03.19.14
Posted in Site News at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy
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Appearing remotely at the Ted 2014 conference in Vancouver, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden publicly criticized Amazon for leaking info like a sieve.
Snowden has publicly challenged the policies of major tech companies before, most notably during his live video appearance at the South by South West conference. This is, however, the first time the former NSA contractor has singled out Amazon, according to numerous conference attendees and a branch of TedX.
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Whistleblower Edward Snowden has appeared as a surprise guest at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver.
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“Is it really terrorism that we’re stopping? I say no,” Snowden said. “The bottom line is that terrorism [...] has always been a cover for actions. Terrorism evokes an emotional response.”
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Several Australian law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) have submitted proposals asking the country’s senate for more surveillance power, and state police have even asked that the government move to log its citizens’ Web browsing history.
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You may not find it difficult to identify a face in side-by-side photos but for computers, this has not proven to be a simple task so far. Now Facebook has come up with new software called DeepFace, which can verify whether two unfamiliar photos of faces show the same person. With 97.25 percent accuracy, the software comes pretty close to replicating human abilities.
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A young anti-racism protester abandoned her campaigning work because she felt intimidated by a covert police officer who tried to persuade her to spy on her political colleagues, she has said.
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The latest scoop from Barton Gellman, reporting for the Washington Post on documents Ed Snowden leaked, highlights an NSA program known as MYSTIC, with some snazzy clipart… and the ability to retrieve all recordings of phone calls in certain (non-US) countries going back at least 30 days.
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The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.
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Admission that DoD office doesn’t have investigations open into the controversial surveillance comes as new report reveals NSA can harvest every call made in unnamed foreign country
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The Guardian’s revelations about the scale of surveillance on American citizens by the National Security Agency has been recognised with a top US journalism award.
The Scripps Howard Foundation announced that the Guardian’s reporting on revelations contained in documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden received the Roy W Howard award for public service reporting.
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The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.
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Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants knew of the existence of the Internet surveillance program PRISM, they just didn’t know it was called that, according to the NSA’s top lawyer.
Rajesh De, the spy agency’s general counsel, said that the companies knew that the NSA was collecting data from them. This revelation comes after months of repeated — and very similar — denials by the tech companies.
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The National Security Agency has many secrets, but here’s a new one: the agency is refusing to say how much water it’s pumping into the brand new data center it operates in Bluffdale, Utah. According to the NSA, its water usage is a matter of national security.
The agency made the argument in a letter sent to officials in Utah, who are considering whether or not to release the data to the Salt Lake Tribune. Back in May, Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle asked for local records relating to the data center, but when he got his files a few months later, the water usage data was redacted.
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Asked to debate whether Edward Snowden is “a patriot or a traitor” during an event at the UCLA School of Law, Bruce Fein, the attorney representing all of us in a class-action suit against the NSA, remarked on the spirit of the Fourth Amendment.
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The proliferation of digital and wireless devices has boosted the amount of information that can be gathered on individuals, Page said.
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U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden scorched senior CIA and NSA officials, the secret doings inside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and a controversial section of the USA Patriot ACT on Tuesday night during a lecture in downtown Portland.
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Today, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer will appear before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as its members question government officials, privacy advocates, law professors, and policy experts about the government’s surveillance programs operating under the FISA Amendments Act (“FAA”), also known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The board — known as the “PCLOB” — is holding its third workshop since last June’s initial revelations about NSA surveillance. In December, the PCLOB released a meticulous and devastating report about the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, concluding that the program violates the plain terms of Section 215.
Interventions and Ukraine
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There is no sign of any referendum on self-determination for the people of Chechnya and Dagestan.
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As the US and the European Union impose sanctions on 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine for helping the people of Crimea to make a democratic choice to become a part of the Russian Federation, one specific question arises – where were all the sanctions when the West was carrying out genuinely illegal wars and interventions that resulted in destruction and thousands of innocent civilians being killed?
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At the tactical level, US policy has devolved to “regime change.” At the strategic level, US policy is simply incoherent, if not nihilistic; swapping corrupt oligarchs for neo-fascists or religious zealots. The logic for supporting recent coups have little to do with common sense — or democracy. And with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now the Ukraine, language needs to be coined to avoid words like coup.
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Sooner or later, leaders in nations cleverly slandered by a monopolized media and brutally attacked by USA covert violence and murderous interventions will defeat this evil by quoting to the world the outraged words of famous Americans who bravely condemned their nation’s many atrocities – the most recent three of whom were shot to death.
Drones
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Last month I noted that we’re in the midst of the longest pause in drone strikes in Pakistan since the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. The pause corresponds with the Pakistani government’s halting efforts to hold peace talks with the Taliban, but also reported discussions within the U.S. government about whether to kill a U.S. citizen accused of collaborating with al-Qaida in the country.
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When the documentary ended, to our surprise, Johnson himself came out to talk to us. After an intense discussion about the ethics and efficacy of drone warfare, he invited us for a follow-up meeting once he was confirmed at the DHS.
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On March 14 the U.N. Human Rights Committee meeting in Geneva began a two-day examination of the U.S. human rights record, its first since 2006. The Committee is charged with upholding the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. treaty that the U.S. ratified in 1992. At this meeting the U.S. came under sharp criticism for its counter-terrorism tactics of using unmanned drones to kill al-Qaida suspects, its transfer of suspects to other countries that practice torture, and its failure to prosecute any of the officials responsible.
