01.30.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Core
-
-
Another pull request was already submitted of AMD Radeon DRM graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 3.14 kernel merge window with the DRM pull.
Linux 3.14 Radeon DRM changes were already submitted to drm-next, which includes improved DRM support and various other changes, particularly for the newer AMD GPUs. This latest Radeon DRM pull that was sent in today provides additional fixes.
-
The latest version of this kernel branch has received its first update, but it’s a small one with just a few changes and fixes. This is normal for a new kernel, and subsequent versions should pick up the pace.
-
-
Just a matter of weeks after the lead Btrfs file-system developers joined Facebook after leaving the Fusion-io data storage company, another key Linux kernel developer has left his post at Fusion-io to join the social network company.
-
Back in November the networkd service gained support for network bridging and now with the latest code rework there is network bonding support. Network bonding is combining two or more network adapters for network redundancy or greater throughput.
-
-
-
-
Here are the main branches for arm-soc for the 3.14 merge window. We’ll have a few more patches towards the end, but this is the bulk of it.
-
* Improved crypto_memneq helper.
* Use cyprto_memneq in arch-specific crypto code.
* Replaced orphaned DCP driver with Freescale MXS DCP driver.
* Added AVX/AVX2 version of AESNI-GCM encode and decode.
* Added AMD Cryptographic Coprocessor (CCP) driver.
* Misc fixes.
-
The open source libferris project is a virtual file system that aims to provide a single file system interface for all data. I have been advancing libferris towards that goal over the last ten years. Over that time, libferris has gained support for mounting relational databases; physical devices like printers, webcams, and scanners; composite files like Berkeley DB and XML files; applications like Amarok, Firefox, emacs, pulseaudio, XWindow, dbus, and evolution; and more recently web services like GDrive, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr, as well as many other things.
Graphics Stack
-
With a fresh round of Mesa Git commits on Monday morning the support landed for OpenGL 3.2 and OpenGL 3.3 within Nouveau’s NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers.
-
Announced today to Wayland developers was SWC, a new Wayland compositor framework designed to be taken advantage of by window managers targeting Wayland.
-
-
Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver that’s been in development now for the better part of a decade, is working brilliantly for some NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while for other NVIDIA GPUs the experience is a sloppy mess. Using the Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1-devel Gallium3D driver code installed on top of Ubuntu 13.10, here’s what the experience is like when trying a number of GeForce graphics cards with this latest open-source driver code.
-
-
SimpleDRM is aiming to be a rather generic and simple DRM driver for the mainline Linux kernel. SimpleDRM doesn’t do hardware acceleration but can replace multiple existing frame-buffer drivers like efifb, vesafb, simplefb, and other code. This basic DRM driver can then work with the xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver but there isn’t yet any support for using this DRM driver on Wayland-based systems.
Benchmarks
-
Besides the interesting but disappointing AMD Kaveri Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Linux driver benchmarks published this morning, here’s some more AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” benchmarks for your Sunday viewing pleasure.
-
The latest benchmarks to share with you all are some tests done of all major Linux kernel releases from Linux 3.8 through Linux 3.13 and including the latest drm-next code that will land in the Linux 3.14 kernel. Here’s a look at whether Intel Haswell HD Graphics users can expect any more performance improvements out of Linux 3.14 on the graphics front.
-
-
After this weekend carrying out a 25-way open-source Linux graphics driver comparison featuring AMD Radeon, Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA GeForce hardware, the tables have now turned to look at nearly the same assortment of hardware but when using the high-performance, proprietary Linux graphics drivers. We’ve also upped the demanding OpenGL benchmarks used — including the Source Engine — as we see how the AMD and NVIDIA binary graphics drivers are doing to start 2014.
-
As alluded to in days earlier after finding major open-source Radeon driver improvements — including the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver — I’ve been conducting a fresh graphics card comparison spanning many graphics processors and looking at the latest open-source driver performance on the Intel, NVIDIA, and Radeon fronts under Ubuntu Linux. In this article is a 25-way Intel Haswell HD Graphics vs. AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics comparison from Ubuntu 13.10 with the upgraded Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 development driver code to provide a very bleeding edge look at what the open-source drivers have to offer the Linux desktop users.
