, why something similar didn’t happen more recently in the fight for net neutrality. The answer, in large part, is because Aaron isn’t around anymore to do these things. To motivate and guide us.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Aereo, a TV-over-the-Internet startup whose legal battles have been closely watched, has been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court today. If the company survives at all, its business model will have to change drastically, and it will have to pay fees to the television companies it has been fighting in court for more than two years.
In a 6-3 opinion (PDF) written by Justice Stephen Breyer, Aereo was found to violate copyright law. According to the opinion, the company is the equivalent of a cable company, which must pay licensing fees when broadcasting over-the-air content. “Viewed in terms of Congress’ regulatory objectives, these behind-the-scenes technological differences do not distinguish Aereo’s system from cable systems, which do perform publicly,” reads the opinion.
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The fight between a movie studio and an Australian ISP has today taken another odd turn. Village Roadshow’s co-CEO now suggests that iiNet must take responsibility for piracy in the same way a car manufacturer apparently would if one of its vehicles killed someone while being driven by a customer. Except they don’t, of course.
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Send this to a friend
06.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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The cloud-dominated world of modern IT is the perfect breeding ground for the spread of Linux in particular and open-source software in general, according to the man responsible for guiding one of the most important open-source projects.
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Systems engineer Renault Ellis started using Linux five years ago when he was enrolled in a security and forensics program. He was studying IP tables and read the C Programming Language manual by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie along with Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg.
“I was hooked,” Ellis said via email. “I knew then I wanted to be a Linux Engineer.”
Ellis is now a Senior Linux and Unix Engineer at electronics distributor Premier Farnell in Chicago, Illinois, where he creates, tests and deploys scripts in an eCommerce environment. He works with Apache and several different monitoring tools, both open source and commercial, and leads a lot of the DR (disaster recovery) and PCI (payment card industry) processes in their Unix environment.
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For years, Linux has ruled supercomputing. So, it came as no surprise to anyone at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit near Wall Street that once again the Top500 group found in its latest supercomputer ranking that Linux was the fastest of the fast operating systems.
[...]
In the latest contest, not only did Linux dominate, but Linux showed that is slowly pushing out all its competitors. In the June 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, the top open-source operating system set a new high with 485 systems out of the fastest 500 running Linux. In other words 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world are based on Linux.
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Facebook engineer Chris Mason is unequivocal about the primacy of Linux in Facebook’s storage infrastructure.
“If it runs on a computer, and it’s storing important data,” he said, “it’s running Linux.”
Mason, speaking at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit on Monday in New York, joined Facebook just six months ago in order to spearhead the social network’s move to btrfs (usually pronounced “butter eff ess.”), the Linux-based file system that he created in 2008 while working at Oracle.
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Kernel Space
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The kernel has roughly twice as fast of a release cycle as OpenStack. In the kernel’s case, there are roughly 2-3 month release cycles containing a two week merge period with six to ten week of stabilization work. OpenStack’s cycle is six months, made up by a four week planning window, 14 weeks of code merger, and six weeks dedicated to stabilization. The result? Faster releases for the kernel, but perhaps less significant changes per release.
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There’s been numerous requests lately for more disk I/O scheduler benchmarks on Phoronix of the Linux kernel and its various scheduler options. Given that there’s routinely just speculation and miscommunication by individuals over the best scheduler for HDDs/SSDs, here’s some fresh benchmarks for reference using the Linux 3.16 kernel.
This early Linux 3.16 testing was just some simple and straight-forward tests I got done with a spare system I maintained access to while in Russia. Once returning to the US this week and then settling into the new Phoronix office I’ll run some more Linux 3.16 benchmarks using the latest Git snapshot at the time and use both hard drives and solid-state drives.
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“It’s not that Linux was new from a technical standpoint. It was new because it was done differently,” says Linus Torvalds in his interview with the IEEE Computer Society. “Linux made it clear how well open source works, not just from a technical standpoint, but also from a business, commercial, and community standpoint.”
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Graphics Stack
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Where were you when you first learned about open source software? If you’re under, say, the age of 40, your answer will probably be, “Come again? I’ve always known about it!” But if you’re older, you may recall the first time you ever heard the phrase. Maybe it was when Netscape announced it was going to “open source” its Navigator Browser, or perhaps when you heard the name Richard Stallman for the first time. It may also be the case that it was some time before you really got your arms around what open software (or Stallman’s Free and Open Software) really meant in all of its various connotations – license-wise, commercial and community.
Or maybe you got involved before the phrase “open source software” had even been coined (in 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond) to describe what it was they were doing.
That’s what happened in my case, when one day I got a call from one of the great unsung heroes of the open source movement – Bob Scheifler, of MIT. Bob is not only a wizard with code, but he did for the X Window System – the code that enabled the GUI for the then dominant non-desktop operating system (UNIX) and is still used in Linux today – what Linus Torvalds later did with Linux itself.
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For what it’s worth, the marketing graphics product names for Intel’s upcoming Broadwell processors have been revealed.
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Chandler Paul has published a draft specification of wl_tablet that covers support for drawing tablets (i.e. Wacom-like tablets) to the Wayland protocol. Tablet support is already present within libinput as the common, abstracted input library but now it’s time to add the necessary support to the Wayland protocol.
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Benchmarks
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For those running an Intel ultrabook, here’s some benchmarks using the Linux 3.16 kernel on this portable x86 hardware compared to Linux 3.15. Unfortunately, the results aren’t too promising.
As some extra Linux 3.16 kernel benchmarks to share, I used the stable Linux 3.15 and compared it to Linux 3.16 Git on an ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA ultrabook running a Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor with an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS host.