The U.S. rejected this criticism, however, stating its belief that the rights treaty “imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.” “The United States continues to believe that its interpretation—that the covenant applies only to individuals both within its territory and within its jurisdiction—is the most consistent with the covenant’s language and negotiating history.”
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Pakistan is trying to push a resolution through the United Nations Human Rights Council that would trigger greater scrutiny of whether U.S. drone strikes violate international human rights law. Washington, though, doesn’t want to talk about it.
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The almost weekly US anti -terror attacks in Yemen and Pakistan rarely make American newspapers’ headlines. But when there are claims that innocent civilians have died in a drone strike mistake it creates news around the world. In one of those deadly drone attacks in Yemen on a convoy of 11 trucks carrying 60 men to a wedding, between 12 and 17 people were killed in four vehicles and many others wounded turning the wedding procession into a slaughter.
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As LaRouche Democrat and U.S. Senate candidate Kesha Rogers of Texas calls for the impeachment of Democratic President Barack Obama, she lists among her reasons the “assassination” of U.S. citizens.
Rogers says on her campaign website that Obama violated the Fifth Amendment “with the avowed assassination of at least four American citizens, Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Samir Khan, and Jude Mohammed, without benefit of due process of law. Indeed, the death warrants against these individuals were effectively signed in secret, in a committee which is overseen directly by the president.”
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A new United Nations report has called for independent probes of a series of drone attacks that have killed civilians around the world. Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, identified 30 drone strikes – most of them by the U.S. – in which civilians were killed, badly injured or threatened. They include a U.S. drone strike on a wedding party in Yemen that killed as many as 12 civilians in December. While drone strikes in Pakistan appear to have declined, strikes in Yemen increased and civilian casualties tripled in Afghanistan last year.
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DeLappe is hoping not only to memorialize those killed by American drones, but also to bring attention to America’s drone policies.
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Military
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Jacobus claims that members of the military are not disproportionately from poor backgrounds, and indeed some studies seem to back him up. And, indeed, most members of the military, when asked if they joined to “serve their country” answer yes. But three-quarters also say they joined for education benefits, which makes one wonder what the impact on recruitment would be if the United States made education free or affordable the way other nations do. And, if that happened, what would be the further effect on susceptibility to Pentagon propaganda of a populace with a higher education level?
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The less expensive option is using drones for close air support. The cost per flight hour of a Predator drone is just $3,769. However, as Cockburn’s piece illustrates, drone technology and cameras just aren’t there yet.
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This decontextualized rendering of violence in Iraq as a sort of atmospheric condition of the country is, sadly, typical of much of the reporting in Iraq today. It not only fails to explain political divisions and struggles in Iraq in a meaningful way for US readers. It also fails to explain how this violence is a direct consequence of the US invasion and occupation, blaming the victim for the violence that is our sour bequest to them.
CIA
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According to a report from Al Jazeera America , the Senate investigation into Bush-era tactics after 9/11 found that the CIA used interrogation techniques not authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice against one or more “high-value” detainees. The report follows Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s Senate floor speech calling out the CIA’s “intimidation” techniques against members of her committee.
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The FBI is evaluating separate criminal referrals sent to the Justice Department by the CIA in its dispute with Senate investigators over access to documents about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices, officials familiar with the matter said.
The CIA and one of its two main congressional overseers, the Senate Intelligence Committee, have traded accusations that each inappropriately intruded into computer systems containing highly classified data about the Bush-era practices, which human rights activists have described as torture.
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The Justice Department has not decided whether to formally investigate the conduct of CIA officers or Senate staffers in a high-profile dispute that has emerged from a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of now-banned CIA interrogation practices, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday.
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So the CIA officer is suspended for being a bad boss. But he was not censured for his role in the killer drone program. However, there is poetic justice that his identity was blown because of his involvement in this CIA assassination program.
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The Obama administration itself — the supposed “most transparent administration in history” — is one of the worst offenders. As Mike covered earlier, administration-directed agencies have abused these exemptions hundreds of thousands of times in the last five years. Even when the agencies have been “responsive,” they’ve still been mostly unresponsive. The FBI’s documents on warrantless GPS tracking were handed to the ACLU with 111 pages redacted entirely.
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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul believes Americans should be afraid of an intelligence community he believes to be unapologetically “drunk with power.”
Civil Rights
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Weev Appeal Andrew Auernheimer Appeal Identity Theft AT&T Ipad Hacker Technology News Cybersecurity Weev Auernheimer Weev Andrew Weev Auernheimer Hacker Ipad Hack Andrew Weev Auernheimer Goatse Security Security Researchers Andrew Auernheimer Technology News
Censorship
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Intellectual Monopoly at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Freedom revolutionises not only software
Summary: How the “Revolution OS” (GNU/Linux) and Free software in general help change perceptions around copyrights
LAST NIGHT when watching “Revolution OS” (again) I was reminded of the connection between software freedom and copyrights, more so than patents. In fact, the movie hardly mentions patents at all. This movie, which is in principle copyrighted and is not free to watch, remains on Google’s YouTube. There was no takedown request on the face of it — probably a conscious decision in fact from the makers of a movie that’s centred around Richard Stallman and the FSF’s role, with big mentions (but not too big) of Linux. If it wasn’t immediately available on YouTube, my wife and I would not have watched it. This is one of those cases where copyright maximalism proves to be counter-productive. Permissive copyright policy leads to free publicity and it helps reaching those who have pricing and availability issues (official link for ordering the DVD). The Internet has changed many things, so laws need to adapt accordingly — according to people’s needs that is.