-
-
All drives were tested from an Intel Core i7 Haswell system while running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.13 kernel. The tested assortment of drives used (based upon their availability within our labs) included:
-
For the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of playing with CompuLab’s Utilite Computer. The Utilite is a miniature ARM desktop computer powered by Freescale’s i.MX6 SoC and is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This is a speedy little Linux system that for some workloads can blow past Intel’s original Atom Z530 “Poulsbo” SoC system.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of yesterday’s and today’s news about the NSA
New Leaks
-
The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”
Illegal Collection of ‘Evidence’
-
A man charged with aiding a terrorist organization has asked a U.S. court to throw out information collected by the National Security Agency, saying the NSA’s surveillance of his Internet communications violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecuting Anonymisers
-
In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of a three-judge panel at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication.
In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit’s SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit’s users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit’s users.
War on Journalism
-
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
-
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his “accomplices” to return leaked documents during a hearing on Wednesday.
Europe
-
A former Ukrainian president warned on Wednesday that the country is now on “the brink of civil war,” and Russia added to the gloom by announcing the suspension of its financial aid package, which was all that had been keeping Ukraine solvent.
[...]
Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.
Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.
-
-
Former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Edward Snowden will be invited to the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), APA’s Europe bureau reports.
-
Chancellor says Germany and US still ‘far apart’ on sweeping surveillance and spying activities revealed by Edward Snowden
-
Berlin and Washington are still “far apart” in their views on the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
-
The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.
-
THE EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE COMMISSIONER has spoken out on Data Protection Day about national security agency surveillance.
US Politics
-
Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
-
Senator Patrick Leahy questioned how the Constitution allows the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records and repeated his calls for President Barack Obama’s administration to end the program during a hearing Wednesday.
The Obama administration should heed the recent advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and end the phone records collection program, said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
-
The NSA’s new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at “nullifying” the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center’s much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Angry Birds
-
Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website late Tuesday were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text “Spying Birds.” The U.S. National Security Agency’s logo was also visible in the image.
-
-
Reacting to recent revelations that smartphone apps such as Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) to spy on their users, the Application Developers Alliance has condemned the NSA for damaging the industry.
BBC
-
When the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of Edward Snowden’s NSA-GCHQ leaks in June, it unleashed a stream of abbreviations, acronyms and jargon describing the cyberspies’ activities.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.29.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News items from December and January, demonstrating the power of peer production and cooperation
Sharing/Transparency/Openness
-
Another 100% Open Source camera is coming up: we really think that Open Source photography is the next big thing in open source!
-
After my initial stint with Wikipedia editing, I increasingly realized that the English version of Wikipedia lacked articles on Indian writers, famous personalities, cultural artefacts, and more. The problem is multi-layered and includes poor coverage of everything relating to non-western societies as well as to women within those societies. Once, I created article on Wikipedia about an Indian, female writer named Bama. She is from the lowest caste community called Dalits in India; and while the author is a celebrated writer of stories on the subject of double oppression (which is oppession of women by people of higher castes and oppression by men within their own communities), Wikipedia almost naturally had no record of her work. Sadly, within minutes of my creation of her article it was nominated for deletion. I then quickly added more references while simultaneously starting a discussion about why it should not be deleted. At that point, another Indian editor jumped in and helped with the explaination; the next day the deletion tag was removed.
-
Just a few years ago, the words “open source” and “hardware” were never mentioned in the same sentence. Instead, the focus was on open source software running on top of closed, proprietary hardware solutions.
Hardware suppliers were inwardly focused on creating proprietary, “converged” infrastructure to protect their existing businesses, instead of working with the community to develop new solutions.
-
-
-
-
-
Built alongside friend and colleague Robert Attorri, his creation is called Light Table, and he believes it can not only improve programming for seasoned engineers like himself, but put the power of coding into the hands of so many others. “We consider programming a modern-day superpower. You can create something out of nothing, cure cancer, build billion-dollar companies,” he says. “We’re looking at how we can give that super power to everyone else.”
-
-
1) “Open”: Early on, most commonly thought of as short form for “open source” (code all can use, tinker with and contribute to), “open” has opened up a Pandora’s Box of multiple and sometimes contradictory implied meanings: “open standard” (technical standards anyone can apply); “open access” (for participation in online activities); “open content” (digital content that can be reused, remixed and shared); and “open data” (publicly released data, generally governmental or research).