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Applications
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With Rygel, users will be able to browse the media collection from the TV or PS3 on a PC running GNOME, and they will have the possibility to play any of said media.
This is a very interesting application because it does something that very few others manage to do on the Linux platform. A few years ago, Rygel wasn’t really being used at its full potential because there weren’t too many devices, like Smart TVs for example, that would require users to have a working media server.
The prices for Smart TVs have dropped dramatically in the last couple of years and more Linux users are now looking for a media server solution. Unfortunately, there are few media servers out there and some of them even charge a price for the premium features…
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The open-source multimedia converter for linux Curlew has reached version 0.1.22.3 bringing some missing dialog icons, a “Português – Brazil” translation and an updated russian translation.
Curlew is an open-source multimedia converter for linux with a support for more than 100 different file formats. It can also be used to add subtitles to your video file and show file informations such as duration, remaining time, estimated size, and progress value.
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Proprietary
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Twilio will depend on partners to bring Twilio CX to market. Customer service startup LiveOps has signed up as an early partner, leveraging the new solution for call centers. If other similar partners bite, Chromebooks could suddenly find a healthy new market in call centers.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A new Steam Beta client has been made available by Valve and it looks like the developers have been really busy with the Steam Summer Sale. Almost two weeks have passed since the previous Steam update, Beta or Stable, but now the devs are working to get everything up to speed.
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An editorial on this subject was requested by arnej who reminded me on GamingOnLinux’s IRC channel that there is now another, perhaps even more important reason not to buy games in advance of their actual release on Linux.
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Bring civilization to Sproggiwood, a story-driven, turn-based roguelike set in a world of mischief and wonder. One moment, you’re a simple farmer from the peaceful island of Clog — the next, you’re lured through a mysterious portal by a talking sheep.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I am happy to announce that today we released Qt 5.3.1. Qt 5.3.0 has been well received with over 500.000 downloads in the first 5 weeks of release. I believe this new patch release is even better offering many improvements over Qt 5.3.0. As a patch release, it does not add new features, but various improvements and fixes. Qt Creator version 3.1.2 also released today, is packaged into the installers. For Qt Enterprise users we are providing a fully supported Qt Quick Compiler 1.0.0, as well as updates for Data Visualization (version 1.1) and Charts (version 1.4).
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Plasmate’s goal is to help people create/test and deploy plasma packages. Originally in KDE4 we offered a clear way on how to use the plasma tools like the embedded plasmoidviewer. But we were aware that people might not want to use plasmate and instead use the plasma tools as standalone applications like they used to before the release of plasmate so we were still offering the option of using another IDE and the plasma tools. Also for every single new feature that we added to plasmate(like the kconfigxteditor) we also provided a standalone application because we wanted to give people the option to continue use their favorite IDE and the new plasma tools. In my opinion the purpose of a software application is to make the life of its users(people) easier. For the ones who don’t use plasmate if we didn’t offer those tools as standalone applications we wouldn’t fulfill our purpose. But it can also get better
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Further integration of the refactored code. The plans to rework our codebase were first discussed in 2011. In 2012 thanks to your generous donations major parts of the code could be rewritten. However they are still not being used in a released version of Kdenlive since since then developer activity was unfortunately rather low. In Randa we want to work out a plan to continue the efforts step by step and start implementing it.
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ZevenOS-Neptune 4.0 has been dubbed “It’s all about you” and is the first release in a new series. The last update for a Neptune Linux distribution was made all the way back in October 2013, but the developers have made some great progress since then.
“This version is aimed for creating a fast running Linux Live System for USB Sticks and offering the best out of the box experience for hard drive installations. Therefore we developed easy to use applications like USB Installer aswell as a Persistent Creator that allows you to store changes to your system on your live usb stick.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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As someone that has dabbled from time to time making small GTK applications for Fedora, one of the pain points when making an interface was just figuring out what specific icons were named, and what they looked like. My previous workflow was to open up /usr/share/icons/ in Files, and search for the icon and the icon name.
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With today’s release of Mutter 3.13.3, GNOME on Wayland has support for touchscreen support.
The Mutter 3.13.3 release brings touch support on Wayland along with improved behavior of window buttons with comoositor menus, updated window shadows, support for keeping windows on the preferred output and various bug fixes.
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This is the second update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and it looks like some interesting changes have been made, although there is no major feature to be observed.
According to the changelog, closing windows with attached modals is no longer allowed, GNOME Shell is no longer self-restarting on OpenBSD, and the behavior of window buttons with compositor menus has been improved.
Also, a workaround has been implemented for an atspi-related performance regression, numerous smaller bugs have been fixed, and a handful of translations have been updated…
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The application is not new and you’ll find it in the Ubuntu (and Fedora, etc.) repositories but it hasn’t been updated in about 4 years. Recently, the Font Manager developer started working on a new GTK3/Vala version and he needs you to test it and post feedback.
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Orca works with applications and toolkits that support the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Linux and Solaris.
The developers are making some very big changes to Orca and it looks like GNOME 3.14 will feature several important new features. This is the second major overhaul done by the Orca devs, but they are not stopping here.
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The GNOME Control Center allows users to configure various components of their system using a vast collection of tools. It’s the hub for all the major settings that can be done in a GNOME environment, so it’s easy to see why any update for it might be considered important.
In fact, the GNOME Control Center didn’t see many changes in the previous GNOME 3.12 release, besides the regular updates and new features. Some changes have been made, but nothing really stood out.
