03.16.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hardware Freedom Day celebrated yesterday all around the world and the trend of open source 3D printing is worth noting
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For its second edition Hardware Freedom Day is happening with over 40 registered teams and one more sponsor in the name of LulzBot offering 8x3D printers for the event, product which has been RYF-certified by our partner the FSF. Canonical, Google and Linode are of course still part of our long term sponsors and we are trying to reward all our supporters as well. You can find more details on that by looking at the HFD website.
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The first Open Ephys projects include components for recording electrical signals in mice brains, and a software interface for collecting data. Unlike something along the lines of the open source brain scanning tool Open BCI, the Open Ephys tools are aimed at neuroscience researchers, not at engineers and game developers. Nonetheless, in building these contraptions, Siegle and Voigts have turned to many of the same tools used by other hardware hackers across the country, including the Arduino open source circuit board “We like Arduinos because lots of people know how to use them, and they’re easy to get your hands on,” Siegle says.
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Cheap, disposable fashion is not only an environmental problem, but is also about companies giving their workers unfair wages and unsafe working environments. Various solutions to this widespread problem include shopping at thrift stores, clothing swaps, buying local and handmade, but making your own clothes can also be a way to ensure that your clothes are ethically made — by you.
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The evolution of 3D printing has moved quickly and it is now poised to alter every aspect of our lives and health. Thousands of Europeans are enjoying 3D-printed metal orthopaedic implants to support or replace missing bones and, in the US, thousands more have benefited from 3D printing used by dentists. Most people that need hearing aids have custom 3D-printed devices comfortably resting in their ears now.
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3D printers may be trendy, but they are hardly new. One of the earliest of all is the RepRap project, which began back in 2005. As its name implies – it’s short for “replicating rapid” prototyper – RepRap is designed to be able to produce copies of itself, or at least most of its parts. Not only that, it is completely open source, both in terms of its hardware (which uses Arduino kit) and software.
Because of its open nature it has gone on to form the basis of many other 3D-printing systems, including those from MakerBot.
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03.14.14
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The FUD machine of the Microsoft lobbyist is interjecting itself into the media again, despite clear warnings that were published for years
KNOWING THAT Microsoft Florian is a liar and ‘spammer’ (flooding journalists with identical E-mails) that’s employed for the smearing of Android, most journalists now ignore him and we rarely hear anything from him. A few months ago I visited his blog just to see if he was still ‘alive’ online as I had not heard of him for almost a year.
Joe Mullin, who is usually excellent when it comes to reporting on patents, perhaps fails to grasp Microsoft Florian’s poor record when it comes to covering events. He is a spinner, a deceiver, and he has been proven to be only an agenda pusher for several years now. He pretends to be things that he is not. That’s what he is good at, other than mass-mailing journalists so that they link to his nonsense. Pamela Jones would be tempted to reach out for her keyboard and log into Groklaw if she saw this.
No journalist — and it’s worth repeating — NO JOURNALIST should be taking it at face value what Microsoft Florian says, not without remembering who he works for. Microsoft Florian played a major role in the “Android is expenseive” PR campaign, making up or propping up fictitious figures. HTC already refuted the FUD from this lobbyist, who is paid by Android foes including Microsoft (they seem to be passing him material to publish, too).
“Yesterday,” writes Mullin, “Mueller published a hearing transcript from February 10 which featured each side’s lawyers arguing to limit or throw out the other side’s expert report.”
So this is just an argument, it’s not actually anything factual. It’s a wet dream of some lawyer. Mullin turned it into an incredible headline which then invited many comments. This is the manufacturing of “news” out of gossip. Mullin says: “New demand dwarfs licensing fees charged by Microsoft, and it will go to the jury.”
But wait, why assume that there are “fees charged by Microsoft”? Well, guess it’s Microsoft Florian again. As Mullin later mentions: “Microsoft patent licenses to Android phone makers have reportedly been in the $7.50 to $15 per phone range, with lower estimates hanging around $5 per phone. As Mueller points out in his post on the royalty demands, those fees are for a license to a wide portfolio of patents, not just five patents being hotly litigated in court.”