-
Goteo is a crowdfunding platform for the commons. Founded in Spain in 2011 with an explicit mission to promote and support p2p values of openess, collaboration and sharing, Goteo’s innovation in crowdfunding has seen them go from strength to strength. Their 2013 year end report is an inspiring testament to the power of the crowd. We highly recommend reading the article and encourage you to consider Goteo for your next p2p and commons inspired projects.
-
-
-
-
The winners in the domestic challenge covered a broad range of issues Sunlight cares about, including public procurement, public sector innovation and the use of data to improve public administration. If last year’s challenge was any indication, this year’s European-focused competition will likely demonstrate that cities around the world are turning towards new technology and open data to improve the lives of city residents.
-
-
Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world.
-
Most of the Honey Badger platform is written in Python, an open source programming language popular with mathematicians and web programmers. And the team stores and processes its data with a combination of Hadoop — an open source clone of Google’s big data crunching system — and the tried and true open source database MySQL. The team pays Amazon and Microsoft Azure a few thousand dollars a month for cloud hosting — a bargain compared to what they would have had to pay upfront for supercomputers ten years ago.
-
Open-source magic is not about slapping magical secrets up on YouTube; there are more than enough eager teenagers and fun-ruiners willing to do that. Instead, it takes a lesson from the open-source technology activists who believe that better innovation comes through collaboration.
-
The Open Source Ecology project is designed to develop plans and methods to build these fifty machines, and do it as one collaborative effort. In his TED Talk he confessed that after completing a PhD in Fusion Energy he felt useless. There was no practical knowledge to be used in the world to implement change.
-
-
Sundance winning documentarian Ondi Timoner isn’t in the habit of doing things in half-measures. Her latest endeavor, the web series “A Total Disruption,” features some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. The project is in a sense a quest to profile the entrepreneurial spirit of the age.
As such, the project hasn’t been limited to the tech sector. Timoner has turned her lens on creative luminaries like Shepard Fairey and Amanda Palmer. Those two are headlining a benefit soirée for the next phase of “A Total Disruption,” that will also feature Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and YouTuber Jhameel, this Sunday in Los Angeles.
-
-
Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable eletronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company’s first product to market and will be the world’s the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source.
-
-
-
-
But what if architecture could make life better for the many. What if good-quality, life-bettering architecture were open-source and available to download off the internet? For free?
Open Data
-
-
-
-
EdX, the non-profit online learning organization with a huge roster of global institutions under the xConsortium participating, has been a leader in the free online education arena for several years. In June of last year, the organization released the code for its learning platform under an open source license. And, MIT has been leveraging the platform to deliver free online courses, as we covered here. Now, MIT has announced that it will start offering for-profit courses on edX, beginning with a course on Big Data. Because of the salaries that people with Big Data skills are commanding in the job market, the course could be a good opportunity for job seekers.
-
Few things are more frustrating, or more likely to result in irreproducibility and error, than trying to reconstruct a computational analysis based on a prosaic description of an algorithm in a research article. Yet this is a very typical part of the working day in my field (bioinformatics) and I imagine, in many others.
-
Being unprepared for the conversation, our 45 minutes together wandered through introductions and eventually focused on a conversation about how public data could be used to advocate for employment opportunities for communities of color around municipal development sites. My perspective was that we could use public data to document the ways that these employment opportunities often are not given to members of the community adjacent to or containing the development site. While we didn’t get very far on this topic, many participating (myself included) seemed interested in exploring it further.
Elsevier Against Open Access
We last covered this a month and a half ago. Here’s later coverage:
-
I thought Elsevier was already doing all it could to alienate the authors who freely donate their work to shore up the corporation’s obscene profits. The thousands of takedown notices sent to Academia.edu represent at best a grotesque PR mis-step, an idiot manoeuvre that I thought Elsevier would immediately regret and certainly avoid repeating.