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Black Lab Linux is a distribution designed for general desktop and power users that comes with a lot of applications and features. In the past, the developers tried to market this distribution as a replacement for Windows and Mac OS X systems and they even tried to make it look like those OSes.
It turns out that users didn’t really go for that look, so the makers of Black Lab Linux had to change gears and make some important modifications. The current build of this Linux distribution looks very different from the previous editions, but that might turn out to be a good thing…
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Red Hat Family
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IT News Africa had the pleasure of interviewing Werner Knoblich, Vice President & General Manager EMEA Red Hat, at the 2014 Red Hat Forum in Johannesburg South Africa.
In the interview, Knoblich discusses how open source technology plays a key role in the development of emerging trends, as well as helps businesses get the best out of their technology. Additionally, he covers how Linux containers facilitate a flexible way to build and deploy applications while reducing the time and expenses associated with underlying Cloud technology.
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Fedora
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Now that it’s possible to root the Amazon Fire TV, it’s possible to do some pretty funky things with Amazon’s $99 TV box… like replace the operating system with Fedora 20 Linux.
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The Fedora 21 changes freeze is coming up in two weeks!
The Fedora 21 change freze is expected to close no earlier than 8 July and that date is quickly approaching. With that said, all accepted F21 changes are expected to be substantially complete.
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Máirín Duffy just blogged that there is now a clear winner in the Fedora.next branding / logos design process. There were many iterations, and some great ideas during the process of brainstorming and designing the logo. As there is now a clear design concept, the next steps in the process are to create the usage guidelines and recommendations, and compile the set of assets that can be used to brand the three Fedora Next products.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has published details about an OpenSSL regression in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS operating systems.
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If you use Ubuntu 12.04, use the second (Cool PPA below. For Ubuntu 14.04, you can use any of the two PPAs below.
[•••]
Tsvetko’s stable Cinnamon PPA provides the latest Cinnamon for Ubuntu 14.04 (2.2.13) and Cinnamon 2.0.14 for Ubuntu 12.04 (that’s because newer Cinnamon versions don’t work in Ubuntu 12.04) as well as all the required packages like Nemo, cinnamon-screensaver, etc.
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Who remembers the Ubuntu Netbook Edition or UNE (formerly Ubuntu Netbook Remix)? At about 2009/10, netbooks were all the rage. The technology produced, low powered, low cost, and extremely portable PCs. The netbook (and Microsoft marketing) would eventually drive hardware vendors to produce the Ultrabook. Many distribution spins were created to accommodate this netbook market and that included Ubuntu. Canonical would even work closely with Dell, to deliver a Moblin flavored distribution. As soon as it appeared, it disappeared, although all was not lost. The fundamental design for the UNE would inspire Unity.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint team has announced the release of the Plasma Desktop edition of the popular GNU/Linux based operating system – Linux Mint KDE 17. Being a Plasma user myself, and since I keep a close eye on what this team is doing, I was obviously interested in testing it out.
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The Emmabuntüs distribution is intended to be sleek, accessible, and equitable, but above all, it’s designed for old computers.
“It was designed to make the refurbishing of computers given to humanitarian organizations easier, especially Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution’s name comes from), and to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners,” reads the official announcement.
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This is one of those reviews that should be really easy to write. Just last week I wrote an article listing 5 reasons why Lubuntu would be good for Windows XP users. Therefore with this in mind you might think that this review would list all of Lubuntu’s good points and paint a positive picture.
Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. As far as I am concerned Lubuntu 14.04 feels like a step backwards when compared to Lubuntu 13.10.
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Techbase has designed a Raspberry Pi Compute Module into a Linux-based “ModBerry” automation computer backed by an “iMod” cloud platform for remote control.
The computer-on-module version of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, which began shipping this week, was anticipated by many, but perhaps nowhere so acutely as in Poland. First, we heard about A Sherlybox private cloud storage device based on the module from Polish startup Sher.ly, and now Gdansk-based industrial computer manufacturer Techbase has opened pre-orders for an automation computer called the ModBerry 500 based on the COM.
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Wearables were everywhere today at Google I/O, but there was only one truly new product announced: the Galaxy Live, Samsung’s Android Wear-running smartwatch. And we’ve had a chance to spend a few minutes playing with a demo unit — it’s only able to do a few things right now, but we have our best sense yet of what Android Wear hardware and software will look like. This is one of the key devices for Android Wear, one of the watches being given to all attendees of the conference, and at first glance it’s quite nice.
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Phones
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Android
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Google on Wednesday kicked off its I/O conference in San Francisco, presenting devs with a dizzying array of possibilities: a new design language for Android L; a boatload of new apps, APIs and SDKs; and expanded support for a variety of architectural and hardware configurations. “If I were a developer, I would feel real good about opportunities today,” said ABI analyst Jeff Orr.
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Linux may rule in most places — supercomputers, mobile, and Wall Street to name a few — but the Windows empire has still held on to the desktop, despite Windows 8.x’s failure to grab marketshare quickly. Now there’s new hope: At Google I/O, Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Chrome and Android, said during the opening keynote that Google will be giving Chrome OS the power to run Android apps.
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Google hasn’t exactly been successful at taking over the living room — Chromecast aside, its previous efforts have failed to capture much consumer interest. However, during the I/O 2014 keynote today, the company showed that it is ready to start fresh with Android TV. It’s a new platform that combines live TV via your cable box or even an over-the-air antenna along with Android apps and services like Google Play to offer up a more simplified way to get content to your TV than the older Google TV model.