The key word here is “reportedly”. But reported by who? Microsoft Florian and some Microsoft-friendly analysts. We covered this before.
Mullin concludes as follows, prepetuating an ubsubtanitated myth: “It’s also possible to earn a lot of money by convincing Android OEMs to pay patent royalties, as Microsoft has shown. One analyst estimates Microsoft is getting $2 billion per year in patent payments over Android.”
Microsoft might not be paid anything, but people like Microsoft Florian, paid by Microsoft itself, helped create this fairy tail and given it some legs. So all that Mullin’s article does is basically reiterating speculations and making them look like facts.
Well done, Microsoft, for an effective deception and PR campaign. It is the “Android is expensive” strategy. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
NSA/GCHQ
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Geneva panel share deep concerns over US record on host of different subjects, including racial inequality and Guantánamo
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Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg has called president Barack Obama to express his frustration over what he says is long-lasting damage caused by the US government’s surveillance programmes.
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Facebook’s CEO says he called President Obama to express his ‘frustration’ at repeated revelations of NSA snooping
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…how US spy hive the NSA today branded claims that it “has infected millions of computers around the world with malware,” and that it “is impersonating US social media or other websites” to eavesdrop on people.
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Human oversight is being made redundant by an automated hacking system called TURBINE setup by the NSA — with help from GCHQ — which uses fake Facebook servers to infect users’ systems. Former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald has released detailed information on the network, which had already come to light last year, and the workings behind it on his site The Intercept.
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The EU threatens the abolition of its trade agreement with the US, and other deals, if blanket surveillance by the NSA on EU citizens doesn’t stop. MEPs announced a resolution that wraps up a six-month inquiry into America’s violation of data privacy.
Drones
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Prosecuting the drone protesters in the town of DeWitt has cost taxpayers $42,786 so far, and more trials are expected to take place in the near future.
DeWitt officials said the upcoming trials of the activists charged in connection with drone protests at Hancock Air Base could double that cost, The recent trial of protesters resulted in 12 people being sent to jail. DeWitt Town Justice David Gideon found them guilty of disorderly conduct in connection with the October 2012 protest. They were given a 15-day sentence.
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Firefighters were still unloading debris from the scene of Wednesday’s explosion in East Harlem that killed seven people and injured dozens when a three-pound DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter drone began buzzing above the wreckage.
CIA
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It seems that President Obama has chosen sides in the fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over a report describing the agency’s torture program under President George W. Bush. The executive branch is standing with the CIA, standing behind its director, and even reportedly withholding documents from the Senate investigation.
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Imagine you commit a heinous crime. Then imagine that, once facing charges in court, you’re allowed to withhold incriminating evidence brought forth by the prosecutors, keeping the jury in the dark about the details of your lawbreaking. Further, imagine you commit more crimes while on trial and imagine the judge enables and covers up these additional offenses.
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The White House is refusing to hand over top-secret documents to a Senate investigation into CIA torture and rendition of terrorism suspects, claiming it needs to ensure that “executive branch confidentiality” is respected.
In the latest development in the spiralling clash between Congress and the administration over oversight of the intelligence agencies, Barack Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that certain material from the George W Bush presidency was being withheld for fear of weakening Oval Office privacy.
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A fight between the Senate and the CIA over whether crimes were committed in the handling of sensitive classified material appears unlikely to be resolved in the courts, legal experts say.
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Congress needs to get to the bottom of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s astonishing allegations of a CIA attempt to intimidate congressional staffers investigating the spy agency’s past actions.
Feinstein, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, can have no partisan motive in roiling these waters. And she has been a firm supporter of the agency, even defending the CIA’s controversial use of armed drones to kill terrorists overseas.
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The Senate on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the nomination of Caroline Krass to serve as the CIA’s top lawyer amid a snooping fight pitting the spy agency against Congress and ensnaring the CIA’s acting general counsel.
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Feinstein, after all, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2009, has yet to see an NSA violation of the Constitution, an invasive spying program or a creative “re-interpretation” of the law that she hasn’t applauded as being lawful and “needed” to “keep people safe.”