-
We just recently wrote about the terrible anti-science/anti-knowledge/anti-learning decision by publishing giant Elsevier to demand that Academia.edu take down copies of journal articles that were submitted directly by the authors, as Elsevier wished to lock all that knowledge (much of it taxpayer funded) in its ridiculously expensive journals. Mike Taylor now alerts us that Elsevier is actually going even further in its war on access to knowledge. Some might argue that Elsevier was okay in going after a “central repository” like Academia.edu, but at least it wasn’t going directly after academics who were posting pdfs of their own research on their own websites. While some more enlightened publishers explicitly allow this, many (including Elsevier) technically do not allow it, but have always looked the other way when authors post their own papers.
-
As we all know, University libraries have to pay expensive subscription fees to scholarly publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa, so that their researchers can read articles written by their colleagues and donated to those publishers. Controversially (and maybe illegally), when negotiating contracts with libraries, publishers often insist on confidentiality clauses — so that librarians are not allowed to disclose how much they are paying. The result is an opaque market with no downward pressure on prices, hence the current outrageously high prices, which are rising much more quickly than inflation even as publishers’ costs shrink due to the transition to electronic publishing.
-
One of the world’s largest academic publishers has launched a wide-ranging takedown spree, demanding that several different universities take down their own scholars’ research.
Open Hardware
-
One of my favorite quotes is “We are what we celebrate.” Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST Robotics, says this and it comes up on an almost daily basis one way or another in my work in open source hardware and education. One of the challenges of getting more young people into engineering and computer programming is that we’re collectively competing with the high profile status that becoming a famous, professional athlete or musician, or reality show star, promises. I don’t expect the mass media to change, because change happens from small groups of motivated people. And, this is where the maker, hacker, and open source software and hardware communities are making great progress.
-
-
With growing concern about government agencies such as the NSA, open-source software has stepped into the spotlight as a way to ensure complete transparency. While this has so far only applied to software, there could soon be a way for you to take complete control of your hardware as well, all thanks to Project Novena.
-
Usually, I avoid making predictions. However, increasingly, I believe that the sleeper trend of 2014 will be free-licensed hardware — and that its availability could transform free and open source software (FOSS) as well as hardware manufacturing.
As 2013 closes, the trend is already well-advanced. Ubuntu Edge’s crowdfunding might have failed, but Ubuntu Touch is supposed to have a still-unnamed vendor, while the first Firefox OS phone was released in July, and Jolla released its first phone based on Sailfish OS.
-
-
3D printing is set to disrupt multiple industries thanks to its unique position at the intersection of three important trends in technology: the Internet of Things, our growing desire to personalize our things, and the coming revolution in the way things get delivered to us.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 1:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Change is coming from Internet hacktivism, leaks, and dissemination of important information about those with extraordinary power and/or wealth
Nobel for Peace
-
Two Norwegian politicians say NSA whistleblower’s actions have led to a ‘more stable and peaceful world order’
-
Edward Snowden was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian politicians, including a former government minister, for contributing to transparency and global stability by exposing a U.S. surveillance program.
Europe
-
-
In the wake of the recent ARD interview with Edward Snowden, here are my comments on RT yesterday about the NSA’s involvement in industrial espionage…
-
It is difficult to imagine how a significant rift in trans-Atlantic relations could emerge without the involvement of Germany, the European Union’s most populous, financially solvent and politically powerful member.
It continues to host tens of thousands of American troops on its soil, and with its impeccable capitalist credentials, track-record of dutiful political decision-making, enviable manufacturing base and ability to criticize English-speaking nations in their own language, Germany is always able to make a good case for its views on the international stage.
-
The exposure of US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance practices by whistle-blower Edward Snowden has resulted in UK businesses worried about privacy removing their data from US hosting providers and moving it back to British servers.
That’s according to Lawrence Jones, CEO of internet hosting company UKFast, whose customers include the NHS and British Cycling. He says British firms want to store data in Britain in order to prevent the US government from snooping on customer information.
-
AT&T Inc Chief Executive Randall Stephenson met with several European officials last week to discuss the U.S. spying scandal, which is affecting the telecommunications company’s business, he said on Tuesday.
Some European reports had speculated that Stephenson’s meetings in Europe were focused on AT&T ambitions to buy Vodafone Group Plc.