“Public domain means any use allowed,” says iophk about [1], “even distasteful or commercial ones.” What we increasingly find is that copyright law changes, and it typically changes to benefit corporations (very rich people), not 99% or more of the world’s population. This trend ought to change and it all starts with education because there is plenty of indoctrination out there, even in state-funded schools. At Apple, shows a new article [2], the idea that “copying is theft” gets explicitly promoted. This is wrong. And since Apple has been “shamelessly copying” many other companies, according to Steve Jobs himself, that may simply imply that Apple itself if a “thief”, based on Apple’s own standards. If lies are manufactured and promoted as “Truth”, then justice will never triumph.
Right now there is a struggle between politicians who serve corporations’ interests in copyrights (and parrot propaganda [3]) and those who are doing the opposite [4] (yes, they exist, but they are a minority in politics). Earlier this month we saw several stories about censorship using “copyrights” [5,6], where the claims of copyrights themselves were bogus (fraudulent piggybacking on DMCA). This in itself is a breach of human rights and free speech. It’s a serious case demonstrating how broken today’s copyright laws are, especially Hollywood export like the DMCA.
Last week Red Hat dedicated at least 2 articles to permissive licensing that challenge copyrights [7,8]. OpenSource.com itself has just embraced the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. That’s fantastic. It wasn’t really surprising, however, because wherever Free software goes there tends to be an atmosphere of sharing and collaboration. The licences on text tend to be liberal and minimally restrictive (usually just attribution is needed).
This leads us to the final case of point. Last week we mentioned a new application called “Popcorn Time”. It is basically an application for streaming videos over torrent. Nice idea; friendly to networks (reduces loads on backbones), privacy-preserving, robust, and decentralised. What’s not to like?
What’s not to like? It’s competition for the copyright cartel/monopoly.
Not too shockingly, the developers abandoned the project just days later [9] (reasons not known), but it soon got embraced by other developers [10], only to be portrayed as “Netflix for piracy” by corporate British press the following day [11]. Remember that here in Britain ISPs are now being pushed to block (censor) almost everything which even challenges the status quo on copyrights. Even new sites like TorrentFreak get censored by some ISPs like Sky.
What we really need right now is a challenge to the stigma that torrents are all about copyright infringement, that FOSS is facilitating copyright infringement, and generally that decentralised communication, which makes surveillance difficult for the likes of NSA and GCHQ, is somehow for “terrorists” or “paedophiles”, as the copyright cartel wants people to believe.
After the events surrounding Popcorn Time we should become better aware that copyright law — not just patent law — remains a serious threat to software freedom. We gave other examples of this before.
According to OpenSource.com, “vague patents” are now under threat again because the SCOTUS is taking another look at them. To quote: “You’ve probably realized this by now, but the Supreme Court is having a very busy term when it comes to patent cases. In Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments, Inc.—scheduled for oral argument on April 28—the Court will consider whether to hold vague patents to a more exacting standard.” There are other such ongoing cases at the SCOTUS, but when will copyright law, including failures such as the DMCA (widely abused), be challenged at this high level?
Intellectual Monopoly as a whole (“Revolution OS” sparingly uses the term “Intellectual Property”) is a real problem; it is all about protectionism and it retards society. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Sweden has invoked a previously-unknown “Perpetual Copyright” clause against carmaker Mercedes-Benz, who recited a public-domain work by the poet Boye in a recent ad. The legal threat was brought by the Swedish Academy, which is tasked with overseeing the clause. This has severe chilling effect on culture even 70 years past an artists’ death.
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In a detailed interview with the Sunday Times, he said, “Copying is theft … what’s copied isn’t just a design, it’s thousands and thousands of hours of struggle. It’s only when you’ve achieved what you set out to do that you can say, ‘This was worth pursuing.’ It takes years of investment, years of pain.” The sharp views on copying followed when he was indirectly asked about its competitor (read: Samsung) mimicking the work of his team.
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Last year Finland wrote history after it became the first country to vote on a “fairer” copyright law, crowd-sourced by the public. Now that the vote is near, several lawmakers have warned against the disastrous effects of the proposal, by parroting a memo handed to them by the copyright lobby.
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If it wasn’t for the Chilling Effects DMCA clearing house the actions of those abusing the DMCA would go largely unreported. Still, the Copyright Alliance doesn’t like the site, this week describing the information resource as “repugnant” to the DMCA. Unsurprisingly, Chilling Effects sees things differently.
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My friend Mary, a folk singer, stopped by to visit spontaneously this evening. “What are you up to?” she inquired.
“I’m recording a music video for a new folk song,” I explained. “The Firefox Phone was announced last week, so I need to compose a song about it.”
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Opensource.com is now using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license as our preferred license for all original content. You are still responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site.
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Hollywood won. The open source project called Popcorn Time is dead after just four days. It’s not really surprising.
“Popcorn Time is shutting down today. Not because we ran out of energy, commitment, focus or allies. But because we need to move on with our lives,” reads the website and a post on Medium.