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Red Hat at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Fedora 21, the next version of Red Hat’s Fedora distribution of Linux, just received a slew of new feature approvals courtesy of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.
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Among the Fedora 21 changes that were approved at today’s FESCo meeting for Fedora 21 features include:
- Migrating cron jobs to native systemd timer units and changing Fedora package dependencies that currently depend on crontab.
- A system-wide crypto policy of unifying cryptography policies by different applications/libraries so there is a consistent security level for all applications running on a Fedora system.
- Access control for PC/SC smart cards to prevent unauthorized access to data on smart cards and also from unauthorized erasing of smart cards or even communicating with the smart card’s firmware.
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So Ojuba project manage many projects that make changes, Ojuba contribute in Fedora itself and in many big open source projects as KDE,MATE,VLC,Wine and others.
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03.13.14
Posted in Kernel at 3:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Level
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While it’s late into the Linux 3.14 kernel development cycle, a patch that was introduced in Linux 3.13 with an aim of improving open-source graphics driver performance for TTM-based drivers is now being reverted since for some situations it instead decreased the performance.
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The first Arduino-certified product to come out of Intel’s embedded systems division, is the Galileo a sign of things to come or a white elephant?
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Red Hat is a relative late-comer to the dynamic patching party. Oracle has been in the space the longest, thanks to its 2011 acquisition of dynamic-kernel patching vendor Ksplice.
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He has worked on the Linux kernel and userland for more than 20 years, in areas including KVM, the kernel-based virtual machine, high speed networking, Linux/ia64, Linux/m68k, the system libraries (glibc) and high-end NUMA systems.
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For users of the BFS scheduler patches to the kernel, they have been updated this week for the Linux 3.13 kernel.
Con Kolivas continues maintaining his Brain Fuck Scheduler patch-set outside of the Linux kernel with no ambitions to mainline the alternative CPU scheduler. BFS 0.446 was released this week and with this release comes support for the now-stable Linux 3.13 kernel.
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Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are all the rage as conventional computing platforms have taken up the challenge of network routing and management (see “What’s The Difference Between SDN and NFV”). The trend is to integrate monolithic, vertically integrated hardware like gateways and routers into a single, virtualized, hardware platform.
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On a related note, the LLVM Linux project is also seeking GSoC attention. Developers are still hard at work on making the upstream Linux kernel compatible with building under LLVM/Clang rather than just GCC. Much progress has been made in being able to build the Linux kernel with Clang but there’s still outstanding patches, etc.
Education
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it is building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than 31 universities have partnered with edX and nearly two million people have accessed its courses online since it launched just 18 months ago.
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Xen/ARM
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Xen 4.4 provides stable ARM support, improved libvirt support for libxl, a new scalable event channel interface, and many other changes. I’ve already written at length before about the big improvements to Xen 4.4 within Xen 4.4 Is On Approach With Many Features and Xen 4.4 Will Be Riding High With New Features.
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Graphics Stack
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Other changes for today’s NVIDIA 334.21 Linux driver update include a NVIDIA kernel module security fix for a userspace pointer dereference, OpenGL bug-fixes, support for GPUs with VDPAU feature set E, improved application profile support, improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver’s composition pipeline, NVIDIA Settings control panel updates, and other fixes.
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Last week we talked about Broadcom finally open-sourcing their VideoCore IV 3D Graphics Stack and it is indeed the real McCoy, but the $10,000 Quake III bounty has yet to be claimed for getting it to work on the Raspberry Pi.
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VDPAU Feature Set E is the latest revision of NVIDIA’s PureVideo hardware that’s found in the brand new Maxwell graphics processors. With the GeForce GTX 750 series support for VDPAU Feature Set E, there is support for H.264 decoding up to 4096 x 4096 and MPEG-1/MPEG-2 streams up to 4080 x 4080. These new GPUs also support enhanced error concealment when dealing with the decoding of corrupted video streams.
Benchmarks
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The ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T is a Haswell-based Intel ultrabook that I have found to be quite interesting and will be carrying out a large number of Linux tests (and Windows 8.1 vs. Linux benchmarks) from this laptop that sports Intel Iris Graphics 5100, dual SSDs, and other impressive features.
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For any Linux laptop users or those concerned about their data’s safety on production systems, I highly recommend utilizing disk encryption for safeguarding the data. However, what’s the performance impact like these days? In this article with the current development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a modern Intel ultrabook we’re looking at the impact (including CPU utilization) of using an eCryptfs-based home directory encryption and LUKS-based full-disk encryption on Ubuntu Linux.
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For those curious about the performance of Intel’s “Quark” x86 SoC for very low-power applications, including wearable devices, here’s some benchmarks of Debian on their Galileo development board.
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…in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
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For this article we benchmarked Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development state and compared it to the Ubuntu releases going back three years to Ubuntu 11.10.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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With Valve’s Source Engine originally just targeting Direct3D, when initially porting their games to Linux and OS X they relied upon a hand-made Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. In potentially assisting other game developers, Valve Software has now opened up this graphics translation layer.
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Crytek has confirmed that CryEngine now has “full native Linux support.” A demo of the engine running on the open source OS will be presented at Game Developers Conference next week.
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Crytek has announced plans to reveal the nature of their updates to proprietary game engine CryEngine in the upcoming GDC in San Francisco. They have immediately outed that the engine now natively supports Linux.
Crytek will also use the event to show off their latest games. Visitors will get to play two new modes from online FPS Warface, Tower Raid and Capture. They will also be showing of The Collectables, a military strategy game for iOS and Android.
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Digital Tribe Games has announced that their upcoming new dungeon themed Role Playing Game, TinyKeep, is going to see the light of the day pretty soon on Linux, Mac and Windows machines. The game is now under development having reached its funding goal on Kickstarter thanks to the pledges of 807 people.
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I am sure there are a few Sega fans following us here, so this one is for you! Duck Marines is a free software remake of the ChuChu Rocket party game. Sadly I didn’t have a Sega Dreamcast for very long, so it is not a title I am too familiar with.
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The Humble Mobile Bundle is back and with it six awesome Android games. These games make the list of best games of 2013. Like every time, this humble bundle will stay on sale for 2 weeks only, so just literally pay a couple of bucks and get them.
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Valve has recently released Portal 2 on Steam for Linux and opened a GitHub entry to gather all the bugs from the community. When one of the Valve developers closed a bug related to Portal 2 recommending that the users disable a security feature, the Linux community reacted.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Wine has been around for more than two decades and works pretty well on most Linux desktops, laptops and servers (not that there is really any good reason for running a Windows app on a Linux server). But since Wine depends on parts of the Linux operating system that are not always available in the Linux variants used to power many smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and Chromebooks, configuring Wine for them is more problematic.
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Gizmodo reports that a new open source application called Popcorn Time lets you stream torrent movies in Linux, as well as Windows and OS X. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of an application that could actually stream torrent video content, but I’m sure the movie industry isn’t going to be happy about it.
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The Wine development release 1.7.14 is now available.
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And I’m not the first to notice this. This is probably because the latest version, NEdit 5.5, was released in 2004. So I need a new programmer’s editor.
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Quite obviously, musicians and the people around them have a great need for video editing software — not only because YouTube is a popular place to listen to music, but because videos have so much promotional value. Tour diaries, talk-to-the-camera confessionals, live show videos, viral stunts, and other types of videos are all part of the gameplan for recording artists these days.
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I’ve been informed by the musl development camp that they intend to release version 1.0 of their standard C library in the next few weeks.
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Bluefish is a powerful text editor aimed towards developers with features such as syntax highlighting, indentation, support for projects, auto-completion and more. Considering Linux is saturated with various text editors and integrated development environments ranging from the simplest to the more complex and feature-rich ones, let’s see what Bluefish offers for programmers and not only.
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I love Docker, it’s a fantastic concept, and so far the execution and progress of the project has been flawless. I also love FreeBSD; FreeBSD is a clean and powerful system with advanced features like Dtrace, ZFS, and Jails. Combine the two and it sounds better than chocolate and peanut butter. With the recent version 0.9 release, Docker announced the infrastructure support to glue the two together, along with KVM, OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, and nearly any other environment for application isolation through an execution driver API.
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