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What Pichai didn’t say was that Cook was at all wrong. Android’s variety naturally leads to issues in various areas, security being one of them. It’s also why popular chipset maker Qualcomm has come on so strongly with their Snapdragon series. Though they’ve varying degrees of prowess, Snapdragon chipsets all have the same basic security layers intact.
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The misconception that Apple’s products are somehow more secure has carried from Macbooks to iPhones. This may sometimes be a true statement, but it’s usually due to external factors, not actual security procedures or OS advantages. Such has been found to be the case with iOS when compared to Android, according to Marble Security Labs.
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Cyanogen is a for-profit business built around the CyanogenMod project, which is used by hobbyists to unlock their phones in order to get quicker updates and remove the types of interfaces installed by their device maker and carrier. It offers its own flavor of Android — one designed to offer users more choice while at the same time remaining fully compatible with the official Google version.
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A source within Google tells Ausdroid that “a new Nexus phone is definitely in the works, with the big feature of the new Nexus phone tipped to be a very LG G3 sized 5.5″ screen. While the screen size matches, no mention was made of whether the resolution of the panel would be equal to the QHD display on the LG flagship.”
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The Google I/O conference begins today, and it’s already clear from advance notice on the sessions and discussion topics that Android and new device types for Google’s platforms will share the spotlight at the event.
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After we’ve covered the news about the official lauching about the new flagship smartphone, the Huawei Honor 6, is now we have a review about the phone. The new Huawei Honor 6 is packs with 5 inch screen, 3GB of RAM and this is the first smartphone that powered by Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 920 octa-core processor made of four A15 cores and 4 A7 cores which Huawei thinks compares to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset.The Huawei Honor 6 has officially release in Beijing on June 24th, 2014. Before now, the Huawei Honor 6 has spread as a rumors, and now this phone is come to the market and ready to beat the other flagship smartphone, such as Samsung Galaxy S5.
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In short, the CIMI Corp. president is essentially trying to provide a path to deployment for NFV and SDN, believing strongly that without high-level orchestration and management and an operations framework, virtualization in the telecom sector could be spinning its wheels for some time to come.
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Explore Software Defined Networking (SDN) — network management via software abstraction layers — as a method to enhance and optimize your Infrastructure as a Service in the areas of interoperability, user and provider expectation management, developer and administrator requirements, and effective risk mitigation.
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Assistive technology software is any program or operating system feature designed to let a user with cognitive, sensory, or physical impairments use a computer system. Innovations in assistive technology software can make a huge difference in the daily lives of these people.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The issue we had to solve is that GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 cannot be loaded in the same address space. Moving Firefox from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 isn’t a problem, as only GTK+ 3 gets loaded in its address space, and everything is fine. The problem comes when you load a plugin that links to GTK+ 2, e.g. Flash. Then, GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 get both loaded, GTK+ detects that, and aborts to avoid bigger problems.
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If you work with web content at all, you’re probably familiar with doing debugging and content editing directly from within a browser. If you’re a Firefox user, you may also be very familiar with tools such as Firebug, which lets you do extensive debugging and development from within Firefox.
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All of the major web browser vendors now ship developer tools with their products, but Mozilla is planning to go whole hog by building a full integrated development environment (IDE) for web apps right into its Firefox browser.
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Recently, the Mozilla Release Engineering team has made numerous advances in release automation for our browser, Firefox. We have reduced the requirements for human involvement during signing and sending notices to stakeholders, and have automated many other small manual steps, because each manual step in the process is an opportunity for human error. While what we have now isn’t perfect, we’re always striving to streamline and automate our release process. Our final goal is to be able to push a button and walk away; minimal human intervention will eliminate many of the headaches and do-overs we experienced with our older part-manual, part-automated release processes. In this article, we will explore and explain the scripts and infrastructure decisions that make up the complete Firefox rapid release system, as of Firefox 10.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Cloudera has been on a tear lately. The company, a pioneering startup focused on enterprise analytic data management powered by Hadoop, recently raised a staggering $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors.
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Databases
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Aerospike, a NoSQL startup that has garnered a fair number of advertising industry customers thanks to its in-memory technology, has raised $20 million in a series C round and is open sourcing its database under the same license used by MongoDB.
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MongoDB users can now record and replay traffic and requests using Flashback, an open-source tool announced by Parse at MongoDB World in New York City.
Flashback is a MongoDB benchmark framework that allows developers to gauge database performance by benchmarking queries. Flashback records the real traffic to the database and replays operations with different strategies. The framework’s scripts fall into one of two categories: recording ops during a particular timeframe, or replaying the recorded ops.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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There is something truly comforting in observing vibrant communities such as the one of LibreOffice. The project is growing, not just in developers but in adoption as well: more users as well as more localizations are a visible sign inside the project. All this is not only thanks to our good name and reputation; it is because as we are well into our fourth year of existence, it is important to realize that communities scale as much as their production and communication infrastructure is able to grow and perform its duties. Two words are of peculiar importance here: Production & Communication. In a Free and Open Source Software project, these two functions are tightly connected. The project enables the software production at the same time it enables communications between its members. Conversely, you cannot have a developers, users, or QA mailing list for instance, without relying on an existing code repository of some sort, otherwise you’re only doing vapourware (and vapourware only needs a database of press contacts, but no real mailing list).
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BSD
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The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of the next PC-BSD quarterly update, version 10.0.2!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I have begun to push some of the Emacs Lisp Packages I have been working on over the last years to GNU ELPA, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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I’m a big believer in collaboration. It’s one of the main tenets of the open source way and a huge part of the design process. When done right, collaboration is about finding the right and diverse mix of people, collectively defining the problem and goals, and then collectively doing the work: researching, listening, thinking, sharing, tinkering, doing more research, more thinking, more tinkering, and more sharing until you get to a strategy that has conviction and truth.