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YTS developer Jduncanator told TorrentFreak that they are in a better position from a copyright standpoint because it’s built on their API. “It’s as if we have built another interface to our website. We are no worse off managing the project than we would be just supplying the movies. It’s our vision at YTS that we see through projects like these and that just because they create a little stir in the public, it doesn’t mean they are shut down.”
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Popcorn Time’s closure lasted just two days, with the site allowing users to watch movies free online being picked up by other developers.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Open Source”
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Earlier this year, Qualcomm wowed technology industry executives and analysts with a tour of its smart connected home at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The tour demonstrated how the Linux-based home automation platform AllJoyn connects all of the various in-home devices from appliances and lighting to TVs and talking teddy bears.
“As they walked through the home, you could see the executives truly understand the power of various devices across brands and verticals and visualize the potential for collaboration,” says Liat Ben-Zur, senior director at Qualcomm Connected Experiences and chairperson of the AllSeen Alliance, in the interview below.
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Have you ever watched a TED talk and thought, “That should be a company!” Well, that’s happened a few times, I’m sure, and one of them is right here in Silicon Valley. Years ago, wordsmith Erin McKean delivered a TED talk on her vision around the lexicography and meaning of words. This particular talk struck a chord with an investor named Roger McNamee, who in turn encouraged the team to build a company around this. Hence, Reverb Technologies was born.
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The patent system. Online privacy law. Bitcoin regulations. Net neutrality rules. In the coming years, policy makers may have as much influence on technology as the world’s hackers do — if not more. So it should come as little surprise that a hacker is running for Congress.
Twenty-eight-year-old software developer David Cole spent over two years working for the White House as the deputy director of new media, where he helped build the White House website, and now, he wants to make the switch from crafting code for the government to crafting policy. He’s seeking the Democratic nomination for his home district in New Jersey, which includes Atlantic City. If he wins, he’ll challenge the incumbent Republican, Frank LoBiondo, who has represented the district since 1995 — and is not a hacker.
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Is Linux a success? Certainly. The Apache Web server? You betcha. Firefox, sure. But, what about smaller or newer open source projects? How can you tell if they’re on the right path or if they’re slowly spiraling into failure? This is a subject that was discussed at great length at the recent OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, California.
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It is also the time when skeptics started sharing their doubts on the success of the open source model, stating that the security vulnerabilities that come from community contributions are a barrier for the project’s reliability. Some were and still are even more pessimistic and claim that financial institutions cannot assume the potential risks that come with adopting an open source solution for critical parts of their business.
Beehive
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Open source projects garner the attention of the tech community because the passionate people behind these developments occasionally cause major disruption and create opportunities to change industries, as Android and Linux did.
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Tristan writes, “The Open Source Beehives project is a partnership between the Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona crowd-sourcing a solution to the bee colony collapse issue.
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Neuroscience
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Today’s neuroscientists need expertise in more than just the human brain. They must also be accomplished hardware engineers, capable of building new tools for analyzing the brain and collecting data from it.
Video Editing
Events
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The first enterprise forum about open source ever held in Sri Lanka, ‘Open Source Forum Sri Lanka 2014’ took place at Hotel Galadari, Colombo recently. Participants included top executives and corporate leaders from Sri Lanka’s business community and the Government sector. The objective of the event was to maximise the value of big data, cloud computing, virtualization, content management systems and business intelligence through the adaptation of open source. This is aimed at bringing in affordability, control and openness.
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Do you ever wish the free software was just a little bit better? As a longtime free software advocate, I certainly have had this thought many times. Sometimes nothing can be done because a particular feature is patent-encumbered, but sometimes clear user feedback is all that’s needed. Enter SpinachCon — it’s a hackfest for users. The idea is that sometimes free software “has a little spinach in it’s teeth” and it needs it’s friends to let it know in a friendly way. People try the software, answer a few questions and get a free lunch in return.
Services/Fog Computing
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Last weekend Daniel, Arthur, Morris and me were in Chemnitz where the Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2014 took place. We drove a booth during the two days, the CLT host around 60 boothes of companies and FOSS projects. I like to go to the CLT because it is perfectly organized with great enthusiasm of everybody involved from the organisation team. Food, schedules, the venue, everything is perfect.
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This isn’t too surprising. Ubuntu has made a point of working closely with OpenStack. Although most people think of Ubuntu as just a desktop operating system with designs on becoming a smartphone power, it has also long been a major cloud player.
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For the database piece, Cloudinary is using the open-source MySQL database technology.
“We are very knowledgeable in the NoSQL area but we’ve had a lot of discussion about our database use and for us MySQL is the answer,” Lahan said.
For the image manipulation piece, Cloudinary leverages multiple technologies, including the open-source ImageMafhbj project.
All of Cloudinary’s client integration libraries are open-source and available on the company’s Github site.
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The educational ecosystem for providing training in Linux, OpenStack and other open source software continues to grow. The latest momentum comes from Mirantis, which has announced a new milestone with more than 200 organizations now adopting the company’s training and certification program for OpenStack that launched in late 2013.
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OpenStack, the very hot open source cloud platform, is emerging as a generator of a lot of top tech jobs, and, as we’ve reported, open source skills in general are highly valued in the current job market. In answer to that, a lot of OpenStack certification programs have been on the rise, and Mirantis announced an interesting platform-agnostic program in December of last year. Today, the company has announced that more than 200 companies and organizations around the world have turned to the Mirantis Training and Certification program for OpenStack to train and certify their IT staff as OpenStack cloud operators on multiple platforms.