Surveillance Through “Apps”
-
-
Developer Rovio today denied handing over user information to U.S. and U.K. officials, suggesting that any leaked data is coming from third-party ad networks, not Rovio.
-
Mobile phone applications such as the game Angry Birds are being used by British and American spy agencies to gain access to users’ personal data, leaked documents reveal.
-
Security experts explain how the NSA and GCHQ may be harvesting data from smartphone apps like Angry Birds
-
As part of its latest reporting on leaked NSA documents, the New York Times did not properly redact a PDF that listed the name of a National Security Agency employee who prepared the document as well as a target of the program.
The Times published Monday the latest revelation stemming from leaks supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that US spy agency and its UK cohort, GCHQ, have the ability to harvest sensitive personal data from phone apps that transmit users’ data across the web, such as the extremely popular Angry Birds game.
-
This app follows you while you shop—and it needs a clearer privacy policy.
“Transparent” Mass Surveillance
-
The U.S. president also called for patent reform and for faster broadband in schools
-
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn win a battle against the NSA, but the war is far from over
-
Effective Reaction
Update (Just in)
-
Britain announced Tuesday that the head of GCHQ, the secret eavesdropping agency that has come under scrutiny following leaks by former US analyst Edward Snowden is to stand down.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
Gamers on Linux are in heaven after the arrival of Steam and with a decent catalogue being updated aggressively by Valve, future for gaming on Linux looks bright. But chances are you may be a hardcore Linux enthusiast, with no or least interest in gaming but after Steam’s arrival, you want to give Gaming a try but don’t know where to start. We are here to help.
-
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is set to be the first ever game on Linux that is based on the CryEngine. According to the Kickstarter page for the open world Role Playing Game (RPG) there will be Linux support for the game when it releases which is slated to be the fourth quarter of 2015.
-
-
-
Paradox Studios, the development house behind the hugely successful and addictive Magicka, Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis IV among other games, officially announced in their recent Miami convention that they are planning to launch two new games, Runemasters and the highly anticipated sequel to the Hearts of Iron series, Hearts of Iron IV. Both games are slated to be getting a Linux release along with a Windows release.
-
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the few remaining titles from Valve that’s highly sought after by Linux gamers but has yet to make its debut. Going back to last year we’ve known CS:GO has been running internally on Linux and even last April Intel Mesa developers have been optimizing their driver with CS:GO using their early access to the title in cooperation with Valve.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Valve has worked a lot lately, at both the Steam client and SteamOS, their Debian based Linux system for gaming.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
Archiving tools typically are intimidating and confusing. Even those with GUIs often require an investment of time to figure out how to use them. B1 is very intuitive. Almost every action can be executed through keyboard shortcuts. The menu row at the top of the app window has only three drop-down categories: File, Commands and Help. The dialog boxes that open from the menu are well designed and easy to use.
-
I freely admit that I wish Plex was open source. Thankfully, however, its proprietary code does’t mean Linux users are excluded.
-
When NodeJS made its debut in open source market, around 4 years ago, everyone knew what was going to follow. Programmers loved it at first sight, used it and evolved it. The idea of having a JS client, that talks to a JS server and stores data in a JS database ( document databases ), was quite attractive and people adapt it at once, in every case, right or wrong.
-
pax is one of the lesser known utilities in a typical Linux installation. That’s too bad, because pax has a very good feature set, and its command-line options are easy to understand and remember. pax is an archiver, like tar(1), but it’s also a better version of cp(1) in some ways, not least because you can use pax with SSH to copy sets of files over a network. Once you learn pax, you may wonder how you lived without it all these years.
-
LaTeX is a document preparation system and document markup language for high-quality typesetting. The system was originally developed by Leslie Lamport in the early 1980s. LaTeX is based on Donald E. Knuth’s TeX typesetting language. Lamport says that LaTeX “represents a balance between functionality and ease of use”.
-
-
Linux Shell is one of the most fascinating and powerful GNU/Linux powered tool. All the application, including X, is built over shell and Linux shell is so powerful that the whole Linux system can be controlled precisely, using it. The other aspect of Linux shell is that, it can be potentially harmful, when you executed a system command, without knowing its consequence or unknowingly.