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Open Hardware
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Open source, you either love the idea or you hate it. It it weren’t for the open sourcing of 3D printer files, the industry would not be nearly where it is today. It allows for individuals and companies to take someone else’s ideas and designs, improve upon them, use them, and redistribute them. When done in a truly open source manner, this creates an exponential rate of innovation, whereas there could be thousands of people improving a design, only to have a thousand more come along and do the same to their own. We’ve seen 3D printers evolve at tremendous rates over the past couple years, and a large part of the credit belongs to the open source movement that a great deal of the designers and manufacturers have supported.
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Stereolithographic 3D printers, which use light to harden liquid resin into 3D objects, are dropping in price. And their price tag will likely continue to fall after two open source printers enter the market this year, one of which went up on Kickstarter today.
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Programming
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The Eclipse Foundation’s annual Release Train will be in the spotlight later this week, but first a bit of that metaphorical illumination should fall on a new Foundation project. Announced on Monday, the newly organized Eclipse Science Working Group (SWG) is being described as “a global collaboration for scientific software.” It aims to bring together groups from academia, industry and government to create open software that can be used in basic scientific research.
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In a previous article on the new asyncio module introduced in Python 3.4, I explained simple use of event loop functions that register, execute, and delay or cancel calls. In this article, I demonstrate more-advanced examples that explore asyncio’s support for server and client programming, protocols, and transports.
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Unfortunately, when you have been accused of rape — even provably falsely as I have been — there’s no way to “win”. For the rest of my life, when someone searches my name on the internet, the word “rape” will appear somewhere among the results. And that person will always wonder whether or not I was capable of such a heinous act.
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Science
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Health/Nutrition
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According to a Sunlight Foundation analysis of the NRA’s proposals a year later, “the initial fervor for increasing armed security in schools has died down” and the video game industry has “been upping its political profile with significant campaign contributions to Democratic members and a seven-figure lobbying budget”. While those two areas were stuck in the mud, “the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) found that a years-long trend of diminishing budgets for mental health had reversed in 2013, citing Newtown as a key mitigating factor”. The trend spread to more than budgets: Nevada and Nebraska established programs to provide for more screening and mental health training for children. Despite successes on the state front, the NRA still struggled: a quick search of it’s press releases show it mostly playing defense on a variety of bills, and it’s NICS Reporting Improvement Act of 2013 (a direct attempt to create the “active national database” LaPierre spoke of) went nowhere.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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We offered them the spirits of cooperation and liberty and the modern heart, and this is the thanks we get. It’s almost as if some people don’t appreciate being invaded.
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In reality, the invasion and occupation of Iraq had been a disaster long before the recent gains made by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The sectarian conflict responsible for much of the war’s reprehensible human cost was caused in part by the occupying forces’ division of the country’s political system along sectarian lines.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that the Sunni militants taking over Iraq have quickly gained power because the United States armed their allies in Syria.
“I think we have to understand first how we got here,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I think one of the reasons why ISIS has been emboldened is because we have been arming their allies. We have been allied with ISIS in Syria.”
Paul was asked whether the U.S. should shift its focus to Syria.
“We have been fighting alongside al Qaeda, fighting alongside ISIS,” he said. “ISIS is now emboldened and in two countries. But here’s the anomaly. We’re with ISIS in Syria. We’re on the same side of the war. So, those who want to get involved to stop ISIS in Iraq are allied with ISIS in Syria. That is real contradiction to this whole policy.”
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You’re not supposed to talk about oil and Iraq–but corporate media can’t stop talking about oil and Iraq.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Icelandic whalers made their first kill of the 2014 hunting season – an endangered fin whale, landed today. Campaigners have condemned the hunt, and are calling for a boycott of whaling companies’ seafood exports.
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Number of people who accept that change is occurring rises 10 points to 70%, according to a new poll
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Public fear, uncertainty, and doubt are still big issues for nuclear energy.
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Finance
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Surging mistrust of the euro during Europe’s debt crisis fed a campaign to bring Germany’s entire $141 billion gold reserve home from New York and London. Now, after politics shifted in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition, the government has concluded that stashing half its bullion abroad is prudent after all.
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A Billings judge on Monday sentenced a 21-year-old man for a 2012 vandalism spree and suggested he replace his fast-food job with a “real job” so he can better pay restitution to his victims.
District Judge G. Todd Baugh sentenced Brandon Daniel Turell to 10 years in custody of the state department of corrections, with five years suspended, and ordered him to pay about $13,600 in restitution.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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We’ve been writing about the big US/EU “free trade” agreement negotiations (which aren’t really about free trade at all), variously named TAFTA or TTIP (negotiators prefer TTIP, to avoid comparisons to NAFTA) for quite some time now. If it were really about free trade, there might be some interesting elements to it, but it’s much more about the standard issues like providing corporate sovereignty over national sovereignty, and other things like ratcheting up copyright and patent laws in secret. All this “democracy” is all done very much behind closed doors that won’t be opened until many years after the agreement is already reached.
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Andy Coulson, a former editor of the now-shuttered Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World, was found guilty of conspiring to intercept communications, concluding a lengthy trial focused on criminal activity at the British paper. According to the Associated Press, fellow News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner were acquitted.
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Contrary to right-wing media misinformation, corporate fraud on the stock market remains a real problem that class actions continue to correct through restitution and deterrence.