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OwnCloud, the company behind the open-source ownCloud Community Edition, announced on March 11 what the business claims is the “only fully self-hosted enterprise-ready file sync and share software, ownCloud 6 Enterprise Edition.”
Databases
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When I started teaching PostgreSQL education courses in 2001, PostgreSQL was the ugly one in the data center. Many of the people who were learning how to work with it were doing so grudgingly because of some specific requirement. They had inherited a PostgreSQL database, for example. As a result, many of them tried to learn just enough to do what they needed to do. The other population of students were serious technologists, die-hard open source devotees who wanted to use only open source solutions and were learning PostgreSQL because they needed a relational database for their operations.
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PostgreSQL has picked up a new feature of logical decoding.
This new PostgreSQL database feature adds over ten thousand lines of new code to the open-source server and allows the write-ahead log stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes, per this commit.
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“Development is slower because we do not take shortcuts, but over the years, we have made a name for the [PostgreSQL] database as a product that is reliable and is backed by communities and companies that felt strongly about the value they were providing its users. … We have played the long game in not taking shortcuts and focusing on making the best database possible.”
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Amazon Web Services is a juggernaut in the infrastructure as a service market, but GoGrid, a midsize IaaS competitor that aims to be the cloud for big data, says it wants to offer an alternative to AWS’s platform. And it’s hoping to do so through open source databases.
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Desktop Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (23.59%)
Server Distribution of the Year – Slackware (31.83%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year – Android (59.15%)
Database of the Year – MariaDB (36.41%)
NoSQL Database of the Year – MongoDB (46.15%)
Office Suite of the Year – LibreOffice (85.50%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (63.54%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – KDE (35.77%)
Window Manager of the Year – Openbox (18.88%)
Messaghng Application of the Year – Pidgin (47.83%)
VoIP Application of the Year – Skype (44.95%)
Virtualization Product of the Year – VirtualBox (54.38%)
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The company offers a community edition of VoltDB under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3, but it omits a number of features found in the commercial version.
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The open-source MariaDB database has emerged in recent years to be a real competitor to MySQL from which it was forked. Now at long last there is a generally available version of MariaDB Enterprise edition.
Collaboration
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Zimbra has rolled out a new version of its cloud-friendly groupware collaboration software. Titled Zimbra Community 8.0, the release introduces a free edition of the platform, which the company is offering to businesses and individuals alongside the standard and professional editions it traditionally provided.
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Diaspora really could be the answer. It’s open source, it’s decentralized and it has Aaron Swartz in its DNA. Its security people are answerable only to the community. Because it’s decentralized, there’s a node or “pod” element. Different servers offer users slightly different experiences, sort of like neighborhoods within a city. This is much different from Facebook where everything is the downtown business district.
Content Management
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It’s the age old question when considering a content management system (CMS) for your new or renewed website: Is it best to go with open source or proprietary software? David Hartstein, writing for WiredImpact, suggests that the right answer is pretty obvious. (If you want some basic definitions of the terms “CMS,” “open source,” and “proprietary,” please consult his article directly.)
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Joomla! has been known for Joomla! Platform and Joomla! Content Managment System (CMS). The newest addition to the mix late last year was Joomla! Framework. Many say it’s an exciting project with innovative development, so we interviewed our own Don Gilbert, who has been coordinating the project’s efforts, to find out how it’s going and what’s new with the project.
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Attackers have abused the WordPress pingback feature, which allows sites to cross-reference blog posts, to launch a large-scale, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, according to researchers from Web security firm Sucuri.
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Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is under going a major leadership change this week.
Company founder Matt Mullenweg is stepping up to the role of chief executive officer, replacing Toni Schneider.
Funding
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Bethesda-based Spree, which this week raised a $5 million Series A round led by Thrive Capital, is simultaneously a startup and a popular open-source project. But open-source projects — on their own, at least — don’t pay the bills.
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At first glance, open source and crowdfunding seem an inevitable match. After all, what could be more natural than software that nobody owns being funded by popularity? In theory, crowdfunding should allow developers to concentrate on what interests them, freeing them from the need to make a living or answer to an employer.
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Chances are free and open source projects have made their way into your workflow, your entertainment, your communications. Why not set 2014 off by vowing to give back to those projects which enrich your life?
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News is a bit slow in these last remaining days of what many consider the holiday season, but some headlines stood out today. Our old friend Jack Wallen is back with another top 10 list. iTWire’s David Williams resolves to donate to Linux and Open Source projects this year and opensource.com has suggestions for others way to help out in this new year.
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George Church created the Personal Genome Project, a big plan to sequence more than 100,000 human genomes in the U.S. Now the database he’s been using to store all that information has become the basis for a new startup.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Software Freedom
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Tonight, Dr. Richard Stallman is presenting a talk titled A Free Digital Society. Dr. Stallman will address the many threats to freedom in our digital society. He’ll focus on issues of digital surveillance that undermine the foundations of democracy, including massive surveillance, censorship, digital handcuffs, non-free software that controls users, and the ‘War on Sharing’.
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In September 1983, the GNU Project was born. GNU was to be a new kind of operating system: the first one with an explicit ethical goal.