-
-
A few months ago, Docker (then dotCloud) and Red Hat announced a partnership to collaborate around Docker, the excellent container management solution for Linux. At the time, the OpenShift team was heads down working on our 2.0 release, but we were already thinking about how we could use Docker to take application development and deployment on OpenShift to the next level.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
i3 is a tilling window manager. It is dynamic, fast, and an addictive environment. I have been using it for last 6 months. Once the initial hiccup is dealt with it becomes natural to you and the way you do computing. In this tutorial I will try to explain the basics and help you getting started with i3.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past fortnight, for the most demonstrating lack of civil rights and sometimes disregard for human life
NDAA Indefinite Detention
-
TAC, which describes itself as “a national think tank that works to preserve and protect the principles of strictly limited government through information, education, and activism,” has drawn up model resolutions for any state, county, town or other political subdivisions whose leaders want to officially state their displeasure with federal military policy during the “war on terror.”
-
Although some self-described “conservatives” now claim that nullification is unconstitutional, others view nullification as a proper and constitutional approach for checking federal overreach and are working to apply this approach through state legislatures. Taking notice, the Wall Street Journal published an article on its website sketching the various efforts across the country to nullify unconstitutional acts of the federal government.
-
The controversial provision authorizes the military, under presidential authority, to arrest, kidnap, detain without trial and hold indefinitely American citizens thought to “represent an enduring security threat to the United States.” – See more at: http://www.libertynewsonline.com/article_301_34724.php#sthash.2MqOqgzr.dpuf
Rape
-
-
A 20-year-old Indian woman said she was gang-raped on the orders of a village council because she fell in love with a man from a different ethnic group, police said Thursday.
-
Police
-
Astonishingly, infuriatingly, two former Fullerton, California cops have been acquitted on all charges after savagely beating to death Kelly Thomas, 37, a mentally ill homeless man who died five days after being set upon by Manuel Ramos, Jay Cicinelli and four other officers. The attack, caught on surveillance video, led to days of protests, the recall of three City Council members and the resignation of a police chief whose department has a long history of violent abuse. Thomas’ father Ron, a former deputy sheriff, said the defense “lied continuously” during the trial and the family will likely pursue civil charges in the death of his son, who a year after his death was cleared of the stupid bogus charges – trying to get into locked cars in a bus parking lot – police came up with in a pathetic attempt to justify their cold-blooded, fist-punching murder. Since the verdict, people have held vigils and protests at a makeshift memorial where Thomas died; one sign carries Thomas’ picture before the beating and proclaims, “No one can hurt u now.” Also, the FBI has said it will review the evidence for federal civil rights violations. There is both raw and shorter, edited video of the attack: It captures Ramos snapping on rubber gloves, smacking his fists together and sneering to Thomas, “See these fists? They’re gonna fuck you up,” followed, many vicious punches later, by Thomas writihing on the ground repeatedly crying out for help and his father. Warning: stomach-churningly graphic and heart-poundingly disturbing, all of it.
-
-
Houston resident Greg Snider claims he was arrested and held for more than an hour after local police mistakenly targeted him as a criminal, all for giving a homeless man a few quarters.
Snider said he had pulled into a local parking lot in order to make a phone call when a homeless man came up to him and asked for some spare cash. Snider claims he gave the man 75 cents and left to continue on his way.
“I had no idea at all what was about to happen,” he told KPRC Local 2 News.
As soon as Snider merged onto a local freeway, however, police followed him with flashing lights and sirens, ordering him to pull over.
-
Oddly enough, cops (and lawyers for cops) from halfway around the world are no different than our local variety. This isn’t solely an “American” problem. Excessive force is used, the victim complains, and once the court battle ensues, the justifications for the use of force are presented, which often sound completely insane to those not well-versed in the art of defending abusive cops.
-
Ukraine
-
-
Riot police brutally dispersed protesters from central Kiev in the largest operation since the latest outbreak of violence. Almost 200 officers have been injured over four days of scuffles. Two people were reportedly killed amid the crisis.
Surveillance
-
The security firm that conducts 45% of all background checks for potential U.S. government employees may have falsified hundreds of thousands of background checks over a four-year period.