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Rebekah Brooks likes to tell this story about herself. How, as a junior reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloid The Sun, she stuffed her flaming red hair under a head scarf, dressed up as a cleaner and smuggled herself into the offices of the Sun’s stablemate, The Sunday Times. When all the Times’s editorial staff had gone home, she sat herself at a computer and calmly stole their scoop.
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Putting aside that the “Business Twitter” page can’t spell “someone”, in light of there being no opt out feature, I don’t know what else to do. I’m fed up with having to block these accounts. Twitter may make money from adverts, but no product that promotes its tweets gets business from me – its a point of principle. A product invades “my space” – I boycott that product. There are many other users who think the same way.
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Privacy
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The Supreme Court has just ruled that smartphones and other electronic gadgets are worthy to require search warrants to search just like real computers. Their big issue is the depth, breadth and volume of data stored on smartphones but that is just one function of a smartphone. The Supremes also mention browsing histories, and “apps”, all providing information about people to police just like other evidence.
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The Supreme Court of the United States said Wednesday that police officers must have a warrant before searching the cell phone contents of an individual under arrest.
In a unanimous ruling announced early Wednesday, the high court settled two cases surrounding instances in which law enforcement officials scoured the mobile phones of suspects in custody and then used information contained therein to pursue further charges.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that police officers usually need a warrant before they can search an arrested suspect’s cellphone.
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Theresa May has used the annual Lord Mayor’s Defence and Security Lecture to call for changes to the law to give new powers of surveillance to the government. Despite the extensive coverage given to broad range of programmes revealed in by Edward Snowden, she claimed the UK’s lack of technological capability presented a “great danger”.
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Civil Rights
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Activists angered by the closing of water accounts for thousands of people behind in their payments have taken their fight to the United Nations.
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Amnesty international has launched an open-source ‘Panic Button’ app designed to help human rights activists at risk from attack, kidnap or torture.
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After our house burned down in Wisconsin a few months ago, my husband and I packed our four young kids and all our belongings into a gold minivan and drove to my sister-in-law’s place, just outside of Atlanta. On the back windshield, we pasted six stick figures: a dad, a mom, three young girls, and one baby boy.
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When news broke early last year that Internet activist Aaron Swartz had been found dead, filmmaker Brian Knappenberger was already deeply immersed in the hacking and computer programming world. Fresh off the release of a documentary about the Anonymous movement, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, the filmmaker had been following the ongoing lawsuit against Swartz, who faced charges related to illegal access of the JSTOR academic-article service.
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The BBC thus seeks to square the circle of supporting the release of Peter Greste and at the same time taking the British government line of supporting the Egyptian dictatorship’s elimination of its political opponents.
The truth is that Peter Greste is only superficially the victim of an Egyptian dictator. At root he is the victim of a western foreign policy that believes the interests of Israel outweigh all other interests in the Middle East.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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ROAMING CHARGES across Europe will drop more than 50 percent from 1 July, as the European Union (EU) works towards eliminating roaming charges altogether.
Following similar price cuts that took place this time last year, the European Commission (EC) announced on Tuesday that in its effort to put an end to roaming charges, prices are set to drop by “over 50 percent” from 1 July.
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As you may have heard, the nation’s cable companies have suddenly found themselves cast as villains, simply because of that little “trying to kill the Internet” thing. They’re working hard to get rid of net neutrality, the basic principle that they can’t charge extra to sites or services to make them load at a non-infuriating speed. But don’t worry: In order to clear their good names, Verizon, Comcast, and their ilk are doing their best to address their customers’ concerns … by using the time-honored tradition of feeding us bullshit.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A bogus SoundCloud takedown reveals a much larger issue with private sites and the public domain.
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When a House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee convenes on Wednesday for its second meeting of the year on music licensing, it will be playing audience to a band of industry honchos clashing over copyright law to ensure they get the biggest piece of the industry’s financial pie.
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Posted in Courtroom, Deception, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The LLP echo chamber
Summary: Heaps of editorials and analyses from patent-centric firms pretend that nothing has changed after the Supreme Court abolished patents on “abstract ideas” (as opposed to working implementations)
POTENTIALLY substantial patent changes are afoot, especially owing to a decision from SCOTUS. A new article by Timothy B. Lee chastises this court for not understanding technology, which is a typical problem with judges. “The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem,” says Lee. “Patent litigation has become a huge problem for the software industry. And on Thursday, the Supreme Court could have solved that problem with the stroke of a pen. Precedents dating back to the 1970s place strict limits on software patents. The court could have clearly reiterated that those old precedents still apply, and that they rule out most patents on software.
“Instead, perhaps fearing the backlash from invalidating billions of dollars worth of patents, the court took an incremental approach. It ruled that the specific patent at issue in the case was invalid. But it didn’t articulate any clear rules for software patents more generally. In effect, the court kicked the can down the road, leaving a huge question mark floating over most software patents.”
SCOTUS can hardly distinguish between UML, pseudo code, and source code. The ambiguities left behind are already being exploited by patent lawyers and here is a new example from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, another from Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C., and one from Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, to name just three (these flood the media these days, day after day). Well, at first came lots of media reports (written by journalists) declaring a lot of software patents dead and later came (and still comes) the flood of “analyses” by lawyers, rewriting the history to assure their clients that it is worth patenting software and that nothing has really changed.
In recent days we found more examples from Proskauer Rose LLP, saying that “Applying this rationale, the Court found that the claims at issue recited computer steps that are “purely conventional” and a “basic function[] of a computer.”15 The Supreme Court therefore affirmed the Federal Circuit and held the claims were ineligible under § 101.”
The SCOTUS decision was too weak in some sense and law firms are spinning it in their favour. Here is an example where the title says “Supreme Court silent on general eligibility of software patents” (not entirely true). Cooley LLP , Fenwick & West LLP, Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Lathrop & Gage LLP also try to assure their clients that patenting more algorithms is OK, as if nothing has changed. “Although the Court’s decision provides some clarity concerning the inventive effect of reciting computer implementation within patent claims,” says the last analysis, “there remains some ambiguity concerning how courts will define “abstract ideas” moving forward (indeed, the Court stated that it “need not labor to delimit the precise contours of the ‘abstract ideas’ category in this case”).”
Code is already copyrighted, so one might argue that patenting anything but code would be patenting “abstract ideas”. Suffice to say, this is not what greedy patent lawyers are going to tell customers for whom they produce useless papers that the USPTO almost blindly stamps for approval.
Patent lawyers continue to rely on the ignorance or gullibility among judges (who are themselves lawyers and are rarely technical enough to grasp programming). Perhaps any court that deals with patents should have an imperative to be technical. CAFC, for example, needs to be abolished for being corrupt and also utterly dumb on technology. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Countering the very disturbing marketing illusion that Facebook and its (in part) owner Microsoft are warming up to FOSS while in reality they hoard patents and use them offensively
Surveillance giant and meta-advertising company Facebook has been running an effective campaign to openwash its data centres, hardware, programming tools, and software, despite the fact that Facebook is proprietary and very malicious. Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people's data against them. Facebook, like Microsoft, is close to the NSA and we noted in daily links, there is a high-profile European court case dealing with it.
Facebook not only started with misappropriation of source code (Mark Zuckerberg took over people’s work that they had paid him for) but also with unoriginal ideas. There were sites like Facebook before it (far less privacy-infringing), well before Zuckerberg scraped people’s faces off Web sites to make his first controversial site that got him in a lot of disciplinary trouble.
There is a patent case underway, potentially showing Facebook’s lack of originality. The plaintiff is a Dutch programmer, not a patent troll. It is going to be interesting to see how it ends up, not just because it involves darn patents but because it may teach Facebook, which hoards patents, a lesson about the harms of software patents. While Facebook tries to openwash its operations it is a usually patenting a lot of basic software ideas and also using these to sue companies. How ‘open’ is that? Patent extortion, just like Microsoft.
“Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people’s data against them.”The UBM-run Dr. Dobbs continues its campaign of openwashing of Microsoft, especially courtesy of Mono and .NET booster Andrew Binstock (he is the Executive Editor of the site). Here he is paying lip service to Microsoft again, giving it much needed help it by using the “.NET section” of a news site to openwash .NET. “How far the company has come from its early dismissal of open source,” says Binstock, but has he really paid attention? The very fact that Andrew Binstock is the Executive Editor should say a lot about whose agenda is served at Dr. Dobbs these days (after the acquisition).
Microsoft’s Android pretense, as mentioned the other day, is that it is actually a backer while in reality it extorts Android and runs a program for ‘licensing’ Android (which is not a Microsoft product). When Microsoft ‘tips’ an Android phone it should not be shocking because it is part of the plan to legitimise extortion, pretending (e.g. to regulators) that Microsoft is not a hostile actor. At the same time as this article there is an unusually high volume of articles with Microsoft revisionism along those lines.
Overall, these campaigns of openwashing and especially the efforts from Microsoft boosters like Binstock ought to remind us to keep our eyes open and our brains working. There is a deception endeavour going on. In some internal documents that came out through legal action Microsoft speaks very explicitly of the needs for such endeavours. █
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Posted in Patents at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Obsession with shares instead of sharing
Summary: Deviation from the mentality which says ideas should be patented and ‘protected’ (meaning that others are prevented from using similar ideas) based on new examples from the media
THE world of MBAs is vastly different from that of engineers. When all that matters is oneself (financially), then the notion of sharing makes little sense, as long as one can exploit or hoard others’ work (the selfish approach). This is why, despite engineers’ spirit of sharing (wanting to show their achievements), many companies continue to embrace secrecy and isolation.
Bloomberg (Wall Street-friendly press) gives its press platform to a famous patent troll, Jay Walker. This grooming piece is highly disturbing as it helps the likes of Walker (patent trolls) and the USPTO make patents seem almost synonymous with innovation (classic lie). Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing. That’s what corporate media likes to do. It’s repeated so often that many people actually believe it without questioning.
“Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing.”We recently countered the marketing nonsense that associated/conflated de-weaponising patents with becoming “open source”. Tesla did not open up designs of cars and make them downloadable or anything, but the corporate press sure helps Tesla’s marketing by stating that “Tesla founder has given away patents on electric car technology” (not given away actually). This is shameless PR for reasons that we highlighted before. “Elon Musk took the decision to invest heavily in patent protection. Without patents, Tesla won’t have any control over the commercial opportunities of its inventions,” says this generally poor coverage from the financial press (equating patents with currency). A Red Hat site did yet another article about this, saying that “Elon Musk and crew at Tesla Motors made some big waves last week. In case you missed this recent news roundup, it was announced that Tesla is effectively relinquishing their patent portfolio—particularly around charging stations.”
Here is a VC (venture capitalist) who opposes software patents (Fred Wilson is one of several) weighing in again. To quote: “If you did a topic analysis on AVC over the past 10+ years that I’ve been blogging, I suspect patent reform would rate highly. I’ve been advocating for eliminating software patents and cutting back patent protection broadly as loudly and frequently as I can. I believe that sharing intellectual property will lead to way more innovation than hoarding and protecting it. I’ve seen a huge amount of pain and agony inflicted on innovative companies by trolls and “inventors” who never did anything other than write their ideas down on paper. Having ideas is not innovation. Making something new and different and putting it into the market is innovation.”
So basically, several VCs too want to see a society that shares ideas. Patents may not be needed at all. Even investors can reject them. Patents are a threat when counterparts and trolls use them. Here is a post titled “What If Drug Patents Were Written Like Software Patents?” To quote: “Not happening, that one, and it’s a good thing. But stuff nearly that vague and idiotic is all over the software patent landscape. Such patents list a superficially impressive amount of detail about how their “invention” is to be implemented, but all too often, that scheme turns out to mean something like “Someone uses a computer to contact a web server” or “Someone turns on their mobile phone”. It would be as if we in the drug industry could enable our compounds by citing a few synthetic organic chemistry textbooks – that’s how you make ‘em, right there!”
In general, much of the whole patent hype is inherently bad, as it encourages isolation. Tesla is at least realising this after it wasted a lot of money patenting a lot of stuff. For that Tesla deserves some credit. It acknowledges its wasteful mistakes now, grasping a culture of sharing instead. The lesson we should learn from Tesla is not patents giveaway; we should learn from Tesla’s error and avoid this error by never patenting stuff in the first place. Tesla merely gave back what it took away. █
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06.24.14
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The press is awash with Microsoft propaganda that negates truths, such as Microsoft as having “warmth towards open source” (like lawsuits), Microsoft having big share in virtualisation (based on revenue/sales alone), and Microsoft “continu[ing] Android push” (actually, extorting and derailing Android)
EVERY now and then we see some Microsoft openwashing that we are urged to respond to. There are some propaganda agents out there (some working directly for Microsoft) whose aim is to portray Microsoft as privacy-respecting, Open Source-friendly, law-obeying/abiding, and competition-respecting. Earlier today we saw a pro-Microsoft site saying that “Microsoft Refuses To Open Source VB6″, then issuing the following revisionist nonesense: “With Microsoft’s new warmth towards open source it seems a small thing to ask for VB6 to be open sourced.”
There is no “new warmth towards open source”, there is openwashing and propaganda, that’s all. Microsoft pretended to have open-sourced some very old software a few months ago, but that was a sheer lie, promoted for the most part by Microsoft-friendly sites that disregard facts. We need to keep track of such lies, which usually come from sites that have historically been linked to Microsoft (sometimes their writers come from Microsoft).
Here is the MSN-connected (Microsoft, and Microsoft Windows-run) Fool.com belittling Red Hat by warping the way one counts share in virtualisation (they count sales, but Free software is rarely actually sold). It’s the same propaganda line that Gartner and IDC use when it comes to servers share. They give the illusion that proprietary software dominates virtualisation, but that’s nonsense. VMware is linked to the NSA through RSA, and it is run by people from Microsoft (the NSA’s #1 PRISM partner and more). Like Hyper-V, VMware is proprietary and it probably facilitates back door access like Hyper-V does (Hyper-V runs on Windows, which has back doors, hence Hyper-V and every guest VM under it has an NSA back door). We need to find back against disinformation that belittles the share of GNU/Linux and Free software by framing it as a purely financial question.
The third example for today comes from an Android-hostile site. It now gives the illusion (again) that Microsoft supports Android rather than what it actually does. Microsoft extorts Android and derails it by trying to turn a portion of it into a Microsoft surveillance platform.
All the examples above show us not journalism but agenda disguised as reporting. Please report such coverage to us so that we can counter it. █
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Posted in Fraud, Microsoft, Open XML at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
OOXML: When crime pays off
Summary: Reports from the European Commission’s Web site reveal the degree to which OOXML is successfully derailing migrations to Free/libre software in the public sector
SOME of the criminals involved in the OOXML festival of corruption have already left Microsoft (e.g. Oliver Bell, who joined a Gates-funded Gates grooming operation) or joined Microsoft (e.g. Peter O’Kelly), so holding them accountable would be hard, especially now that years have passed and conditions have changed. Microsoft got away with a lot of crime, including bribery. Nobody was sent to jail or even put on trial. Microsoft is above the law, no doubt. It’s an international problem that we find also in the case of large banks, not just software companies with strong ties to the NSA for example.
According to this new report from the European Commission’s Web site, “Open source [is] hindered by OOXML incompatibilities” (as intended and planned by Microsoft). To qoute: “The mixing of outdated and incompatible versions of OOXML, an XML document format, is hindering implementation in open source office alternatives, according to a study published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) today. The different OOXML versions also pose difficulties for public administrations that use different proprietary office suite versions, and the inconsistencies are causing problems with older documents. The OOXML document format is hindering the interoperability of suites of office productivity tools.”
There is also this accompanying report titled “Complex singularity versus openness”.
“Does not even mention ODF,” pointed out one of our readers about this article. “When M$ forced it’s XML file-format on the world for office suites it deliberately created lock-in,” wrote Pogson.
This once again reminds us why Microsoft went as far as criminal activities. It sought to prevent people all around the world from taking their data to better platforms or even create new data in formats that would continue to make the data accessible. To us at Techrights is has always been somewhat of an outrageous mystery that nobody was sent to jail for it. It shows that the system which purports to uphold justice is very arbitrary and unjust, with Microsoft positioned on the side of immunity while it helps secret agencies illegally violate rights of citizens. █
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