Perhaps a little background is needed. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Unix was an operating system (OS) that was in common use at the time, and the recursive acronym is a bit of programmers’ humour. The project emerged from the hacker culture at MIT, which had collapsed at the end of the 1970s when a technology company hired all but a few of the programmers.
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Last week, I was writing about MediaGoblin when I was struck by a sudden realization: the project was not about code for its own sake. Instead it was about the sort of vision that seems to be disappearing recently from free and open source software (FOSS).
What makes MediaGoblin stand out is not just the idea of an all-in-one file-sharer, as convenient as that might be. Rather, the code is an explicit critique of centralized web services like Instagram, which require users to communicate through a single web site rather than directly with each other. As events of the past few years have proved, such centralization threatens privacy and makes surveillance all too easy.
FSF Internal
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The Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.
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The theme of “Free Software, Free Society” will be explored at the LibrePlanet 2014 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Stata Center at MIT on March 22 and 23, 2014, by the Free Software Foundation in collaboration with MIT’s Student Information Processing Board.
GNU GPL
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In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Roman Telezhinsky, the lead developer of Valentina, a free software pattern making program, which is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or any later version).
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The Free Software Foundation will be providing a half-day legal seminar titled “GPL Enforcement and Legal Ethics”, taking place on Monday, March 24 at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Anyone can register to attend the seminar, though it is aimed particularly at practicing lawyers and law students. For practicing lawyers in the US, continuing legal education (CLE) credits are expected to be available for many states.
Popular GNU Programs
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The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.
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As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop and Firefox web-browser. Future work planned for this GNU project is Xen PVH support, working x86_64 support, language bindings for translators, read-ahead, HDD/Sound/USB DDE support, and having a full GNU system with Hurd.
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That would be the oddly-named GIMP (acronym for: GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source, high-end image editing and creation alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and its now open-ended, monthly wallet-siphoning distribution mode for tasks like photo retouching, image editing and composition, and image authoring.
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The split was the result of GIMP’s concern over policies at SourceForge, primarily SourceForge’s use of DevShare, an installer for Windows that bundles third party software offers with FOSS downloads. In addition, the GIMP folks had reservations about potentially deceptive “download here” buttons on ads being served by the likes of Google’s AdSense.
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Out this Sunday is a major update to GNU ease.js, which relicenses this JavaScript framework to the GPLv3 and has several other changes. GNU ease.js helps the Free Software Foundation’s case for the “importance of free JavaScript” on the web.
Compilers
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For any students looking to get involved with this year’s Google Summer of Code, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has several interesting projects that are looking to be tackled.
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While GCC 4.9 is running behind schedule compared to where GCC 4.8 was at this time last year, open-source developers banding together still might get out the GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 release in early April with its many new compiler features.
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Samsung is still working towards bringing OpenACC support to GCC. We’ve seen Samsung developers working on OpenACC for GCC over the past several months — along with other OpenACC initiatives out of CodeSourcery, etc — and now there’s some new OpenACC GCC Fortran patches.
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This testing is quite simple and straightforward as it’s intended to just complement the AMD A10-7850K compiler benchmarks of the previous days. The processor being used this time around was the Intel Core i5 4670 that is a true quad-core CPU with a 3.4GHz base frequency and 3.8GHz Turbo Frequency. Being a Haswell CPU, it supports SSE 4.2, AVX 2.0, and all of the other latest-generation Intel extensions.
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Renato Golin of Linaro volleyed an interesting message to the GCC mailing list on Friday about “LLVM collaboration?” While controversial, he suggested LLVM and GCC developers begin collaborating due to an “unnecessary fence” between the competing compilers and decisions that need to be shared. He acknowledges while there’s licensing differences (GPL vs. UIUC / BSD) there’s differences between the compilers and their stacks that really shouldn’t exist as it hinders the users and developers.
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Most people know I’m a fan of RMS’ writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS’ post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It’s clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.
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Intel’s Beignet open-source OpenCL implementation for their Linux graphics driver now switches to LLVM/Clang 3.5 as its preferred version.
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Hardware
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TAZ 3, the fifth model in the LulzBot line of 3D printers by Aleph Objects, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.
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Lenovo’s X230 is an “ultraportable business laptop” with 12.5-inch display, 2.96lb weight, and other modern features while boasting an Intel Core i5 series processor.
Privacy
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As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux 3.14
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Linux 3.13 was released on Sunday January 19th 2014. Please read What is in Linux 3.13. 3.14-rc5 was released on March 2 2014. Based on the rc release progress so far, it is looking very likely that the Linux 3.14 release will be out before the end of March 2014.
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Now, things might change, and maybe next week ends up being another ugly week, but with some luck that won’t happen and this is the last rc.
Go out and test. It all looks good..
Linus
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In talking about the Linux 3.14 kernel on pretty much a daily basis now for the past few months and already having run dozens of benchmarks from Linux 3.14 in its Git state, here’s a recap of some of the most exciting work for this new kernel:
Linux 3.15
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David Herrmann sent in a patch on early Sunday (along with some other patches to be covered in another article) for enabling support for DRM render-nodes by default with the next Linux kernel cycle.
Community/Events
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The Linux kernel developer panel at Collaboration Summit in Napa, Calif. next week is our first opportunity this year to hear directly from Linux kernel developers about which issues and features are top-of-mind for the kernel community now and in the year ahead. Kernel developers Jens Axboe, Matthew Garrett, Mel Gorman, Greg Koah-Hartman, and Dave Chinner will take the stage for a technical discussion moderated by Jon Corbet. Here, the panelists have answered a few of Corbet’s preliminary questions to get the conversation started.
Graphics Drivers/Cards
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With the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” right around the corner we have out today some new benchmarks of various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards when testing them with the latest Linux GPU drivers on Ubuntu 14.04 at 4K (3840 x 2160).
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AMD has released a new Windows and Linux Catalyst proprietary graphics driver. The Catalyst 14.3 Beta for Linux doesn’t advertise any new features, but it comes with some bug-fixes.
Weston
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The full-screen shell protocol for Wayland’s Weston compositor will allow for features like splash screens and terminal emulators as simple full-screen clients, but the code is still being revised ahead of its hopeful merger.
X.Org
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Eric Anholt’s big Intel patch-set to the GLAMOR acceleration architecture has now been merged for the mainline X.Org Server.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNOME
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One of the nice things about popovers is that they are just normal containers – you can put any widget into them, and keyboard navigation and input works like everywhere else. This is a marked contrast to menus, which are very specialized. Attempts to put entries, sliders or buttons into menus usually end badly.
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As a quick update to the HiDPI support on top of yesterday’s article about GNOME Shell 3.12 getting last minute HiDPI improvements, more work has landed today for supporting high-resolution Retina displays within this next GNOME desktop environment update.
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Here comes the 3.11.92 release candidate, last stop before 3.12. Tarballs are expected on Monday, this is the last chance to get your fixes in, we will then enter the hard code freeze, and you will need a big bunch of approvals to get changes in. Let’s repeat, tarballs are due on 2014-03-17 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.11.92 rc release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.11.92.
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GNOME has been moving away from hierarchical menus for applications. It is problematic for many reasons. One problem is the need for a global, hierarchical classification (‘categories’) – the world is just not that simple, and applications don’t always fit into these predefined categories. Another problem is that menus don’t really scale beyond a single level of submenus or beyond more than 10-15 items per menu. Not to mention that menus are hard to use on touch devices.
KDE
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Last week at CeBIT, KDE won the Linux New Media Readers Choice Award 2014 (link to German language Linux Magazine) for the best Linux Desktop Environment. 46% of the readers of Linux New Media’s global publications voted for KDE. Runner-ups were GNOME with 18% and XFCE with 13%. Other awards went to CyanogenMod, Raspberry Pi, Bitcoin, Puppet, Tor and Git.
Cornelius Schumacher, President of KDE e.V. received the award on behalf of the KDE Community from Mathias Huber, Editor at Linux Magazine. The video of the award ceremony will be available on the Linux Magazine web site later.
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The KDE community today released the second beta of Applications and Development Platform 4.13. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. We kindly request your assistance with finding and fixing issues.
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In the Plasma team, we’re working frantically towards the next release of the Plasma workspaces, code-named “Plasma Next”. With the architectural work well in place, we’ve been filling in missing bits and pieces in the past months, and are now really close to the intended feature set for the first stable release. A good time to give you an impression of what it’s looking like right now. Keep in mind that we’re talking Alpha software here, and that we still have almost three months to iron out problems. I’m sure you’ll be able to observe something broken, but also something new and shiny.
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Some of your existing data will need to be migrated from the current Nepomuk backend to the new ‘Baloo’ backend. Running the nepomukbaloomigrator should take care of that. The old Nepomuk support is considered “legacy” (but it is still provided). The programs that have not yet been ported to the new architecture have Nepomuk integration disabled. One significant regression is file-activity linking, which will not work until KDE Applications and Platform 4.14. If you rely on this feature, we recommend not upgrading at this time. For the final release, distributions might choose to optionally have the old search (Nepomuk) available.
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The initial release of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next will likely not have perfected Wayland support but many components should be usable within Weston and other improvements — including KWin as its own Wayland compositor — will come with time.
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Here at MyKolab.com we are often surprised when companies flaunt having turned to green energy to power their services. We always considered this the lowest bar of sustainability everyone should meet. After all, this is the 21st century and we have known for decades the damages and risks of fossil and nuclear energy. That’s why for all of MyKolab.com’s history, every server and all of Kolab Systems have run on green energy. Our energy mix is mostly hydroelectric, some solar, and a little bit of wind, due to the geographic conditions in Switzerland.
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Kate (the KDE Advanced Text Editor) is the well know, powerful text editor that ships by default in KDE, and has plenty of powerful features for both simple text editing as well as programmers. Some of the well-known functions that it offers include indentation, syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages, block-selection mode or check-spelling.
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KWin5 will feature a new configuration module to control Desktop effects. KWin5 will be a part of the upcoming Plasma Next Workspace. The control module is rewritten with QtQuick controls.The focus of the control module will be on Desktop Effects.
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Enlightenment
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Most folks who have been around Linux and/or open source software for awhile are aware of what GTK and QT are – tool kits for building applications. Something that not as many may be aware of is that there is another open source tool kit out there – the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. These serve as the building blocks not only for the Enlightenment desktop, but also for a growing number of applications.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
SDN
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SDN company Midokura this week said it will support for Cumulus Networks’ Linux network operating system in its network virtualization software.
The combination will enable customers to manage workloads on virtual and non-virtualized infrastructure using Midokura’s MidoNet product. MidoNet is a distributed network virtualization system that is designed to allow service providers and enterprises to build flexible and easier-to-manage virtual networks.
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Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) represent two of the more dramatic oncoming technology shifts in networking. Both will significantly alter network designs, deployments, operations, and future networking and computing systems. They also will determine supplier and operator success (or failure) over the next five to 10 years.
Servers
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T&G, whose majority stakeholder is German agricultural giant BayWa, has a network of over 41,000 square metres of storage facilities, a global distribution network covering sales, marketing, and logistics, and a passionate, experienced team, who are intent on ensuring that the produce that customers receive, are as fresh as the day it was harvested.
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Multiple CIOs have told me they planned to modernise all of their databases, but — constrained by cost and time — only managed to tackle the 20% that yielded 50% of the value. The remaining 80% remains a major drag to IT; we’re kicking the can down the road.
UNIX platforms such as Solaris on SPARC and AIX on Power store data in a different format than Linux on x86 (big-endian versus little-endian).
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Once upon a time, IT organizations tended to treat systems based on different OSes as completely different stacks of compute resources that pretty much ran in isolation from one another. But as pressure to become more cost efficient has mounted alongside the rise of application workloads that span multiple systems, the need for storage systems that can play well across both Linux and Windows systems has become more acute.
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CloudLinux is a great technology implemented on all our shared and premium shared servers, and is available for our managed dedicated servers. It essentially protects your site from other websites on your server. It means fewer servers go down and you’ll have a faster, more consistent website experience. We spoke to the man behind the technology, founder Igor Seletskiy.
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With Quick Growth Comes Demand for Skills
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2014 Linux Jobs Report cites ‘unlimited career potential’ for Linux pros
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Desktop
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I’m sure there will be objections from people who want to define “the year of the Linux desktop” differently. There will be those fans of GNU/Linux distributions like Ubuntu who will object that the Linux Desktop has not arrived until we’re all running KDE and Gnome. I fear those folks have a while to wait. Others will object because there are still so many copies of Windows and new PCs are still shipping with Windows. That’s a fair point, but I believe even those users are actually Linux Desktop users. As I argued last year, Linux has already won on the Windows desktop.
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Eurocom sent out a news release that beginning today they will be offering choices of operating systems in their line of GPU-upgradeable, high-performance, professional laptops. Besides the high-end laptop line-up, they will also be offering Linux options for their lightweight notebooks.
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If your office runs 24/7, you’ll have to do the migration in stages. You may have to migrate servers one at a time, and migrate departments group by group. So, some work gets paused, but most of your business will run during the entire migration process.
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Linux has a reputation for being designed for geeks only, but that’s old history. Many modern Linux distributions exceed the user-friendliness of XP, and they’re free to download. If you don’t like the feel of one, you can easily switch to another. What’s more, each Linux distribution comes loaded with useful software such as productivity suites, modern browsers like Chrome or Firefox, and photo and music management apps.
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“This is a subject very near and dear to me,” Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone told Linux Girl over a fresh Tequila Tux down at the blogosphere’s Punchy Penguin Saloon.
Though Stone spent several years teaching “how to” computer courses for faculty and staff at a local university back in the 90s, “all those years barely prepared me for my greatest challenge: my own mother,” he said.
To wit: After buying his parents a Windows 95 computer way back when, “I sat her down and showed her how to use the basic hardware,” he explained. Yet “even after hours a day over the course of weeks, the computer was too much for her. Windows just had too many options, and she kept getting herself into places she couldn’t get out of.
“I literally spent years looking for environments that would make her comfortable,” Stone went on. “She went through the Windows OSes (95, 98, ME and finally XP) and some Linuxes — Red Hat first and then a couple variations of Ubuntu. She always found ways to get herself into trouble.”
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I’ve been a computer user since around 1991, when we got our first PC, a Tandy from Radio Shack (almost $1,000), which came with Windows 3.1. Since then I’ve used each and every version of that operating system (OS), and still do. But at home and for personal use, it’s Linux for me. Why? Well that’s a question with many answers.
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The biggest driving factor for software developers to work together with open source is cost. It is much cheaper for them to cooperate through open source than it is to remain isolated with proprietary software, asserted Inktank VP of Product Management Neil Levine. “You can no longer rely on one particular vendor to provide everything you need with regard to technology.”
After the Desktop
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QOOQ is a durable tablet designed for use in then kitchen. It’s even got its very own Linux-based OS…
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There was a time, back before smartphones and tablets, when most of us used, at most, only three operating systems.
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For months now David Herrmann has been working on a new project known as OpenWFD for open-source WiFi displays on Linux. OpenWFD is an open-source implementation of the WiFi Display Standard / Miracast. That work is now showing success and as part of that Herrmann has just announced Miraclecast as a component to providing open-source Miracast/WFD support on the Linux desktop.
Chromebook
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Chromebooks are making a big statement in the laptop world: NPD Group Inc. reported that Chromebook sales accounted for 21 percent of all notebook sales last year. For devices that are functionally little different from tablets — designed for basic tasks like checking email and web browsing — they’re growing fast. Even as the tablet market continues to grow, capturing 22 percent of the entire personal computing market just last year, Chromebooks are giving people an alternative to rectangular touch screens.
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