UK
-
The question of whether or not citizens should be compelled to give up their passwords to law enforcement is not going to go away. What with different agencies in different countries attempting to do more searches of technology at borders, on the mainland, and around the world, the law is eventually going to have to settle whether these kinds of searches and forced compliance are in good standing with the fourth and fifth amendments of our constitution or the governing laws of other nations.
-
The Chief Inspector of UK Prisons has accused a privately run UK Immigration Detention Centre at London’s Heathrow Airport of ‘a shocking loss of humanity’ after a terminally ill dementia sufferer died in hospital, restrained in handcuffs.
Alois Dvorzak, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease spent the last five hours of his life in handcuffs, and passed away still wearing them. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, write in his report:
-
The Department of Health has launched an investigation into claims that illegal abortions of female foetuses are taking place among some families living within ethnic communities in Britain who seek to ensure that they have sons.
-
-
The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?
-
The BBC seems happy to be used as a covert propaganda outlet by tobacco, fossil fuel and other controversial companies
-
Perhaps the most depressing aspects of the Snowden affair has been not the fact that everything we do online is being spied upon, but the fact that few people in the UK seem to care. That’s partly because the UK is in it up to its neck, thanks to the complicity of GCHQ in most of the NSA’s crimes, and partly because the UK government has been so mealy-mouthed in its response. Its claims that everything it has done has been lawful is based on the fact that the only law that regulates such online spying activity – the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act – dates back to 2000, and is so utterly out of date that it is trivially easy to circumvent its puny safeguards.
[..]
Again, you can see just how bold and specific the recommendations are. Moraes and his colleagues are to be congratulated for pulling together such a high-quality report, on a such a complex and evolving situation, in such a short time. Let’s hope the European Parliament supports the conclusions, and the European Commission agrees to work towards their implementation.
War on Dissidents
-
One year ago this month, the young Internet freedom activist and groundbreaking programmer Aaron Swartz took his own life. Swartz died shortly before he was set to go to trial for downloading millions of academic articles from servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the belief that the articles should be freely available online. At the time he committed suicide, Swartz was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh. Today we spend the hour looking at the new documentary, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.” We play excerpts of the film and speak with Swartz’s father Robert, his brother Noah, his lawyer Elliot Peters, and filmmaker Brian Knappenberger.
[...]
“It’s just incomprehensible, the notion that Aaron should be a felon and go to jail for something that was clearly not illegal, and he did nothing wrong. He was innocent. And to be railroaded on this basis was a complete distortion and corruption of the criminal justice system.”
-
An internal Walmart memo was leaked yesterday, describing how to discourage workers from coming together for action. This document, leaked by Anonymous “Hacktivists” demanded absolute loyalty to Walmart. It further instructed that any and all signs of worker discontent be reported to supervisors immediately.
Prohibition
-
The chief of operations at the United States Drug Enforcement Agency said only last week that increased efforts as of late to legalize marijuana across the country is scaring his fellow officials at the DEA. Others, however, have a much different take.
-
So, the state of Ohio conducted a little experiment Thursday: Can you execute someone using just two drugs?
And the result? Why, yes you can. But it wasn’t quick, and it may not have been painless.
First, a little background.
The executed man, Dennis McGuire, was convicted in 1994 of raping and murdering Joy Stewart, 22, who was eight months’ pregnant. And he eventually confessed to the crime. So there’s no doubting his guilt.
Bahrain and Turkey
-
Out of the 745 “sporadic protests” recorded by the Liberties and Human Rights Department in Al Wefaq Society (Bahrain’s major opposition party), more than a half were suppressed by security forces, according to the organization’s report released Thursday.
Crackdowns on protests were accompanied by arrests, with 183 rally participants ending up behind bars, including 31 children.
-
A Turkish police officer who sprayed tear gas in the face of a woman wearing a red dress at an anti-government protest faces prosecution and a possible jail term, a legal source has said.
-
The one person and movement that continues to baffle the U.S. government is a powerful Turkish Muslim cleric who is a threat to the current Turkish government — from his 26-acre retreat in Pennsylvania, WikiLeaks recently revealed.
WikiLeaks
-
Recently, Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, and Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer/blogger/journalist who broke the Snowden NSA story discussed opinions on the ethics and methods of journalism.
-
The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) have voted overwhelmingly to present the 2014 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence to Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA