06.05.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux currently has probably the largest selection of desktop environment options that any OS has ever had in their entire life. ZorinOS is yet another derivative of the popular Ubuntu Distro and is currently in Version 7. It is based on Ubuntu 13.04 thus offering the latest of what Ubuntu has to offer to the Linux community. But the look and feel is classic Windows 7.
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Linux is not an OS, but it is the kernel, GNU Linux is the OS
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Desktop
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It’s pretty clear they have given up trying to sell “8″ on the low end. There’s a lot of */Linux on the low-end to the middle, I would say.
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Server
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This ease of use was especially appreciated when the Banner student system was being deployed. No real standardised configuration and provisioning methodology exists for Oracle Real application Clusters (RaC) nodes. “as a team, we had to come up with a design that we could repeat for all RaC clusters within the infrastructure,” said Swaminathan.
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Kernel Space
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PulseAudio is a sound server that’s become quite popular in Linux distributions and has, in fact, replaced most other sound systems in recent years. It was a rough transition there for a while, but most of all that is over now. And today, PulseAudio 4.0 was released, a version which will soon begin to appear on our desktops. Arun Raghavan, PulseAudio developer and Collabora employee, in his announcement said, “this release brings a bunch of Bluetooth stability updates, better low latency handling, performance improvements, and a whole lot more.”
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For potential merging in an upcoming Linux kernel release are new patches that allow storing small files as inline data for F2FS.
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Graphics Stack
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Wayland’s Weston system compositor has been hooked up to systemd so it can be used for client notification support.
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Benchmarks
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This past weekend I shared the first experiences of running Intel’s new Haswell CPU on Linux. While Intel Haswell is a beast and brings many new features and innovations to the new Core CPUs succeeding Ivy Bridge, there were a few shortcomings with the initial Linux support. It still appears that the Core i7 4770K is still being finicky at times for both the processor and graphics, but in this article are the first benchmarks. Up today are benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 4770K when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.10 kernel.
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Applications
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Docker is the most interesting container project I’ve looked at, but unfortunately it also seems to be the least stable. In the few hours I was testing it, I managed to generate three kernel panics. One which was easily reproducible by running a docker command as root, and two which popped up at seemingly random times when interacting with the docker command line tools. I do not know if it is due to Docker, or the underlying lxc tools, but something has gone seriously wrong. To be fair, it could have something to do with running in VMware too, but that seems less likely.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Last last week was Humble Indie Bundle 8 with an already lengthy list of titles, but four new games have now been added. The original HIB #8 games included in Humble Indie Bundle 8 are Dear Esther, Capsized, Awesomenauts, Thomas Was Alone, and Little Inferno. If paying more than the floating average price, Hotline Miami and Proteus are also included.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’ve been watching a great set of threads roll by in my email related to a re-boot to the human interface guidelines used by the KDE community. The blog posts by Thomas and Björn explaining what they are up to are great reading and it gives those of us who are developers a really good reminder about user interface fit and finish. ( .. and therefore the above ironic memegif 
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Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These updates continue the series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.4 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running the 4.10 release series. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Today’s update is going to be fairly brief. GNOME and I have come to an accord and now we’re mostly getting out of each other’s way. After my initial impressions, I adapted the way that I do a few things and I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of the system.
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The developers of Snowlinux have announced the latest release the Ubuntu-based version of their Linux distribution. Snowlinux 4 “Frosty” is based on Ubuntu 13.04 and is available with both MATE and Cinnamon desktops. The latest release of the distribution introduces Cinnamon 1.8, which debuted in the recently released Linux Mint 15, with features such as a new screen locking application and a redesigned control centre. Users who prefer the MATE environment can take advantage of the latest version of this desktop, MATE 1.6 from April.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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The Arch Linux developers are warning users of problems they might encounter when updating their systems. The Arch maintainers are staging a merge of the distribution’s /bin, /sbin and /lib directories into the /usr directory that has already been undertaken in distributions such as Mageia and Fedora; openSUSE also moved its directories in a similar way with version 12.2 of its distribution last year. In contrast with these distributions, Arch operates on a rolling release system, which means that there is no “full release” in which the developers can make these changes. The developers therefore have to make the change in a regular update.
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Red Hat Family
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Other equities research analysts have also recently issued reports about the stock. Analysts at TheStreet reiterated a “buy” rating on shares of Red Hat in a research note to investors on Tuesday, May 28th. Separately, analysts at BMO Capital Markets downgraded shares of Red Hat from an “outperform” rating to a “market perform” rating in a research note to investors on Monday, May 20th. They now have a $54.00 price target on the stock, up previously from $52.57. They noted that the move was a valuation call.
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Fedora
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The development team behind the GNOME Boxes project announced a few days ago the second unstable release of the upcoming GNOME Boxes 3.10 application, a GNOME utility that allows users to manage remote or virtual systems.
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Debian Family
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When it comes to setup web servers, or Internet servers (web, email and ftp) there is usually two GNU/Linux distributions that comes to mind, Debian and CentOS. Some people are starting to use Ubuntu server, but let’s focus on CentOS and Debian, as Ubuntu is a Debian derivative.
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Installing Debian may be a trivial task for someone.
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Derivatives
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It has been a while since my last English Debian Edu and Skolelinux interview last November. But the developers and translators are still pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators in the project, Cédric Boutillier.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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And here we go again. Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was released almost a month ago and unlike previous releases, this has been more of a silent affair. Mainstream blogs and news websites didn’t cover much about the release. Ubuntu 13.04 is mostly an incrementally updated release and that could be the reason. But from a user-perspective, “Raring Ringtail” has a number of very important qualities, significant performance improvement being one of them. Leaving all that aside for now, lets discuss what all can be done to further enhance Ubuntu 13.04 for every-day use. 30 things to do after installing Ubuntu 13.04 raring Ringtail.
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In a move that shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given the close collaboration between Canonical and Inktank—not to mention Mark Shuttleworth personally—around the open source Ceph storage system for Big Data and the cloud, the two companies on Monday announced a deal to provide full support for Ceph on Ubuntu. Here are the details, and what they mean for the channel.
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We brought readers news about the Ubuntu operating system for mobiles back in January, developed by Canonical. Ubuntu for phones prompted the possibility of a Ubuntu superphone, and we heard that new Ubuntu smartphones could become available by October this year. Now we have a look at one such possible device with the Ubuntu Eon Superphone envisioned, and we reckon that if this phone ever came to fruition it could win fans.
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This is a story of how a botched Windows 8 upgrade on an older Windows 7 notebook led me to try and discover the free Ubuntu OS.
Like many users faced with an opportunity to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 with an early adopter discount, I jumped at the opportunity to move to the latest and greatest OS.
My mistake was not backing up my Windows 7 system, which proved to be fatal when various errors led to a crashed system sometime after the OS was upgraded to Windows 8.
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Ubuntu is a free operating system available for desktops, notebooks, phones, tablets, servers and even TVs. For the individual, it offers a simple, intuitive interface that can be customised on many levels. For the business user, Ubuntu offers access to legacy applications, remote management, and, with a full office suite, it eliminates the need for costly software licences. For a support fee, businesses can manage thousands of devices. Furthermore, it’s certified for hardware including Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba and HP, and for software including Centrify, Likewise and LibreOffice, among others.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is a GNU/Linux distribution to which I have witnessed a great deal of respect. It is a solid operating system that comes with a desktop environment of its own (though it is based on Gnome Shell & its applications) and when it comes to usability & control, it really puts the users at the top.
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Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced last evening, June 3, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of his popular Snowlinux 4 operating system.
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The most ambitious Linux Mint yet is one of the best desktop distros ever made
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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The latest statistics on Android usage show that Google is steadily moving devices to Android “Jelly Bean” 4.1 and 4.2. 33% of Android devices are now running the most recent version of the mobile operating system with 29% running 4.1 and 4% running 4.2. Adding in Android 4.0, “Ice Cream Sandwich”, and its 25.6% share means that Android 4.x is now running on 58.6% of devices.
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Android is a lot more free than iOS, but there are limits. We need to break through those.
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It’s that time of year. The weather is warming, summer is upon us, the school year is at its end—and many folks are celebrating graduation from their university. If you’re one of those people, congratulations! Now that you’ve completed your studies, you’re probably looking forward to the next big challenge: choosing a career path.
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New York City Comptroller John Liu is about to do something we need to see more often in government. This week, his office is open sourcing the code behind Checkbook NYC, the citywide financial transparency site—but the open-sourcing itself is not what I’m referring to. After all, lots of governments open source code these days.
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Events
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The organisers of FOSDEM, Europe’s biggest open source and free software oriented conference, have announced the dates for the next instalment of the event. FOSDEM 2014 will take place over the weekend of 1 and 2 February 2014 at the Université Libre in Brussels. The organisers say that attendees “may also safely assume that there will be a beer event on Friday 31 January.”
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Web Browsers
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The Epiphany development team announced a few days ago that the unstable version 3.9.2 of the Epiphany web browser for the GNOME desktop environment is available for testing.
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Mozilla
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The Chinese electronics manufacturer plans multiple devices, including tablets and phones, as part of a strategy to supply software and services along with hardware.
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The Firefox OS and browser are creating “an ecosystem where you truly can have anybody and everybody chip in,” said analyst Jeff Orr. The value of HTML5 devices brought out by organizations such as the Mozilla Foundation and the Linux Foundation is “not to overthrow Apple or Google; it’s in promoting interface standards that the larger companies may be holding back.”
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esterday, The Foxconn Technology Group announced at a press event in Taipei a wide-ranging partnership with Mozilla to develop devices based on the Firefox OS open platform, which has until now been primarily emphasized for use on phones (as shown here). We had reported on the likely of this partnership last week, and it does indeed look like Foxconn will produce tablets based on Firefox OS, although there aren’t many specifics about them. What’s really notable is that this partnership is one that could carry Mozilla forward into the next chapter of its evolution.
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A Firefox redesign project is currently underway at Mozilla, titled Australis. Firefox release channels should see the results of this new and exciting project starting with Nightly once it hits version 25 shortly. Then the usual release channels will be employed, but the stable channel will be held off on until the Mozilla team knows that everything is working smoothly – the stable channel probably won’t see Australis before October. A version of Firefox can be installed from Mozilla’s UX branch, available for testing in its current condition, but there is a risk of crashing and hard-drive depletion, according to TechCrunch.
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SaaS/Big Data
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(Sacramento, CA, USA: June 4, 2013) The Linux Professional Institute, the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced a partnership initiative with Big Data Cloud (http://www.bigdatacloud.com/) — a not-for-profit organization evangelizing the new technology movement regarding Big Data and the Cloud. The partnership initiative will promote events and other educational resources for LPI alumni on topics related to Big Data and the Cloud. Big Data Cloud hosts annual events and monthly meetups and has over 2700+ members. It is founded and operated by Third Eye Consulting Services & Solutions LLC (http://thirdeyecss.com/).
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Java virtualization and cloud specialists Waratek announced today the release of the Java Virtualization Interface (JVI) empowering developers to deliver customized Java virtualization solutions for their applications.
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There are a lot of different metrics to validate the health of an open source project. In my opinion, one of the most critical is the number of different code authors.
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On June 4th, the 4.1.0 release of the Apache CloudStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration platform arrived. This is the first major CloudStack release since its March 20th graduation from the Apache Incubator.
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With API discovery service and a new event framework the latest version of Apache CloudStack, version 4.1, is expanding its capabilities in managing and coordinating cloud infrastructures. The IaaS platform has, in its first release since the project graduated from the Apache Incubator in March, added a service which allows end points in the infrastructure to describe the APIs they support and their associated details. According to the documentation there are over 300 APIs in CloudStack and the discovery service is used by the CLI to generate up a DSL on demand for controlling nodes. Future plans include using it to orchestrate API deployment on the cloud.
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Databases
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There may be no part of the channel in which open source is better positioned to dominate than Big Data. Not only are open source solutions such as Hadoop and Ceph enjoying huge popularity for building Big Data infrastructure, but open source relational database technologies are also proliferating among enterprises looking to cut software costs. Survey results released Tuesday by EnterpriseDB on PostgreSQL adoption show just how much that’s the case.
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Patrik Sallner, CEO of SkySQL, has told The H that Michael “Monty” Widenius’s “Business Source” is not part of SkySQL’s plans for MariaDB. “It is by no means something that has been or will be applied to MariaDB, especially not the server”, Sallner told The H. SkySQL and Widenius’s Monty Program recently merged.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The LibreOffice 4.1 Beta has been available for one week now ahead of the official release coming by the end of July. For those curious about the features of this next major OpenOffice.org-fork successor, there are early release notes on the DocumentFoundation.org Wiki. To point out at this time is also a new blog post by Charles-H. Schulz, a LibreOffice developer, about the upcoming features.
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CMS
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A couple of years back we ran a series of articles on plugins we considered useful for running websites on the free and open source WordPress platform. Times change. Some of those plugins we still use. Some are no longer being developed. Others, we’ve had problems with and replaced. Along the way, we found some other plugins that offer new features as well. Anyway, we thought it was time to update you–especially those of you who might be contemplating cranking-up your first WordPress site.
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Project Releases
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Symfony 2.3.0 is the first long-term-support (LTS) release of the PHP framework for web applications since the introduction of a formal release process. Version 2.3 will be maintained for the next three years through to May 2016, after which a new LTS version will be released. There will also be standard releases with new features every six months and these will be maintained for eight months.
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Openness/Sharing
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Given the massive universe of both biological and human physiological data that needs to be processed as part of cancer research, this is a surely unquestionable issue that needs to be addressed.
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Open Tech Forever wants to take the idea of freedom of information into the physical realm, by creating a real factory to create open source items like kilns and wheelchairs.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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For those who missed it, the widely-used SDL library among commercial and open-source games is finally up to its version 2.0 release candidate. SDL2 has long been in development and as of last week the release is quite near.
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Standards/Consortia
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Although Google continues to support a variety of open projects and people, Glyn Moody notes that, following recent changes to Google Code and Google Talk, concern is growing that something fundamental has changed.
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Instead, Sandberg focused on Facebook’s growing user base and engagement, pointing to Facebook’s growth from 845 million to 1.1 billion users in the last year and the fact that 60% of those users return to Facebook each day as opposed to 58% one year ago.
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This post isn’t exactly about math, but it is technical in nature, so I figured I’d get it out there. As part of my regular data-backup process, I routinely download my information archives from whatever online presences I can, such as Facebook (which I’ve been on since early 2010), Google Blogger (this blog you’re reading right now), etc. Obviously on Facebook the thing that I’m most interested in is what I actually write, which are usually called “wall posts” (as opposed to photos or media, which I retain locally anyway). Once in a while I’ve found it very useful to pull up the downloaded posts file and search it for some particular bit of info, contact, or date. What I seem to have discovered is that sometime in the last few months, Facebook silently and completely removed our ability to download that “wall posts” information.
This first dawned on me the other day when I used the Facebook “Download Info” process (Gear icon > Account Settings > Download a copy of your Facebook data), and tried to search for a particular post. Well, the normal file was just entirely missing. You can see the difference below in the downloaded archive from March 2013 versus the download from June 2013. The file “wall.html” — which actually contains all of my posts and is by far the largest data file in the old archive — is missing from the new archive.
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Science
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The Japanese central government has ordered Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) to freeze the contaminated soil that surrounds the damaged No.1 nuclear power station in Fukushima in an attempt to stop groundwater entering the reactor. The nuclear plant was damaged in the earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and has since suffered problems with groundwater becoming contaminated with radioactive substances when it enters the damaged reactor.
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Security
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Back in 2012, after my article on Linux ELF Virus was published in Linux Journal, I was curious to come up with a trigger point for this virus. I mean what would compel a Linux user to execute it for the very first time? I thought about it many times but could not come up with something in a working state.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The British and French governments have said that medical samples smuggled out of Syria have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, and added that they have shown the evidence to a UN investigation.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve been examining the evidence of chemical weapon use in Syria, and one key piece of evidence in at least two of the attacks, Saraqeb, Idlib, and Sheikh Maghsoud, Aleppo, has been the presence of what seems to be a unknown type of gas grenade at both attacks, later spotted with a Jabhat al-Nusra member
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Over the past five days Turkey’s government has unleashed thousands of canisters, cartridges and helicopter drums of tear gas onto its people. This has resulted in hundreds of tear gas-related injuries. Protesters have been repeatedly shot directly and intentionally in the face with canisters, and in at least one instance this has caused permanent damage to the eye. On May 31, two journalists were hospitalized for head wounds from tear gas projectiles. Tear gas has also been fired into enclosed locations, a practice designed to torture and able to kill.
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Thousands of protesters have controlled Istanbul’s main square once more after two days of violent clashes with rampaging riot police, as Turkey’s prime minister vowed to press on with the controversial redevelopment that provoked the clashes.
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Turkey’s prime minister on Sunday rejected claims that he is a “dictator,” dismissing protesters as an extremist fringe, even as thousands returned to the landmark Istanbul square that has become the site of the fiercest anti-government outburst in years.
Over the past three days, protesters around the country have unleashed pent-up resentment against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who after 10 years in office many Turks see as an uncompromising figure with undue influence in every part of life.
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New evidence shows that the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda may have been murdered by a CIA double agent, according to the Associated Press. The American agent was working for the CIA in Chile when he was recruited by DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s secret police.
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Unofficial Intelligence Community Views on Assassinations, James Angleton’s ‘Monster Plot,’ Agent Protection, and More
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AN academic study claims to have proof prisoners were flown to destinations, via a number of Scottish airports, before allegedly being tortured.
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An draft internal Pentagon report suggests that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers revealed to filmmakers the name of a special operations planner who participated in the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden even though the head of the Special Operations Command, Adm. Eric Olson, had specifically asked that the man’s name and the fact of his participation in the raid not be revealed.
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The Obama administration may be shifting control of the country’s drone program from the Central Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon, but robots can still find jobs at Langley — as writers, apparently.
The CIA’s venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unknown amount in a company called Narrative Science, which codes software capable of turning massive data sets into easy-to-read written prose, according to All Things D.
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Waliur Rehman was one of the few TTP leaders who supported the idea of negotiating with Islamabad to bring an end to the civil-war like situation in the country. And he is not the only supporter of the dialogue process with the Pakistan army whom Washington has assassinated with drone strikes. Many of his like-minded contemporaries were killed in the same manner during the last nine years, shortly after they had struck some kind of peace deal with Pakistan’s army and government.
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Footage apparently recorded by a German drone shows what looks like a terrifying near-collision between the unmanned craft and an Afghan passenger plane.
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In the letter, Mr. Holder said that the U.S. “specifically targeted” Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born preacher, during strikes in Yemen and listed the three other Americans who he said had been accidentally killed in the strikes: Samir Khan, Jude Kenan Mohammed and Abderrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the targeted man’s son.
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Obama and the US government have consistently downplayed the use of drones and the havoc they cause, but in truth their use has grown exponentially during his presidency. It is yet to be seen if Obama’s most recent speech is any more genuine.
Afghanistan is undoubtedly the epicentre of unmanned drone attacks, with 506 incidents in 2012 and no way to verify the number of civilian casualties accurately.
In Pakistan there have been 369 since 2004, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 2,541 and 3,540 people have been killed, and that between 411 and 884 of those have been civilians.
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In sum, after years of ideologically driven effort, Mr. Obama has failed to produce a practical — or politically viable — alternative to the Bush paradigm of the “global war on terrorism.” Instead, the tribunal system goes unused, indefinite detention continues, and suspected terrorists — even American ones — are killed without due process, or even the benefits of interrogation, enhanced or otherwise. Verbal acrobatics aside, suspending the use of the term hasn’t brought an end to the reality.
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Six peace activists, representing the group Disarm the Drones, have become the first in Britain to be arrested and charged for anti-drones related offences.
The nonviolent peace activists managed to breach security at Britain’s top security drone control base in Lincoln.
The six, who are Christian peace campaigners, planted a peace garden in RAF Waddington yesterday morning (3 June 2013).
They also displayed images of the victims of drone attacks and may have located the precise place where UK attacks are programmed.
The campaigners were detained for 24 hours overnight at Lincoln police station and held incommunicado for eight hours. Some of their homes have been raided by the police, with computers and other personal effects seized.
There was an attempt to charge the anti-drone activists with Conspiracy and Intent to Trespass and Cause Criminal Damage. Due to a failure of process, the charge of Criminal Damage was levied instead.
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On Tuesday May 14th, the US military succeeded in launching a drone from an aircraft carrier off the coast of Virginia, marking a historical first. The aircraft, an “X-47B” produced by Northrop Grumman, is considered to be the first unmanned aircraft that is able to be launched from a ship. The prototype had a successful flight of around 65 minutes, and ultimately landed at a base in Maryland. This event represents another step towards the mass production of drones, which will considerably boost US military capabilities.
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Could a president order drone strikes against journalists? I’m not worried. No, really. Not much.
The broad sweep of our government’s counterterrorism policy on targeted killings by unmanned drones, coupled with the Justice Department’s new aggressiveness against media leaks, makes me wonder whether we journalists should watch our step.
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THIS MORNING six peace activists, representing “Disarm the Drones” will become the first activists in Britain to be arrested and charged for anti-drones related offences, they were kept over-night at Lincoln police station after they planted a peace garden in RAF Waddington yesterday morning, they’ve been charged with Conspiracy and Intent to Trespass and Cause Criminal Damage.
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Pick an X below and imagine a person. Then kill him. It is your right.
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Cablegate
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So “trial of bin Laden accomplice begins” is really how they’re framing it?
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But giving classified information to the public is something that news outlets–including NBC News–routinely do, and each time they do it they too could be accused of “aiding the enemy.” For example, NBC’s Michael Isikoff reported on February 4 that a “confidential memo” produced by the Justice Department held that “the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be ‘senior operational leaders’ of Al-Qaeda or ‘an associated force’–even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.”
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I know that some people have pre-convicted Manning, but the charges here are simply crazy. He’s already pled guilty to certain charges, but this trial focuses on whether or not he was “aiding the enemy,” which would require to show that he did this knowing that it would help Al-Qaida and [classified enemy]. The supposed “proof” of this is going to be the fact that Osama bin Laden apparently had Wikileaks documents in his compound in Pakistan. But that’s ridiculous. Under that theory, anyone reporting information that terrorists found useful would be guilty of violating the Espionage Act and could face the death penalty. As others in the article note, this would create a tremendous chill on investigative reporting.
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About a month ago, Freedom of the Press Foundation launched a campaign to crowd-fund a court stenographer to provide transcripts of the unclassified portions of the Bradley Manning court martial, given that the military refuses to release transcripts of their own. On Thursday, we learned that all three of our media partners – the Guardian, the Verge, and Forbes – were denied the media passes they requested in order to allow court stenographers to accompany their reporters into the media tent. Each organization asked for a press pass for their reporter and a second press pass for a stenographer to accompany their reporter. Each was issued only one press pass.
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There were 109,032 “violent deaths” recorded in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including 66,081 civilians.
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It is an outrage that soldiers who killed innocents remain free but the man who exposed them is accused of ‘aiding the enemy’
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The publisher’s attorney says a sealed indictment is possible, as the government war on leaks drives on
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WIKILEAKS founder, Julian Assange has described the trial of Bradley Manning which began today as “a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience”.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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One-in-four children in Britain, about 3.4 million, is forecast to be in relative poverty by the end of the decade
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Relax: thanks to Goldman Sachs and other ‘donors’, this year’s conference will be cost-neutral for Hertfordshire – despite the construction of the Great Wall of Watford
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During the world’s most secretive gathering the Bilderberg Group is set to discuss topics including cyber warfare, US foreign policy, “developments in the Middle East” and “Africa’s challenges” despite the glaring absence of regional representatives.
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Six are identified as Canadians:
TD Bank CEO Edmund Clark;
Brookfield Asset Management chairman Frank McKenna, a former New Brunswick premier and ambassador to the U.S., who is also deputy chairman at TD Bank Group;
Robert Prichard, the chairman of the Torys law firm;
Indigo Books CEO Heather Reisman;
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall;
Loblaws CEO Galen Weston.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A federal court hearing a challenge to Wisconsin’s Republican-led redistricting sharply criticized the expensive, secretive, and “peculiarly furtive process” employed by the GOP in drawing and defending the maps, but announced a close to “this unfortunate chapter in Wisconsin political history.”
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The official at the center of the IRS mess, Lois Lerner, gave indications months ago that she was refusing to provide meaningful guidance about how to interpret and apply ambiguous rules for nonprofit political activity.
Lerner was the head of the IRS’ division on tax-exempt organizations, and was recently suspended after declining to testify before a House Committee investigation into the IRS singling-out Tea Party groups for scrutiny based only on their names or political views.
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Censorship
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UK Internet provider Sky Broadband has quietly started to restrict access to a wide range of proxy sites through which subscribers could reach The Pirate Bay, Kat.ph, Movie2k and other blocked sites. The new blockades go beyond the initial court orders and appear to adjust automatically to IP-address changes. TorrentFreak talked to several proxy site operators who are determined to bypass the new measures.
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Violence and violent video games still remain connected in the eyes of many despite a lack of supporting evidence. When an act of violence occurs, the more horrific it is, the more certain it is that people will try to connect the two. We’ve seen it happen time and time again.
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A man who murdered an entire family with a tire iron in 2009 in their Beason, Ill. home tried to use video games as part of his defense earlier this week. After one day of deliberations a jury delivered a stinging verdict.
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Privacy
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O2, Vodafone and EE have all replied to their customers to say that they provide analytics on aggregated and anonymised data sets of their customers to third party companies. Their privacy policies have sections to this effect.
Virgin Media say that they don’t sell their customers’ data and their privacy policy says they may pass on aggregate information about their customers’ mobile use to third parties.
EE have told us that all customers have agreed to their Privacy Policy and implied that this counts as customers giving consent. O2 and EE argue in their responses to customer emails that because they are aggregating and anonymising data, the law does not require them to ask customers to opt-in or opt-out.
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A Democratic group is under sharp criticism for controversial online messages about Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife.
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Curtis Morrison, the guy behind the recording of a Mitch McConnell campaign strategy session, has confessed to the deed in a lengthy post at Salon. The wisdom of doing so while the FBI convenes a grand jury on the matter is one thing. Morrison’s somewhat deluded overestimation of his actions is another thing entirely.
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My effort to expose the Senate minority leader’s ugly campaign upended my life. Here’s what happened
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Earlier court order requiring a Wisconsin suspect in underage porn case to decrypt his hard drives for the FBI by the end of the day Tuesday — or face contempt of court — has been lifted.
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They won’t be trained for espionage, but about 20 University of Utah students will learn how to run the National Security Agency’s new data collection center in Bluffdale.
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Nations swiping intellectual property from rival states and corporations are a much greater threat to economies than private cyber-criminals, America’s spymaster reckons.
General Keith Alexander, National Security Agency (NSA) director and commander of US Cyber Command, made his comments during the NATO-organised CyCon conference in Estonia today.
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The source said that Kang also has a long history of aiding in the activities of the security forces in the area, by both reporting on the “anti-socialist” acts of others and seeking out new informants for the NSA.
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Civil Rights
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Despite the astonishing, far-reaching changes that Turkey has undergone in recent years, clouds of anxiety are gathering over the country.
The apprehension has little to do with the economy. The negative energy emanating from Syria has a partial impact. The jitters in public sentiment stem essentially from increasingly pronounced links between politics and religion, interventions in lifestyles and the demands of various social groups going unheeded.
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On Tuesday May 28, 72 Indian nations in the United States and 10 Indian and Hawaiian Native organizations — speaking at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues — jointly proposed action be taken to give indigenous peoples, especially indigenous constitutional and customary governments, a dignified and appropriate status for participating regularly in UN activities. As a problem that has already been studied and examined within the UN system, they noted, “it is time to take action at last so that indigenous peoples do not have to call themselves NGOs or depend upon ad hoc resolutions to be able to participate in UN meetings, processes, and events.”
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Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation – is designed to slow climate change by preventing the destruction of the world’s most vulnerable forests. It is a key part of the UN’s attempts to tackle a warming climate, and failure in Panama will have impacts much further afield.
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Media executives and editors are divided over whether to attend an off-the-record meeting this week with Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss guidelines for dealing with journalists in leak investigations, an issue that’s gotten a lot of attention amid controversies involving the AP and Fox News.
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I had a busy day on Monday, so it took a bit of time for me to finally get around to reading the full Supreme Court ruling in the Maryland v. King case, in which the court ridiculously ruled that law enforcement can take DNA samples from everyone arrested for a “serious” new crime in the hopes that it might help solve old crimes. We’ve discussed this issue in the past, but the reasoning of the majority ruling in the Supreme Court is rather horrifying. It’s interesting to see that the court did not split along its “traditional” lines. Scalia split with Alito, Thomas and Roberts — who often form a single voting block, while Breyer also was on the other side of his more natural allies, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan. Kennedy is the usual “swing” vote, and wrote the decision here, decimating the basics of the 4th amendment. I mean absolutely decimating it.
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Representing The John Birch Society, this reporter spoke during the fourth segment, describing threats to liberty posed by the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the effectiveness of state measures refusing to enforce those provisions inside state borders.
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…NDAA was passed and FBI escalated infiltration of peaceful activists and prosecution of environmentalists under the pretext of terrorism….
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Leaders of conservative groups targeted for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill about the “chilling” demands from the agency as they sought tax exempt status over the last several years.
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Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees are using secret government email accounts to conduct official business, The Associated Press found, a practice that complicates agencies’ legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails under public records requests and congressional inquiries.
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The acting head of the IRS told congressional investigators Monday morning that his agency has “betrayed the trust of the American people.”
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Thousands of people of all ages gathered Wednesday evening in Ugur Mumcu square in Antakya, a picturesque town in the Hatay province of Turkey.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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My speech yesterday where I set out how the EU plans to safeguard the open internet for all.Watch below, orcomment on the text here.
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If you remember, about five years ago, a bunch of astroturfing and front groups for the broadband companies started spreading this myth that the internet was facing a catastrophe known as the the exaflood, in which internet traffic would swamp capacity and the internet would sputter to a crawl. They talked about things like “brown outs” where so much traffic would make the internet difficult to navigate. Of course, it was all FUD and scare tactics to hide the real intent: to allow the telcos to put more tollbooths on the internet, to double charge some popular internet companies, and to generally try to avoid investing in basic infrastructure. Of course, it was easy to debunk those claims, but five years later, Broadband Reports takes a look at some of the latest data to note that the feared exaflood never showed up, and the predictions of clogged pipes never appeared — and the data on internet growth shows little likelihood of that ever happening.
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We live in a nation of wondrous technological advancement, where our average broadband speed and super low prices are the envy of the world, And if Google shows up to throw fiber around, the local citizenry simply shrugs its shoulders in indifference. Life is good… especially if you’re paid to believe it is.
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In an editorial in the Philadelphia inquirer last week, Comcast’s top lobbyist and policy man David Cohen proudly proclaimed that the U.S. is “the leader” globally in broadband.
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According to recent statistics by Google and Cisco, Switzerland has aced the IPv6 adoption charts by leapfrogging Romania, which topped the charts for nearly a year.
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The European Union wants network neutrality enshrined in law, with guaranteed access to the full and open internet in order to ensure future innovation and strengthen democracy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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When the handful of corporations set on owning, controlling and über-profiting from our common seed heritage — Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF and Bayer — began experimenting with their proprietary chemicals and genetically engineered crops in Hawaii in the 1990s, barely a peep was made. Two decades later, we can’t even convince our Hawaii state government to pass a law making these companies release basic information about the pesticides they spray next to primary schools. Children are sent home vomiting and with nose bleeds.
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The fact that the public is still charged fees to access public records already seems rather questionable. After all, the creation of these documents is paid for by taxpayers. Keeping them locked up behind a governmental paywall often seems like double-dipping.
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Trademarks
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We recently wrote about how the band Twisted Sister was acting as a trademark bully and threatening a small coffee shop in Kansas, called Twisted Sisters. As we noted, the coffee shop name had nothing to do with the band, but actually was named after (you guessed it) a pair of sisters who had been called that by their brother decades ago (long before the band existed). The coffee shop had indicated at the time that it was going to change its name, but it looks like it’s now decided to fight back. jupiterkansas lets us know that a lawyer agreed to represent them pro bono and is trying to explain trademark law basics to the band’s lawyer. In the meantime, the coffee shop’s owner sent a friendly letter to the band, saying that the shop’s name has nothing to do with the band and that she really can’t think of a better name, so she’d like to keep it.
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Copyrights
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We’ve pointed out over and over and over again for years that for many people (certainly not all, but enough to make a huge difference) convenience trumps free when it comes to getting content. The latest example of this in action is the fact that way fewer people downloaded the new Arrested Development from unauthorized sources than other similarly hyped TV shows. As you probably know, the new Arrested Development was released via Netflix, rather than TV, and all episodes were immediately available. Unlike other TV shows that are tied to cable and hardly available online at all, Arrested Development was easy to watch online for those who had a Netflix account (which also doesn’t require additional fees to watch the show if you already have a subscription).
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It’s amazing how frequently we still hear from entertainment industry folks or politicians pointing to Hadopi as an example of “success” in a three strikes program. Of course, the reality is that it has been a colossal failure by nearly every measure possible. The industry has had to seriously massage the statistics, but they can’t deny the simple fact that it hasn’t helped drive sales, which really seems like the key metric. In fact, the latest reports show that music sales — including digital sales — have continued to drop. Even more telling: the decline in sales in France has outpaced the decline elsewhere. In other words, nothing about Hadopi worked.
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If you thought Graham Syfert was done with taking on John Steele and Prenda law with the closing of the Sunlust case in Florida, you’d be wrong. Today he’s filed an incredible filing not just hitting back at Prenda in another case, First Time Videos vs. Paul Oppold, and asking for attorney’s fees, but also including an affidavit from an actual expert (i.e., not a Prenda-style “forensic” expert) named Delvan Neville, who lays out in astounding detail how it’s almost certain that John Steele himself uploaded the various videos to BitTorrent that were then used to sue various defendants for either “hacking” or copyright infringement. Oh, and in doing so, Steele appears to have made some choices that are pretty damning, including suggesting that he set up the file to effectively broadcast that it was free for the taking. In other words, there’s an incredibly strong argument that the release of the file on BitTorrent was very authorized.
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As the MPAA and other copyright maximalist organizations continue to try to block the WIPO copyright treaty for the blind, which will make it easier for blind people around the globe to be able to access creative works, I was touched by this incredible video from Ron McCallum, the former dean at the University of Sydney Law School, where he is now an Emeritus Professor. McCallum has been blind since birth, and in the video he talks about how technology changed his life and allowed him to do so much — and how important the treaty in question is, to allow that same revolution to help others, especially in less developed countries.
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So it appears that late last week, the MPAA realized that their whole stance on trying to block the approval of an important copyright treaty for helping the visually impaired and the blind gain more access to works was a PR nightmare, and decided to put out a joint statement with the National Federation for the Blind. Apparently, Chris Dodd’s initial weak attempt at claiming that it loved helping the blind, despite working hard to stop the treaty, wasn’t enough. Of course, the new “joint statement” is really more of the same when you peel back the basics.
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Here’s one that touches on both patents and copyrights. Last year, we wrote about how some academic journals were ridiculously claiming that law firms, who made copies of journal articles to submit to the US Patent and Trademark Office to show examples of prior art, were infringing on their copyrights. Yes, they were arguing that you couldn’t use their journals as examples of prior art without paying them for the privilege. Thankfully, the USPTO stepped up and issued a memo explaining why they believed such usage was clearly protected as fair use. Still, the American Institute of Physics and Blackwell Publishing decided to sue a law firm, Winstead PC, and patent filers over the matter. The USPTO then stepped in as an “intervening defendant.” Over the course of the case, the publishers finally admitted that articles submitted with patent filings themselves probably weren’t infringing and dropped that claim. However, they still argued that other copies made “during the process of evaluating and
selecting” material to be submitted to the USPTO were infringing (in other words, the clients and the lawyers sharing copies of the articles back and forth — and later copies of the articles associated with patent files).
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The EU trade Commissioner, Karel De Gucht, was a driving force behind ACTA, and apparently he’s learned nothing about why ACTA failed so spectacularly in Europe. MEP Christian Engstrom pointed out to De Gucht that a big part of the reason why ACTA failed was the lack of transparency, and asked him to be more transparent with TAFTA (the Trans Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, but which many are calling TTIP — for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership).
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The new TTIP agreement between the EU and the US will be negotiated in the same secrecy as the ACTA agreement was, EU trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht told the European Parliament on Wednesday evening.
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City of London Police inform TorrentFreak that they have begun targeting sites that provide access to unauthorized content for “criminal gain.” The initiative is part of a collaboration with Hollywood studios represented by FACT and the major recording labels of the BPI. In letters being sent out now, police accuse site operators of committing offenses under the Serious Crime Act. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau further warns that the crimes carry a jail sentence of 10 years.
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Send this to a friend
06.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 2:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
ChromeOS with Ubuntu 12.04 in a chroot environment using crouton. This is pretty recent. Before that I was using stock Ubuntu.
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Linux is at a major tipping point, yet it faces being undermined from within. Jack Wallen calls for the Linux community to end the fighting between the Linux camps.
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This is, again, another rant along the lines of “fragmentation is killing FLOSS…”.
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No degree? No problem. Free software companies value aptitude and community involvement, and apprenticeships offer a leg up
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Desktop
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Further, it shows M$ has slipped to 64% share and “8″ is less popular than Vista… The site is not GNU/Linux-oriented but concentrates on market-share stuff with only a mention of Linux in the forums a few times a year, so it’s at least as reliable as NetApplications or StatCounter.
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Using a second monitor has been shown to increase productivity by 42% on average. Linux dual monitor support, however, is heavily fragmented. Although support is available, it differs greatly depending on the desktop environment being used.
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Server
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Well, that’s really not the question. Most of you probably don’t have a web server. If you do, you very well might be using something that’s not on our list. There are some great distros, known to make dependable and trouble-free servers, that aren’t listed here. The most glaring omission is probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), considered by some to be the Cadillac of server distros.
The list of GNU/Linux operating systems we’ve supplied in our poll is one we’ve compiled from looking at the choices of operating systems being offered by many hosting companies in virtual private servers (VPS) packages and on dedicated servers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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We’re back this Monday with our second profile (see the first one with Greg KH here) in the latest edition of 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks. This series focuses on the workspaces used by Linux kernel developers and aims to take us a little closer into the ways that some of the world’s best software developers do their work.
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The fourth release candidate to the Linux 3.10 kernel is now available.
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Qualcomm developers have posted their new mac80211 driver for the Qualcomm Atheros QCA98xx 802.11ac wireless adapters for use with the Linux kernel.
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PulseAudio 4.0 is now available and with it comes many changes to this commonly used but sometimes controversial audio server.
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Graphics Stack
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While there’s OpenCL drivers available for Linux, on Ubuntu there is no OpenCL driver shipped by default and the proprietary driver implementations aren’t always great.
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With new patches, multi-seat support for Wayland with the Weston compositor is beginning to work well. For showing off Wayland/Weston multi-seat handling, a video has been made.
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Benchmarks
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The news might be heavily slanted towards Haswell right now but for Linux users improvements to Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge GPU drivers are still a major focus. As there have been updates to the drivers as well as to Ubuntu, Phoronix felt it was time to revisit the performance metrics of the graphics on a Core i3 3217U. While they did see improvements when you compare it to previous driver versions it seems that there is still some work to do as the performance still lags behind the Win7 driver.
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Applications
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Email handling seem to continue to be a sore spot in the Linux software realm. Thunderbird and Kmail are two very popular applications, but both present with issues. Claws and Sylpheed had their own problems. Geary recently made an appearance, but is still far from production-ready. What’s a Linux user to do? Well, if your name is Steve Kemp, you just write your own.
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Hazel is a fantastic application that automates the task of managing files on a Mac. After moving to Linux, I nearly forgot about this essential task, and was stuck filing documents on my own. Luckily, a great new project named Maid by Benjamin Oakes is stepping up to fit the final piece of Linux desktop automation puzzle. Maid bills itself as “Hazel for hackers”, and while it is not nearly as refined as Hazel, if don’t mind learning a little Ruby, Maid can significantly increase your productivity.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Door Kickers is an innovative Real-Time Tactics game that puts you in charge of a SWAT team.
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The team of open-source developers and artists behind the Unvanquished game have released their sixteenth alpha with numerous improvements.
Unvanquished Alpha 16, serving as the project’s monthly development release for the month of June, brings:
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Drifter is an open-world sandbox space trading game with a procedurally-generated galaxy 100,000 light years across made up of tens of thousands of star systems to explore and features an original soundtrack by composer Danny Baranowsky.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The announcement of the students accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) 2013 opens a new chapter in KDE contribution. KDE has participated in GSoC since its first season in 2005. Every year is special and exciting for both the students and the KDE Community.
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The list of accepted students for this year’s Google Summer of Code has been recently made public. Very fortunately, I’m among the 1192 students who will spend 3 months coding for various opensource projects.
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I hope that the majority of KDE contributors have at least heard of them, but they have not received much attention lately: The KDE Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
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My laptop is now dedicated to the new plasma developments, while my main system remains on the 4.x branch.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The Freedreno Gallium3D graphics driver that’s a reverse-engineered incarnation of the Qualcomm Snapdragon driver, has support for the A320 graphics core coming along quite well. The A320 found in the Nexus 4 is now running the Freedreno 3D driver and can even handle bearing the load of the GNOME Shell desktop.
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There never will be a year when Linux conquers the desktop, because desktop computers are going to merge into tablet-style touch-driven devices and disappear. But desktop Linux was getting close, until Microsoft derailed it a few years back.
The GNOME project’s recent release, GNOME 3.8, served to remind me of the significance of Microsoft’s actions.
That’s because GNOME 3. 8 introduces a new GNOME desktop, something it’s calling Classic mode and which the project describes as “the traditional desktop experience”.
GNOME Classic mode brings to six the total number of GNOME desktops and takes the Linux and open-source community down a path of fragmentation they seem only too willing to venture down.
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Chakra 2013.05 is the third edition of the Arch-Linux-based distribution to come with KDE 4.10 – the latest version uses KDE 4.10.3 – and makes use of more applications built for the Qt-based desktop environment. For example, the default package manager is now Oktopi, a graphical frontend for pacman that has only recently made its way into the stable package repositories. The Akabei tool, a similar tool that the Chakra developers have been working on, is still unfinished. The new release also includes kio-mtp, which ensures that file manager Dolphin is able to access mobile devices that use the MTP protocol.
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Chakra 2013.05 is the third edition of the independently developed distribution to come with KDE 4.10 – the latest version uses KDE 4.10.3 – and makes use of more applications built for the Qt-based desktop environment. For example, the default package manager is now Oktopi, a graphical frontend for pacman that has only recently made its way into the stable package repositories. The Akabei tool, a similar tool that the Chakra developers have been working on, is still unfinished. The new release also includes kio-mtp, which ensures that file manager Dolphin is able to access mobile devices that use the MTP protocol.
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New Releases
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We are happy to announce our stable release for June 2013 – Manjaro 0.8.6 – a set of installation medias for Manjaro Linux. With this update we present to you more than 25 mirrors hosting our packages all over the world. To get the fastest mirror nearest to your current location we introduced pacman-mirrors, a tool adjusting your mirrorlist. You can rank your list by connection speed or by country. A random option is also available.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I officially became a packer on Mageia, Mandriva-based Linux distro. The date marks the creation of an account with access permission to repository and build system for me.
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Arch Family
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As expected, earlier today (June 1, 2013), the Arch Linux developers unleashed the monthly dual CD ISO image of the Arch Linux operating system for new installations.
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Allan McRae announced a few days ago that the Arch developers are preparing the merge of /lib, /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin and /usr/lib, in order to unify all binaries and libraries into a single directory.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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After spending a peaceful week with Debian’s latest Stable release I decided it was time to experiment with something a little less predictable, something a little more cutting edge. In short, I was looking for a distribution which would offer the opposite experience from Debian’s dependable, conservative approach. As it happens, the opposite of Debian Stable is Debian Unstable. One of the Debian project’s repositories is called “sid” and this repository provides a collection of new and ever changing software. The aptosid project tracks this sid repository and spins it into a cutting-edge distribution. The aptosid distribution is available in a variety of editions including KDE Full, KDE Lite (for people who wish to balance performance with features) and there is an Xfce spin. Each of these editions is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. For my experiment I decided to try aptosid’s Xfce edition, the download for which is 530MB in size.
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Dreamhost is one of the most popular web hosting companies and it has long been a strong support of Debian Linux.
Dreamhost isn’t making the move to Wheezy which was recently released. Instead Dreamhost is moving to Ubuntu – apparently because they see it as being more stable.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This project is awesome because we are all part of the same community and are all working on the same thing together. This project is important because it’s free and open, and it is reaching out to all kinds of people. This project is revolutionary because it is taking risks, redefining concepts, and developing more than just a product.
This project has a name: Ubuntu. And, therein lies the problem.
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Because Canonical was blamed for not bringing new features to Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, they work hard in order not to get the same treatment with Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander.
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Canonical isn’t the first Linux player to provide full support for the Ceph distributed storage system, but with Ubuntu’s popularity in the OpenStack world, the addition of this subscriber option is timely.
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Here’s an update on the Mir display server changes and the adjoining next-generation Unity 8 user-interface that were made to end out May.
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Since my current case mods are nearly finished (i still need a pump and the final photoshoot), i’m going to try and make a case mod based on Ubuntu. I have no money however, so i’ll either be re-using parts or needing sponsorship. I’ve sent out a few emails but i’ve not got any good responses. If anyone is willing to sponsor the build, let me know.
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One feature that didn’t land in Ubuntu 13.04 was the new Smart Scopes functionality in the Ubuntu dash. This feature greatly widens the scope (pun intended) of the dash returning results for a wide range of online services as well as local results. The whole system was re-architected to be more efficient, and designed to scale across our multi-device strategy.
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Canonical, through Daniel Holbach, had the pleasure of announcing on the last day of May that the community.ubuntu.com website is now online.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and Inktank, the company behind the open source distributed storage technology Ceph, have announced a collaboration which will result in an integrated and supported implementation of Ceph for OpenStack on Ubuntu. Ceph offers object and block storage for cloud platforms and has been available on Ubuntu for some time. The new arrangement means that customers of Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage Cloud will also get Inktank-backed support for Ceph.
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Flavours and Variants
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WattOS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and an ideal operating system for outdated computers.
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Last year, I installed and wrote a review for Linux Mint 13 Maya, the MATE version. It had worked really well on my laptop so even when Linux Mint 14 “Nadia” was released, I still kept using Maya. But after a year, I think its the time for an upgrade, and on the same occasion that Linux Mint 15 Olivia was recently out, I decided to download and install the new Linux Mint 15, MATE version.
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After many years of working away from my bedroom desk I was invited to a party at the opening of a new hotdesking space. Tech Cube is an attempt to create an entrepreneurial office space in Edinburgh. As I heard it the old Royal Dick (no sniggering at the back) vet school got sold to a nice guy with deep pockets who is turning it into an arts complex but the ugly wee tower block stuck on the side was not very artistic so get turned into this little project.
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Outside of education, the most popular use of a Raspberry Pi is to play multimedia. For starters, you can use it as a nifty little HTPC with the XBMC media centre. In this tutorial, we’ll transform the Raspberry Pi into the ultimate media streaming box.
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Intel has released new information on its more power-efficient next generation “Haswell” family of Core processors. Quad-core Core i7 Haswell CPUs will offer 15W TDP power consumption, down from 20W on similar Ivy Bridge processors, resulting in up to 9.1 hours of HD playback, while future tablet-ready dual-core parts could lower power consumption by up to 50 percent, to 7W TDP.
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Enea has integrated Yocto technology into its third generation of Linux to provide a comprehensive cross-development tool chain and runtime environment with guaranteed performance and quality of service (QoS) for communications systems.
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Inside Secure announced that its Linux- and Android-ready SafeZone Encryption Toolkit has achieved U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) FIPS 140-2 certification. SafeZone, which is integrated within Inside Secure’s MatrixDAR and QuickSec VPN Client for Android products, now secures data in transit over SSL/DTLSand IPSEC, as well as “data at rest” on Android devices.
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ARM announced a 28nm-fabricated Cortex-A12 processor design claimed to offer 40 percent higher performance than the Cortex-A9, while drawing the same power. The Cortex-A12 is paired with a power-efficient Mali-T622 GPU and Mali-V500 video coprocessor, and supports hybrid Big.Little SoC configurations in partnership with the Cortex-A7.
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Taiwan External Trade Council (TAITRA) and the International Forum Design Hannover (iF) have awarded the APC Paper the Design and Innovation Award at Computex 2013, which kicks off tomorrow and ends June 8.
APC Paper is one of two Neo-ITX form-factor computers announced by VIA Technologies in January. The other is the APC Rock, which is a plain motherboard (it has no built-in case).
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Phones
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Android
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Twitter has announced the availability of Vine app for Android devices. The app was already available for iOS devices. Android Vine users will get what iOS users don’t yet have – zoom. Twitters also teased that there may be some features which will be available exclusively to Android only.
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Insyde Software announced a development platform for deploying Android on Intel x86 reference platforms. “Software Platform for Android” offers production-ready software components built around Insyde’s UEFI Secure Boot technology and “Humanos” version of Android, and provides a variety of Android tools, as well as customization and testing services.
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Several Android tablets running on Intel Clover Trail+ Atom processors broke cover at Computex Taiwan. Intel’s dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom Z5260 is fueling a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet, as well as Asus’s 6-inch Fonepad Note and 10-inch MemoPad FHD10 tablets, while Asus also unveiled a hybrid 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio, combining an Android slate based on a 2GHz dual-core Atom Z2580 with a keyboard dock running Windows 8 on an Intel Haswell processor.
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A senior ARM executive claims that ARM is generations ahead of Intel, according to reports.
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We already know what ARM has planned for 2014′s high-end smartphones, but what about cheaper handsets? The company is preparing new mid-range silicon that it believes can offer increased performance in phones which could cost as little as $200 off-contract. The new Cortex-A12 core will offer 40 percent more performance as the existing Cortex-A9 which appears in chips like today’s Tegra 3, though it won’t be quite up to the standard set by the Cortex-A15 you’ll find in devices that have Samsung’s Exynos 5250 or Nvidia’s Tegra 4, to say nothing of next year’s Cortex-A57 based chips.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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ASUS have taken their love for Android one step ahead. As part of their products unveiling at Computex 2013, Taipei, ASUS announced a bold new member of their Transformer family, the Transformer Book Trio. This new device looks much like its not-so-distant cousin, the Transformer Book, but comes with a big differentiating edge, apart from some better hardware specs.
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Samsung, the Android market leader, has added two new tablets to its Android family of devices. The 8-inch tablet is powered by 1.5 GHz Dual Core processor and features a 8-inch WXGA TFT(1280 x 800, 189PPI) display. With 5Mpx main and 1.3 front facing camera, the tablet is complimenting its 7-inch devices. The tablet runs Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) with TouchWhiz on top of it. The tablet is clearly targeted at average tablet users who want it mainly for ‘reading.
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Tablets are just about ideal for school in terms of mobility, compact size and ease of use. One downside is loss/theft/breakage but that is offset by the lower cost of a tablet. Compare a ~$200 tablet with a notebook of ~$300 or ATX setup at ~$400. Some schools solve this problem by giving ownership of the tablets to students. Over the career of a student, two or three tablets is just a small part of the cost of education. Mobility may be just a matter of clearing desks/tables from time to time or students lugging tablets around instead of books. It’s all good. Typing is another downside but students tend to have good dexterity so they may be able to type acceptably well on touch-screens.
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HP’s first Android-based hybrid tablet, the SlateBook x2, is set to make its appearance in markets sometime in August 2013, as per HP’s official SlateBook page. With SlateBook x2, HP has finally joined ASUS in the Android-powered hybrid tablet market. For starters, a hybrid is a kind of tablet with a detachable keyboard that gives it a notebook-like experience.
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But what makes Clavin — an acronym for Cartographic Location and Vicinity Indexer — more unusual, its founders and others say, is that it is open-source software. Its source code is available for free so that users can change and customize it.
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In Atul Chitnis’s untimely death, the world of open source has lost a passionate advocate
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He was involved in much of India’s open source activities and was a columnist and consulting editor for PCQuest magazine. He was instrumental in setting up communities around Linux and open source software.
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FOSS.in founder and former PCQuest consulting editor, Chitnis, loses his battle against cancer and leaves a huge void to fill
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Tizen, the open source, standards-based mobile device platform that resides in the linux foundation now has a dedicated blinkx app, plus an open source blinkx video player. The blinkx API requires registration to see any documentation but more information on the video player for Tizen is available.
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Many years ago, there was HyperCard, included free with the Macintosh in the late 1980s. It got a lot of attention because it was one of the first tools that made it trivial to create GUI applications. Apple couldn’t figure out how to properly market or position it, so it eventually died of apathy. RunRev has been publishing Revolution, now named LiveCode, as a spiritual successor to Hypercard, for a while, and LiveCode now shares one more important trait with Hypercard: It’s now free.
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An open standard proposal by mapping giant Esri has failed after a backlash from open source developers within the geospatial community led it to withdraw from the process.
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I think it is invaluable, but let’s try to figure out how important is, as assigning a monetary value is almost impossible.
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On June 1, the City of Oakland will co-host ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. ReWrite Oakland will be an all day writeathon that will culminate with the launch of a new website called “Oakland Answers,” based on last year’s Code for America project “Honolulu Answers.”
Oakland Answers will be citizen-focused website, written in plain-language, that makes it quick and simple for people to find City information and services they are looking for online. City staff and the community will collaborate to answer common questions generated by citizens.
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Bugzilla is an open source bug-tracking system that prides itself on offering server software that is free but skillfully designed to help developers manage their work. Their installation list is long and robust. So, how do they manage to not charge expensive licensing fees like most other commercial vendors?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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If you use Google’s Chrome Mobile on either an Android or iOS device, you’re not alone. Google has been steadily increasing its focus on mobile browsing, even as Mozilla prepares to align its whole company strategy around its Firefox OS mobile platform. Now it looks like June will bring some significant news regarding Chrome Mobile, as Google has officially announced two events focused on it, one to take place on June 7, and one on June 13.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has confirmed earlier reports saying that Foxconn is entering into a “wide ranging partnership” with it to develop and use the Firefox OS in Foxconn devices. Mozilla’s SVP of Mobile Devices said: “This cooperation demonstrates the full potential of Firefox OS, the open Web mobile operating system, to enable not only the smartphone but also a wide range of mobile devices”.
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Contract manufacturer Foxconn is backing Mozilla’s open source Firefox OS. The company made the announcement in Taipei. Firefox OS already has a decent partnership will carriers and device makers to bring the OS to the market.
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Mozilla is gearing up for a major user interface overhaul for the open source Firefox web browser. Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year.
The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two releases in a year, to a rapid release cycle with new browsers released every six to eight weeks.
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Can the open-source, Linux-based Firefox mobile operating system become a mobile-space player? The question is far from answered but Mozilla has a new supporter: major electronics contract manufacturer Foxconn.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Piston Cloud Co-Founder Joshua McKenty says the OpenStack customer ecosystem has four emerging market segments. On one side are the customers who hire consultants to build them a cloud. On the other side are the IBM customers who will always be IBM customers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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As the LibreOffice project moves forward with the development on its 4.x branches we sometimes get the feedback that while new features are documented in detail as well as in a summarized fashion (on the wiki and on the website), it is not easy to understand what’s unique about the features in LibreOffice. We often hear things like “but their interface is outdated!” or people asking us to compare LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.
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From October 2013, Oracle will be releasing Java security updates as part of its Critical Patch updates. The announcement came as part of the company’s plans to revamp how it will secure Java over the coming years. In a blog post, the lead for the Java platform software development team, Nandini Ramani, outlined both the scheduling and technical security plans.
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CMS
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In an overnight, grassroots movement, the open source platform Drupal has made an impact in Oklahoma. A group of more than 70 volunteer code sprinters—made up of developers, designers, and sys admins—congregated late Tuesday night at DrupalCon in Portland to create help4ok.org.
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WordPress is most popular open source CMS Blogger Platform based on PHP and MySQL. It has many beautiful options and user-friendly plug-in, which help to custom temple and individual web page. WordPress Contain almost 60 million websites worldwide.
WordPress has strong and easy content management system. As WordPress is open source software it can be operate by any one for personal or professional use.
Best Part of WordPress is it’s plug-in, and this make wordpress out of the box. There are numbers of effective plug-ins in wordpress which can be use to develop website easily and make it user friendly.
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Education
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The Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop is being held this year in Philadelphia from June 2-4. To prepare for the workshop, online activites are were assigned to be completed in stages and culminated on June 1.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation’s monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 68,736 other activists. That’s 268 more than last month!
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Openness/Sharing
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If the concept of ‘open source’ (universal access and contribution to a budding idea/technology via free licence) can be applied to developing software, then why not to promoting research and development into finding cure of diseases like malaria? Former president APJ Abdul Kalam put forth this thought at an event in the city on Sunday.
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A grassroots organisation is using an open source business intelligence program to improve its chances of helping integrate ex-prisoners into the community.
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Open Access/Content
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Aaron Swartz was a tech whiz-kid and political activist devoted to a free and open internet. When he hacked a website to ‘liberate’ data, US authorities responded fiercely. He faced a fine of up to $1m and 35 years in jail. Then he took his own life. Here, his former girlfriend talks about the circumstances of his death
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Programming
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Coverity has published an annual update of those results over each of the last seven years.
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The GCC developers have now released GCC 4.8.1 – the latest update to the GNU Compiler Collection after completing their switch to C++ as the implementation language for GCC in March. With this release, the developers now consider their compiler to be the first to implement all major language features of the C++11 standard. LLVM’s Clang compiler is close behind, however, with its upcoming version 3.3 also implementing the major features of C++11. LLVM 3.3 is scheduled for release on 5 June.
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Version 2.0 of the open source Processing language and development environment for creative arts and visual design has been released. Processing was created in 2001 by Ben Fry and Casey Reas as a way for non-programmers to create electronic sketchbooks that could give instant gratification through visual feedback. Based on the Java language, but using a simplified syntax and graphics model, Processing allows creative users to build interactive, graphical programs, or sketches as they are called in Processing, quickly with a supporting simplified IDE. The project’s mission statement explains, succinctly, that
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Standards/Consortia
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Social gaming company behind FarmVille is also closing offices in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles to save $80m a year
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Hardware
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Eliminating complexity and bloat is undoing a lot of the lock-in that M$ has cultivated over the years. Instead of needing a super-computer on every desk, small businesses are discovering they just need a network and any old client and OS will do the job. Step forward, */Linux, ready, willing and able to work for less.
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Health/Nutrition
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NHS Confederation report says 64% of senior officials believe £20bn of ‘efficiency savings’ will worsen patient experience
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Security
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Google shakes up the InfoSec world with a new seven-day disclosure policy. But do top security researchers think it’s a good idea?
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New policy narrows window for software vendors’ public response to zero-day bugs discovered by Google researchers
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CCP Games has published details of repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks it has suffered over the last two days. The company develops and runs the popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) EVE Online. Attackers targeted the “Tranquility” server cluster and managed to exploit a vulnerability in the backend services that support the game servers. After detecting the attack, CCP decided to take the cluster offline while “a taskforce of internal and external experts” investigated the situation. The company now says it has closed the vulnerability and all game services are back to normal.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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For Contreras, whoever the man was, “the important fact is that this was the person who ordered the injection” that allegedly killed Neruda.
Neruda’s former assistant Manuel Araya also said he believed the poet was poisoned by Pinochet’s agents.
The Nobel Prize winner’s body was exhumed on April 8, and is being analyzed by Chilean and international forensic specialists.
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Members of the military would receive a 1.8 percent pay increase in 2014 under legislation the House Armed Services Committee is considering on Wednesday.
Lawmakers are proposing a higher annual raise for service members next year than the 1 percent pay increase that President Obama recommended in his fiscal 2014 budget. Current law mandates a 1.8 percent boost for service members for 2014; the formula for determining service members’ annual pay increases is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Employment Cost Index and the growth in private-sector wages.
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The fact that drones have now caught the imagination of some in the US as the secret weapon that administrations since 9/11 have resorted to for killing – some call them assassinations – of terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, means there are questions now being asked of the legality of these engagements and the consequent issue of morality in using drones for such killings.
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Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.
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Jill Kelley, the woman described as a “Tampa socialite” who became enmeshed in last year’s scandal involving former CIA Director David Petraeus, filed a lawsuit Monday alleging employees of government agencies violated her privacy.
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As Attorney General Eric Holder wrings his hands in remorse over his feverish pursuit of Fox News reporter James Rosen’s phone records, it’s worth noting that, when it comes to national security leaks, some things are secret — and should be kept that way — for a reason.
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A proposed rule change to streamline the process of conducting security investigations of federal workers in sensitive posts potentially expands the number of positions deemed “sensitive,” and critics worry that the measure could be used to deprive whistleblowers of civil service protections.
The proposal, from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is intended to harmonize the way agencies determine eligibility for posts requiring security clearances, or otherwise afford access to sensitive information or restricted facilities. The goal is to allow agencies to rely on one another’s assessments for federal workers moving between departments, eliminating the need for duplicative investigations.
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Cablegate
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I was asked to appear twice, once after 7 and once after 8, and to explain why the case of Bradley Manning ought to concern people in the UK. BBC Breakfast is based in Salford. So the BBC sent me train tickets, booked a room in the Holiday Inn and organised a cab for me from Manchester Piccadilly. I had reached so far as Euston from St Pancras yesterday when I discovered, rather by chance that my slots on BBC breakfast had been cancelled. I was instead offered a single live interview at 6.40 am that would not be repeated.
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This is a critical time in US History, when the US Government, desperate to cover up war crimes it is committing in the Middle East and Africa, are imposing the most cruel and illegal torture against members of the US military; the sons and daughters of this nation who stepped up to fight for what they believed to be wars for our freedom. The US Government lied to them then, just as the US population is being lied to now by our government, that these wars are anything other than a profit machine for a few rich men. But now we are waking up.
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An Army investigator testified on Tuesday he found no evidence that a soldier accused of the biggest breach of classified information in U.S. history hated his country or had any terrorism-related material on his laptop.
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The trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the internet into a danger zone, legal experts have warned.
Of the 21 counts faced by the army private on Monday, at his trial at Fort Meade in Maryland, by far the most serious is that he knowingly gave intelligence information to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the open information website WikiLeaks. The leaked disclosures were first published by the Guardian and allied international newspapers.
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As Bradley Manning stands trial in the US, Channel 4 News looks back at what the soldier’s leaks published by WikiLeaks revealed – and the impact they had.
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Assange called the court-martial a “fully choreographed extravaganza” and said that rulings from the judge have compromised Manning’s ability to mount a complete defense.
The real defendant, Assange wrote, is the United States: “A runaway military, whose misdeeds have been laid bare, and a secretive government at war with the public. They sit in the docks. We are called to serve as jurists. We must not turn away.”
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The development concerning Mr. Assange came the day that the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning of the Army, who is accused of passing on sensitive diplomatic and military information, began in Maryland. Private Manning has pleaded guilty to 10 counts, but he has not admitted to the more serious charges of violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy, which could bring a life sentence.
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Alex Gibney’s new film, “We Steal Secrets,” is about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. It dutifully peddles the state’s contention that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate publisher and that Bradley Manning, who allegedly passed half a million classified Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks, is not a legitimate whistle-blower. It interprets acts of conscience and heroism by Assange and Manning as misguided or criminal. It holds up the powerful—who are responsible for the plethora of war crimes Manning and Assange exposed—as, by comparison, trustworthy and reasonable. Manning is portrayed as a pitiful, naive and sexually confused young man. Assange, who created the WikiLeaks site so whistle-blowers could post information without fear of being traced, is presented as a paranoid, vindictive megalomaniac and a sexual deviant. “We Steal Secrets” is agitprop for the security and surveillance state.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.
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Muto, whose group is studying the prefecture’s future after the Fukushima No. 1 plant is finally decommissioned, told the crowd that since March 11, the people in Fukushima have had to make decisions every day on matters ranging from whether to evacuate and force children to wear masks to such mundane tasks as drying laundry outside and plowing their fields.
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Thousands of demonstrators have gathered in Tokyo to protest restarting of nuclear reactors the government is considering.
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California Democrats have suffered a setback in their anti-fracking efforts, but will continue to push for more rules on the controversial drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.
The California legislature opted not to follow in the footsteps of New Jersey and New York, defeating a bill that would have put a moratorium on fracking within the state until regulations could be imposed.
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Finance
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Selling off the Royal Mail is controversial enough without the Government throwing yet more petrol bombs through its letterbox. But that’s what ministers have done by selecting three banks most associated with the worst excesses of the financial crash – Goldman Sachs, UBS and Barclays – to handle the forthcoming privatisation.
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This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation received a generous donation of 726 bitcoins – worth $95,070.73 in United States dollars. See the blockchain transaction here.
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Wisconsin’s unemployed are being subject to a double attack by the state legislature. In the state that fell to 44th in the nation in job creation in March, a bill introduced to the Wisconsin State Assembly on May 24 would make it more difficult for jobless workers to collect unemployment benefits. Then, in what Representative Chris Taylor (D-Madison) called the “ultimate bait-and-switch,” a hearing on that bill occurred at the same time as a meeting of the Joint Committee on Finance that passed yet more changes related to unemployment insurance, which critics called even more extreme than the first.
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Student activists and their allies gathered outside Sallie Mae’s annual shareholder meeting on May 30 to demand increased transparency and accountability from the nation’s largest student loan lender, and to draw attention to the worsening problem of student debt. Allie Gardner, a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison drove to Delaware from Wisconsin to attend the shareholder meeting and demand a meeting with the CEO; “Sallie Mae doesn’t exist to protect students, and they are not willing to work with students. They exist to profit off of us.”
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In the past month, the issue of debarment has bounced back-and-forth between committee hearings and the full council to the consternation of some council members who say it already gave clear signals for debarment to the city administrator’s office last year when it approved to begin the process that could ultimately lead to the prohibition of Goldman Sachs from doing business with the city.
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Meanwhile the odious Balls plans to find £100 million from pensioners while planning to blow that 1,000 times over and blow $100 Billion on the entirely worthless Trident missile system. Anybody who believes New Labour is the answer to any of our problems is certifiable.
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Heads of big tax-avoiding firms also set to attend secretive group’s four-day summit being held near Watford
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Censorship
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Facebook and Twitter reported to have been blocked in run-up to protests, with people turning to VPNs to broadcast content
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It’s that time again. Something bad happens and someone thinks it’s the “internet’s” fault. Where do they turn? Google. If people are seeing and/or doing bad things, it must be Google’s fault for not policing the internet thoroughly enough.
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Business secretary admits policing the internet is very difficult, as Keith Vaz calls for code of conduct to be set up for ISPs
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Those blocked from the PirateBay and in possession of a little common sense merely accessed TPB via a proxy and now, as Sky Broadband is stealthy blocking access to these proxies, one has to question, why?
When you consider that the people this will effect are the ones whom have sought out and facilitated a proxy for access to TPB, any blocking of these will merely result in another search? On top of that there’s hundreds of proxies out there with new ones being created far quicker than Sky Broadband or anyone else can block.
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Google has removed the first porn app from its Glassware hub, a store for Glass apps. The app was published by a porn company Mikandi and was aptly named Tits & Glass. Google banned and pulled the app within hours of availability. Mikandi says the app was already a success, “Since we announced the availability of Tits & Glass this morning, nearly 10,000 unique vistors have visited TitsAndGlass.com, and a dozen Glass users have already signed up with our app.”
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Today is June 4th, a day pretty much like any other day in most parts of the world. But in China, June 4th has a unique significance because of the events that took place in Tiananmen Square on that day in 1989.
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Privacy
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“THE New Digital Age” is a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of its leading witch doctors, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the 21st century. This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley, as personified by Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and Mr. Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton who is now director of Google Ideas.
The authors met in occupied Baghdad in 2009, when the book was conceived. Strolling among the ruins, the two became excited that consumer technology was transforming a society flattened by United States military occupation. They decided the tech industry could be a powerful agent of American foreign policy.
The book proselytizes the role of technology in reshaping the world’s people and nations into likenesses of the world’s dominant superpower, whether they want to be reshaped or not. The prose is terse, the argument confident and the wisdom — banal. But this isn’t a book designed to be read. It is a major declaration designed to foster alliances.
“The New Digital Age” is, beyond anything else, an attempt by Google to position itself as America’s geopolitical visionary — the one company that can answer the question “Where should America go?” It is not surprising that a respectable cast of the world’s most famous warmongers has been trotted out to give its stamp of approval to this enticement to Western soft power. The acknowledgments give pride of place to Henry Kissinger, who along with Tony Blair and the former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden provided advance praise for the book.
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In past discussions around the use of technology to achieve school security, we have typically found that the practice has more to do with money than safety. Such was the case when a Texas school district issued RFID-chipped student IDs, the impetus for which was actually all about receiving government funding based on attendance. While there was backlash from students and parents in that case, the ire was likely somewhat muted by the fact that these were still basically just ID cards with a little extra juice in them.
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Pretty much everyone (myself included) has been reading Google+ wrongly. Because it bears many superficial resemblances to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter – you can “befriend” people, you can “follow” people without their following you back – we’ve thought that it is a social network, and judged it on that basis. By which metric, it does pretty poorly – little visible engagement, pretty much no impact on the outside world.
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Last Friday ORG met with representatives of EE to discuss the details of their mobile data analytics operation. The discussion was triggered by a Sunday Times article apparently claiming that Ipsos Mori was trying to sell highly personal information about EE customers to the Met Police, and our campaign following it.
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When the Obama administration started to pursue whistleblowers they took it to a whole new level than previous administrations by going aggressively after the journalists—the government watchdogs, and their whistleblowing sources by misusing government agencies.
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A recent, two-year bipartisan investigation by the U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations demonstrates concern – even among some members of Congress – that data centers (also known as “fusion centers”) represent a major source of government waste.
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Civil Rights
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On June 1, the next Blockupy action took place: a demonstration in Frankfurt. The march started peacefully – until riot police blocked the route. Fighting broke out, with a demonstrators throwing objects at police, and with police kettling demonstrators and attacking them with pepper spray. Exact numbers are not clear, but the Turkish news site Zaman mentions 7,000 protesters, signs reading ‘Make love, not war’ and ‘IMF, get out of Greece’”. Dutch media speak of “thousands of demonstrators”, which, translated back into the reality-based community, probably means many thousands.
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Be they lecturers or street vendors, Turkish nationalist or Kurdish separatist, the Taksim Square protests have brought together Istanbul’s disparate groups … but for how long?
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One of the hallmarks of the Tim Russert era of Meet the Press was the gotcha video: A politician would be confronted with some archival footage demonstrating that they had, once upon a time, taken a different position than the one they were taking today.
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A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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ORGCon2013 has expert speakers responding to the way the latest tragic news stories are being used for point scoring and clamping down on online freedoms, focusing on online censorship, the Snoopers’ Charter and the Digital Arms Trade, plus many more on relevant current issues.
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VICE PRESIDENT of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes has spoken up on net neutrality policy, saying that choice, preferred services, and openness are key.
Kroes was talking about net neutrality and the open internet last week, and she returned to the topic today in a speech entitled, “The EU, safeguarding the open internet for all”.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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As anyone who has been following me recently will know, one of the most important geopolitical developments is the decision to negotiate a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which makes clear its kinship with the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) currently being drawn up.
Equally, you will know that my chief concern with TAFTA/TTIP is not so much any section on intellectual monopolies – although those might well turn out to be ACTA 2.0 – but the clauses dealing with unmemorably-named “Investor State Dispute Resolution”.
I’ve explained what these are and why they are so dangerous on Techdirt (twice, actually.) In a sentence, this system allow a company to sue a country, directly, for alleged loss of future profits caused by tiresome things like environmental legislation or health and safety laws.
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Copyrights
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Chip manufacturer ARM has announced a Hollywood-approved video processor that enables content producers to prevent piracy on mobile platforms. The Mali-V500 video chip features hardware embedded anti-piracy capabilities which secure playback of high-definition video. According to ARM the new chip meets the toughest anti-piracy standards for mobile devices.
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Earlier this year, Industry Minister Christian Paradis introduced a bill aimed at ensuring that Canada complies with the discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The bill raises a host of concerns including granting border guards increased powers without court oversight or review. The bill had not been heard from since its introduction, but yesterday Paradis moved that the bill be read a second time and referred to committee for further study.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.02.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The days when Linux applications were small and simple are long gone. With Firefox and LibreOffice installed on most desktops, the community has embraced monster-sized apps so unreservedly that you can sometimes need to look twice to see what operating system you are using. In fact, the complexity has become so great that simplicity is being reinvented again and again — by adding complexity.
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Desktop
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Why, you ask? Well, it is a write-only database, which means there is no tool to actually read or fix a journal files, should they become corrupt. Or even notice the corruption. And they become corrupt all the time.
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After yesterday’s Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Linux graphics comparison using the very latest Intel Linux graphics driver, here are new benchmarks using the latest Windows and Linux Intel OpenGL graphics driver. Facing competition this morning is Microsoft Windows 7 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 13.04 with its updated open-source stack.
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Graphics Stack
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A new feature being worked on for the Intel DRM Linux kernel graphics driver is IPS. Short for Intermediate Pixel Storage, this feature should allow modern Intel HD graphics cores to let the CPU enter deeper PC states to increase power-savings.
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New features to this original open-source operating system is automated quality assurance testing, improvements to the terminal infrastructure, there’s support for Samsung Exynos 5 platforms with drivers for USB 3, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit networking, eMMC, and SATA. The ARM-based Freescale i.MX53-based devices has new display, touchscreeen, and GPIO drivers. Lastly, the TI OMAP4 display driver has better LCD and HDMI support. There’s also been a custom kernel added for the Raspberry Pi.
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Benchmarks
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Haswell is here, Haswell is here, Haswell is here!!! After talking for months about the Linux kernel and driver development for Intel’s Ivy Bridge successor, the heatsink can be lifted today on talking about Intel’s Haswell processor. For the past few weeks I have been running and benchmarking an Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” processor on Linux to mixed success. While the Haswell improvements are terrific, the Linux experience now is awaiting improvements.
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Applications
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A metadata editor is computer software which allows users to view and edit metadata tags interactively and save them in the graphics file. So, metadata is information that is part of the image file and contains information about the image itself and the creation of the image. It can set textual information such as title, description, exposure time, ISO value, focal length, and copyright. Some modern digital cameras and camera phones are GPS enabled and they can save the location co-ordinates (latitude and longitude) with the photographs. Metadata editors can also set geolocation information by browsing a map or setting coordinates directly, which is particularly useful for cameras without GPS. There are many reasons why users might wish to modify metadata of photographs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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BioShock Infinite is probably the best title in the series, but it seems that Irrational Games have no intention of porting it on the Linux platform.
The Linux fans have started to gather on the official Irrational Games forums, lobbying intensely about a Linux port. After dozens of support messages, one of the members of the Irrational Games team has put to rest any hopes of a Linux port.
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You might think you’re having a bad day, but Eve has got you beat. She woke up in a strange world with an alien computer embedded in her arm. Eve is the main character of Abducted, an upcoming episodic adventure from Sunside. Abducted promises a mix of action-adventure, horror and RPG elements, and the trailer for the first episode shows off some lovely extraterrestrial visuals.
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Prison Architect developer Introversion has launched the game’s 10th alpha build, bringing Linux and Steam Workshop support into the fold, as well as violent riots.
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The somewhat-wonderful, somewhat-demented interactive incarceration simulator Prison Architect always gets the best updates.
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With the end of May comes our usual end of the month summary about the most popular Linux news stories this month that appeared on Phoronix and other announcements.
For this month on Phoronix there were 202 news postings (an average of over six original news articles per day) and 13 featured-length articles. These articles were mostly written by your’s truly to cover all of the exciting Linux advancements. The number of original multi-page featured articles this month were down slightly namely due to the lack of any noteworthy advertising campaigns this month on Phoronix, but hopefully next month there will be more enticing ad campaigns plus the launch of Intel’s Haswell with same-day Linux coverage.
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So May has been quite an amazing month for Linux gaming, we seem to have games running towards us from all sides, from the barrage of Kickstarters to the ferocious indie bundles like Humble Bundle once again gracing us with some really awesome titles
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The somewhat-wonderful, somewhat-demented interactive incarceration simulator Prison Architect always gets the best updates. To wit: “Internally we’ve done a lot to increase the realism by implementing a more advanced model of prisoner anger. This now results in full scale riots and riot police to restore law and order.”
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Valve has updated their Steam Hardware Survey results to reflect usage statistics by their gamer customer base as of May.
The main item that’s been interesting to monitor with the Steam Hardware Survey has been the Linux usage metric. While Linux gamers made up around 2% of Steam’s customer base, in recent months the number has been dropping.
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Double Fine’s super smiley Brad Muir (creator of Iron Brigade) is heading up a new crowdfunding campaign to develop a single player turn based tactical strategy game inspired by X-COM, Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem.
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So May has been quite an amazing month for Linux gaming, we seem to have games running towards us from all sides, from the barrage of Kickstarters to the ferocious indie bundles like Humble Bundle once again gracing us with some really awesome titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kévin Ottens is a long-time KDE hacker, known as ervin on IRC and email. He contributes to the KDE Community at large, with a strong emphasis on API design and frameworks architecture. He was instrumental in developing the KDE Manifesto, a process that started during Akademy 2012.
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I am Adrian, a Romanian first-year student majoring in Computer Science at Imperial College London. I have recently been accepted to work on a KML Editor feature for the Marble Virtual Globe as part of KDE and this blog is where I plan to regularly post updates on the progress of the project.
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Here are some news on what is happening with Kdenlive’s video editor. Last year, we launched a successful IndieGoGo campaign to sponsor Till Theato’s work on Kdenlive.
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Hello Planet KDE — my name is Henry de Valence, and I’ll be doing a GSOC project this summer for KStars. The main goal of the project is to rewrite the astronomy engine in KStars so that it runs much more efficiently and in parallel.
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Gnome-Do was once my application launcher of choice, but soon after I adopted it the project seemed to go stale. Luckily, a new project has stepped up to fill the void, and so far I’m impressed. Kupfer has all the feature I’m looking for, and a fantastic Python API for easy expansion.
Kupfer is another clone of the popular OS X application Quicksilver. At it’s most basic level, Kupfer is an application launcher, but if that were all that it did there would be little sense in running it. The function of launching applications, once the domain of the quicksilver clone category of apps, has made it’s way into to the main desktops. Unity, Gnome, KDE, and their respective derivatives all have basic app and file launching support, but none are quite as full featured as Kupfer. The main benefit of a keyboard launcher is the expandability of its feature set. In fact, launching applications is one of my least used features of Kupfer. For example, here are a few things I use it for every day.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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tl;dr GNOME Classic has some polish problems, but it’s a solid desktop and a significant improvement in workflow over GNOME standard.
Over the course of a week, I’m going to be experimenting with the new GNOME Classic desktop in Fedora 19 beta. I will be recording my experiences (hopefully) daily on this blog. This series of blog entries are entirely my own opinion and do not reflect the opinions of my employer, the Fedora community or anyone besides myself (though I hope my findings will be useful to all).
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After my experience on Day One, I decided to make two significant changes to my working environment in order to adapt to the GNOME Way. Despite many years of using Pidgin as my primary communications application (since way back when it was still called gAIM… get off my lawn), I decided that the lack of notification availability was a significant detriment to my ability to get things done in my day job, so I bid it a tearful farewell and started looking for an alternative.
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What is SolydXK? Debian-based Linux Mint never had a KDE edition, so SolydK was born out of the unofficial project featuring KDE in Debian-based Linux Mint. Then, Linux Mint pushed its Xfce edition back to an Ubuntu base, necessitating the emergence of SolydX. Together they form SolydXK, based on Debian Testing but with update packs, just as Debian-based Linux Mint is.
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maddog explains what’s behind his use of particular Linux distributions.
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Do you know from where does the power of Linux comes from? Well Linux is getting richer everyday with the presence of so much distros and every distro possessing a large group of users and developers working voluntarily on the project. Linux distributions come in all shapes and sizes, and they’re aimed at addressing every conceivable need. This article aims at briefing why a certain distro exist, who are the targeted user of the distro, and what special features it has as compared to its’ counterpart.
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The Cinnamon desktop has yet to be updated in such a way that it can be installed on a system together with GNOME 3.8, released in late March. That makes Cinnamon, developed as part of the Linux Mint project, yet another example of software built by short-sighted developers – who are only hurting themselves, since this behaviour hinders growth and deprioritises users.
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SolydXK is probably the weirdest name you can give your Linux distributions, mostly because it is an amalgamation of two names, SolydK and SolydX, two sub-versions of this distribution, graced with the KDE and Xfce desktop environments, respectively. See the confusion already? But never mind that.
I was asked to take a look and review, if I please. And I did please. Now, as always, with any small distro, there’s the huge risk of one-man-show development and all the other associated issues. But I will put these aside now. Just be aware that SolydXK, no matter how good or bad, might simply vanish, just like the ultra-awesome Fuduntu did. With that in mind, it’s time to check the KDE flavor of this distro, hence the SolydK review.
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New Releases
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As expected, earlier today (June 1, 2013), the Arch Linux developers unleashed the monthly dual CD ISO image of the Arch Linux operating system for new installations.
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Slackware Family
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Slackware’s Slackpkg has long had a design flaw default behavior that could result in inoperative applications or systems. But Patrick Volkerding recently addressed the issue with a simple but significant change. In addition, Slackware is getting some new native packages and updates.
Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, Slackware enthusiast and contributor, recently reported of a significant change in slackpkg that will instruct the package manager to download all packages needed when installing a new application or applying updates. This avoids the condition where a package in a series is installed or updated before its full dependencies and, in some extreme cases, rendering the application or subsystem inoperative. Now, as Raharjo says, “In the normal operations, slackpkg will download the packages one by one and install/upgrade them sequentially.”
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, pits the theory of quantum superposition against what we observe to be true.
In the world of Linux distros, in theory the beta version of Fedora 18 was slated for release in early October 2012; what we actually observed in practice was six rounds of delays until the end of November 2012 when the software finally emerged.
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One reason that someone will pick Fedora is to get the latest and the greatest open software available. Well, that isn’t always true and you might find more updated distros around, but Fedora additionally is quite user friendly and it has evolved in a pretty nice Operating System -for any taste.
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After installing Fedora 19 beta and rebooting my test computer, I noticed that one of the options available in GRUB’s menu is tboot 1.7.0. Not sure what it’s for, I selected it and hit the Enter key.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu, or its managers, have snubbed their loyal users more times than I can even remember now, but they’ve more or less let it be known by their actions that they aren’t interested in the community anymore. They have commercial aspirations and prospects now, but constantly reassure users that they’re all about the community. Apparently their users aren’t buying it. So, today brings just the latest attempt at wooing the community back under their rock.
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A while back I blogged about dogfooding Ubuntu Phone; that is, eating our own dogfood by using it on a daily basis. I have been tracking this here.
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For some time now we have wanted to improve the community pages on ubuntu.com. While the pages there provided an overview of the community they really didn’t serve us or our new community members very well.
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Ubuntu, or its managers, have snubbed their loyal users more times than I can even remember now, but they’ve more or less let it be known by their actions that they aren’t interested in the community anymore. They have commercial aspirations and prospects now, but constantly reassure users that they’re all about the community. Apparently their users aren’t buying it. So, today brings just the latest attempt at wooing the community back under their rock.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint project has released version 15 of the desktop that they’re calling the “most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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As with previous releases, the newest Mint iteration, “Olivia,” comes in two distinct flavors: Cinnamon and MATE. While both have received a bit of polish, it’s the fresher Cinnamon that has gotten the most attention. Version 1.8 of the desktop environment has received plenty of bug fixes, along with a new dedicated settings panel that bypasses the GNOME control center. Support for “Desklets” (read: widgets) has also been added and the log-in screen is completely customizable through HTML5. Both versions benefit from the addition of MintSources, for managing software repositories, and MintDrivers, for managing drivers, obviously. While they’ll come in handy for consumers, the biggest advantage is that IT managers may now be more accepting of the refreshingly green Ubuntu derivative. The developers are calling version 15 their most ambitious release yet, and while we’re not completely convinced that’s true, it’s certainly a significant upgrade over November’s Nadia. You’ll find the full changelog
and download links at the source.
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Gumstix announced a touchscreen baseboard for its Linux-ready Overo computer-on-modules built entirely with the company’s new Geppetto custom design platform, and available for further modification via the web-based Geppetto. The Alto35 is available with a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen from InTouch Electronics.
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Critical Link announced a tiny, Linux-ready, SODIMM-style module based on the Altera Cyclone V SX-U672 ARM/FPGA SoC. The MityARM-5CSX builds on the Cyclone V’s mix of FPGA logic and dual-core 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processing power, adding two GigE channels, a PCI Express bus, and 145 GPIO lines.
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ARM [(LSE: ARM); (Nasdaq: ARMH)] today announced, at the Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, Germany, the launch of the Keil™ Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Application Edition, a software development tool suite which simplifies the development of Linux and Android native applications for ARM® processor-based systems, reducing the learning curve and shortening the development and testing cycle.
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UDOO takes your DIY projects to the next level and it’s a powerful tool for education and creativity.
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On May 24, Raspberry Pi Foundation executive director Eben Upton announced that the open source board’s recommended Linux distribution, Raspbian, will be adding support for a customized Wayland display manager.
While the Pi’s Broadcom BCM2835 system-on-chip may be limited to a 700MHz ARM11 processor, it also has an impressive graphics processing unit (GPU) called the VideoCore 4. The Wayland windowing interface is optimized for the VideoCore and will offer much faster and more capable display performance compared to the current X Window, wrote Upton.
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Phones
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Fairphone is a powerful Android phone created from fair trade and conflict-free materials, and needs your help to be funded
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Android
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Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed the rumors during the AllThingsD conference that Moto X is indeed real. Motorola, now owned by Google, is proud of the fact (and will use it as the marketing material) that the phone will be designed, engineered and assembled in the USA.
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During the first quarter of 2013 Android topped 50 percent of all installed smartphones, says research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
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Come on retailers, the OEMs are doing their jobs to deliver what users of IT want. Do your part and give these PCs retail shelf-space. This will make 2013 the year competition returned to IT in every segment. It’s good for your customers and your bottom line. Stuff clogging retail shelves that doesn’t sell is a waste of your resources.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Tizen is an open source, Linux-based operating systems designed for smartphones, tablets, TVs, laptops, and just about anything else that needs an operating system. It’s backed by Intel and Samsung, and it’s been in development since the MeeGo Linux project shut down two years ago.
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Graduate students in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) have developed an open API platform that allows users to move another person’s arms remotely, using an internet connection and an iPhone.
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Three years ago, In a post here on OStatic, I asked this question: “Is It Too Late for an Open Source Challenge to Android?” And now, as we’ve been covering recently, a number of players are seeking to answer that question. Mobile phones based on Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Ubuntu are imminent, as are smartphones based on Tizen Linux. There are other smaller players in the mix as well.
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Events
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The 2013 Texas Linux Fest takes place today in Austin at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center.
And the team from San Antonio-based TrueAbility will be holding a Linux showdown, similar to the one they had at SXSW Interactive earlier this year.
The contest will test the skills of Linux administrators and the top programmers will be awarded prizes. First place will get a Lenovo laptop, second place a Nexus tablet and third place with get a Beagle Bone Black starter pack. This contest is only open to those in Texas attending the conference, said Luke Owen, co-founder and CEO of TrueAbility.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Reality is of course that with Chrome, Firefox and even Safari now all are very good browsers, the need for Camino was somewhat diminished.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Hortonworks has announced HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform) 1.3, the latest version of its all open source Hadoop platform. The company points out that it has achieved a steady rate of releases of the platform – 1.0 in June 2012, 1.1 September 2012, 1.2 February 2013 and now 1.3 in May – and with the latest release it has been able to focus on Hive and SQL access in Hadoop; Hive is the de facto route for accessing Hadoop data in SQL.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice 4.1 Beta 1 has finally arrived and once again highlights the exceptional talent of the 600+ developers working under the aegis of The Document Foundation to build one of the greatest office productivity on the open source program.
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CMS
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WordPress vulnerabilities are even more of a threat when combined with recent large-scale brute-force attacks which target WordPress websites.
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Funding
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International Centre for Free and Open Source Software here has launched a joint mentoring programme with the Apache Software Foundation, a leading producer of free and open source software.
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While more and more users worldwide are moving towards open-source platform such as Android and Linux, the developers from the city see it as a major opportunity for future. A large number of students are all ready to participate in Google Summer of Code this year. A total of 22 students from colleges of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar will be working with open source giants to develop applications and platforms to get practical exposure.
Mitesh Sanghvi, manager of Google Business Group in Ahmedabad, told TOI that from this year onwards, they are trying to reach out of metros to create awareness about the event that has more than 100 companies working in open source software. “The students will work from India and abroad for three months and apart from stipend, would get invaluable experience by working with experts,” he said.
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Kerala that lagged behind its counterparts in the IT race, is tapping its expertise in the open source software domain, for a paradigm shift. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), one of the largest global companies on free and open source software, has now launched its pilot project in the country in Kerala. Oracle had sent in its feelers, while discussion with other IT giants, including Google, are on the cards.
Satish Babu, director, International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), an autonomous institution under the Kerala Government, told Express that the tie-up with the ASF would give open source developers in the state an international exposure. “Compared to other states, Kerala has a good talent pool in the open source software as the state was one of the pioneers in the country to promote free and open software movement.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As the first point release for the GCC 4.8 compiler is the freshly-released GCC 4.8.1.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The provincial government of Alberta launched its open data portal as part of its efforts to promote government transparency and citizen engagement.
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For more than a decade, the administration of the Portuguese town of Vieira do Minho has made open source its first choice when adopting software. The benefits can be measured not just in terms of flexibility, but also through improved efficiency and lower costs.
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Openness/Sharing
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However, too much of a good thing can be bad, as old dearies like to say. Crowdsourcing is full of projects that have become victims of their own success, and come close to imploding from all the effort to cope with subsequent demand.
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Burdened by runaway costs, unsustainable infrastructure, outrage over tuition increases, declining public dollars, and outmoded degree programs, colleges and universities are struggling to satisfy the needs of their current patrons, let alone cater to a global student population that is expected to double by 2025.
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In its first year, Anesthesia Illustrated, an open-source repository of anesthesia video lectures, attracted users from more than 150 countries who downloaded videos 94,213 times, according to an assessment presented at the 2013 Society for Technology in Anesthesia meeting.
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Open Data
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Museums and copyright have historically had a somewhat strained relationship. Overly complicated copyright laws and overly long copyright terms have only made this more problematic, resulting in museum policy oddities like prohibiting photography and sketching, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently did. (Flash photography is prohibited almost universally, but more for preservation of artwork than for copyright reasons.)
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Open Hardware
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Perhaps you have already found some time to do a bit of tinkering with Arduino. It’s a popular open source electronics platform based on a microcontroller and microprocessor with I/O capabilities that allow it to drive many kinds of surprising inventions. We’ve covered the platform and the community that creates with it before.
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Programming
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I still remember the heated arguments I’d have with my high school professors about dynamic languages. What do you mean python isn’t a real language? What’s wrong with you!? Dynamic languages are the coolest thing ever!
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A 7 inch tablet with that other OS still won’t match the price/performance of */Linux on ARM. To compete, you have to sell Android/Linux or GNU/Linux on your products. Check out ASUS… They even sell gadgets with keyboards running Android/Linux.
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The moneymen have finally looked up from beneath their golden canopies and noticed, hovering above them, a cloud named Amazon that is putting traditional IT companies in the shade.
Amazon’s cloud poses a major threat to most of the traditional IT ecosystem, a team of 25 Morgan Stanley analysts write in a report, Amazon Web Services: Making Waves in the IT Pond, that was released on Wednesday. Brocade, NetApp, QLogic, EMC and VMware are said to face the greatest “challenges” from the growth of AWS,
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Microsoft has just released some information about Windows 8.1 and the Start button isn’t being reinstated. If you have read other headlines and new reports that say that it is, then you are simply being misled.
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I imagine Mr. Pink doesn’t tip at Starbucks. Hell, I don’t “tip” at Starbucks. Occasionally, I don’t feel like having 30 cents clanging around in my pocket all day, so I throw it in the tip jar. But there’s only so much I can pay for a cup of coffee in good conscience.
Apparently, there’s a lawsuit kicking around the New York Court of Appeals over who owns the tips at Starbucks. The baristas are fighting to keep control over the jar and not share the tips with assistant managers.
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Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made a plea for preserving the impartiality and independence of the American judicial system in a lecture Thursday at Elmhurst College.
O’Connor, who addressed a crowded audience at Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel on the west suburban campus, delivered the Rudolf G. Schade lecture on history, ethics and law.
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Science
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from the make-stuff-in-your-home dept
One of the biggest and most important trends right now is the increasing ability for people to make physical stuff that used to be impossible to make themselves. 3D printing is, obviously, a big part of that, but a variety of other advancements are happening at the same time. We’re in the very early days, but machines that help you make stuff are getting cheaper and cheaper, as they get more and more powerful.
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A team of scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has developed a new image sensor from graphene that promises to improve the quality of images captured in low light conditions. In tests, it has proved to be 1,000 times more sensitive to light than existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or charge-coupled device (CCD) camera sensors in addition to operating at much lower voltages, consequently using 10 times less energy.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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The version 2.3.14.2 update of the Apache Struts Java framework fixes several high-risk vulnerabilities that allow attackers to inject code into the server, for example via specially crafted HTTP requests. The holes have been identified as CVE-2013-2115 and CVE-2013-1966; according to the Struts developers, the maximum threat level is “highly critical”.
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Criminals are using an old weakness in the Ruby on Rails web application framework to recruit vulnerable servers into a botnet.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Well it was that President Barack Obama would make the claim that the way prisoners are detained and the way drones are used in terms of targeting would “define” the United States as a nation. A nation of opportunistic, moneyed hustlers intent on bruising the next foreign nose is already a definition worth having. But Obama wants something else. He wants a different style in counter-terrorism strategy, one of death under the guise of law. This has been every nation’s greatest challenge: finding the legitimate means of killing your opponents without feeling too bad about it.
[...]
Obama claims that a new classified policy will deal with the use of unmanned aircraft in areas where the term war is simply not used – Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen. Lethal force will be deployed against those who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans”, and cannot be captured in any practicable way. That, at least, is the drone-speak humming from the pen of Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr.
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“America is at a crossroads,” declared President Obama in a major speech he delivered at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. The speech was essentially a lengthy, carefully argued, yet contradictory defense of his highly controversial drone war.
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There is a vast chasm between “saying” and “doing” in the Obama administration.
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Where are similar figures of conscience in the Obama White House, or even the Democratic Party? Where are the leaks and resignations? Perhaps this is the ultimate object lesson on display in the ongoing persecution of Bradley Manning. Internal dissent, regardless of its legal and moral standing, shall not be tolerated. Indeed, it will be considered sedition and will be smothered by the supreme sanction of the government. Acts that were once considered outrages against conscience are now routine.
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Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon was seeking to send drones to Kenya as part of a $40 million-plus military aid package to help four African countries fighting al Qaeda and al Shabaab militants
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49
The number of people killed in U.S. drone strikes for every high-level suspect.
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John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer jailed for revealing the name of a covert agent in charge of the US government’s Bush-era enhanced interrogation programme, has claimed he is treated as “subhuman” by wardens at the Pennsylvania prison where he is held.
Kiriakou began serving a 30-month sentence in February, after being convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert CIA agent to a freelance reporter, who did not publish the name. He is the first current or former CIA officer to be convicted of leaking classified information.
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A team of academics have launched the world’s largest interactive database detailing suspected CIA rendition flights, many of which may have transported detainees to Guantanamo Bay, RT Reported.
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The president insists the U.S. will use drones in accordance with just-war principles, but Catholic leaders say some moral questions still remain.
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Human rights investigator Christof Heyns to lead calls against lethal robotic weapons
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The hypocrisy of praising Obama for ‘asking the right questions’
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There is no avoiding an international drone race; they should be banned like chemical weapons
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While widely reported in the Turkish press, the arrests Wednesday have been virtually blacked out by the corporate media in the US. Newspapers like the New York Times, which have openly promoted a US intervention in Syria, citing alleged chemical weapons use by the regime of Bashar al-Assad as a pretext, have posted not a word about the raids in Turkey.
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Yemeni political media affirm the majority of victims of those attacks are civilians that are then identified as members of Al Qaeda…
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Two cars, traveling on a Yemen highway, exploded Friday. There were seven al-Qaeda militants inside. Two U.S. drone strikes killed all seven.
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Two drone strikes killed seven suspected al Qaeda militants in southern Yemen on Saturday, a local official said, nine days after U.S. President Barack Obama said he would only use such strikes when a threat was “continuing and imminent”.
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President Obama might believe he is rooting out terrorists, but the drone attacks in Pakistan are also creating more radicals
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President Obama came into office promising to be the opposite of George W. Bush, but after nearly five years as commander in chief, his policies are more like his Republican predecessor than he would care to acknowledge.
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The actual number of drone deaths is at least 200 times the “22 top Al-Qaeda leaders plus Bin Laden” noted by President Obama. Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) recently floated the number 4,700. Independent studies by both U.S. and British investigators have confirmed numbers in that ballpark, with many of those being “collateral damage.” But let’s, for the sake of simplifying the arithmetic, take a conservative round number of 4,000 deaths against a hypothetical 300 senior operational enemy leaders. After all, President Obama did not say that we have killed only 23 people with drones.
[...]
The reality is that U.S. drones have killed thousands, rather than dozens or a few hundred, and that many of them were civilians. The lion’s share of these killings surely could not occur under any dictionary definition of “imminent threat.” Most questionable are the so-called “signature strikes,” where targeting is based on circumstantial evidence rather than known identity of the target.
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KERRY on drones: “The only people that we are going after are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level. … We will not fire when we know there are children or collateral damage. … I am convinced that we have one of the strictest, most accountable and fairest programs.”
THE FACTS: President Barack Obama’s recently amended drone policy includes some of these elements, but that was not always the case. According to the New America Foundation, the CIA and U.S. military have killed 3,364 militants and civilians with drones over the last decade. Although the number of noncombatants killed is not known, the dead have not all been “highest level” terrorists.
The New America Foundation maintains a database of the strikes and compiles its numbers from reports in major news media that rely on local officials and eyewitness accounts. It estimates that one in five of those killed by drones is a noncombatant. The Obama administration said the number of civilians killed is in the single digits. As for comparisons, no other country is known to use armed drones to kill individuals in foreign lands.
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It looks like a computer game, but it’s deadly serious news in Germany: US soldiers control drone attacks with a joystick. According to new media reports, military bases on German soil play a key role in the drone war.
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The US military’s use of unmanned aircraft to kill terror suspects in foreign countries has come under media scrutiny in Germany. US bases in Germany may be involved in drone killings.
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Another joke. According to a May 2012 New York Times report, Obama’s drone policy “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants … unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
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THE renewed debate on drone attacks in Fata and the response from the Pakistan authorities deserve due attention.
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Cablegate
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Assange’s bid for a senate seat was seen by many as a stunt, but a poll has found 26 per cent of Australians would vote him in.
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Julian Assange has accused the conventional media of losing their bite and behaving like a “fresh-faced coquettes with too many suitors”. Writing in The Spanner journal, the WikiLeaks founder argues that most print and online journalists have become lazily reliant on press releases or stories that are fed to them by lobbyists.
“These coquettes long ago stopped cooking their own food and now expect everything to be lovingly presented on a silver platter,” complains Assange, who has been eating from the Ecuadorean Embassy’s crockery since he claimed asylum there last year.
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Whether the British tax payer starts foaming at the mouth at the extensive and expanding bill will be something worth seeing. The bloody mindedness of the British government is considerable. The spectacle has ceased merely being absurd. It has become absurdly expensive.
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Okay, so in Orwell’s 1984, the powers that be may have switched who the “enemy” was arbitrarily and then rewritten history to argue we were always at war with Eurasia or Eastasia. But, at least there was a defined enemy. In the court martial case against Bradley Manning, for supposedly “aiding the enemy” by releasing State Department cables and other documents to Wikileaks, he’s being charged with aiding a “classified enemy” along with aiding Al-Qaida. We’ve already explained why the aiding the enemy charge is highly dubious, since that charge is normally reserved for directly handing information to an enemy, not leaking it to the press.
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Hundreds of protesters gathered outside a U.S. army base Saturday to voice support for Private First Class Bradley Manning, whose court-martial begins there Monday for the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history.
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US authorities were accused of torture after putting Manning on “extreme suicide watch”, meaning he was held in solitary confinement, kept in his cell for 23 hours a day, had all possessions withheld. and was held overnight under lights and repeatedly stripped of his clothes.
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Members of the Bradley Manning Support Network and others gathered Saturday near Fort Meade’s main gate.
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Hundreds of protesters gathered outside a U.S. army base Saturday to voice support for Private First Class Bradley Manning, whose court-martial begins there Monday for the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history.
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Former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg praised WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning in video published Thursday.
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The peace group CODEPINK will join the efforts of the Bradley Manning Support Network in a march and rally outside Ft. Meade where the WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning is scheduled to face court martial on Monday, June 3, 2013. They will dress as Lady Justice, blindfolded, with togas and scales, in front of a huge mural depicting Manning with a Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award. They will speak out about how Manning’s revelations have contributed to the group’s work for peace and justice.
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The trial of Army Private First Class and two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning is set to finally begin on Monday, at Fort Meade, Maryland. Supporters are planning a rally for Manning on Saturday, with ABC News reporting that large crowds are expected to come out in a demonstration of support for the intelligence analyst who leaked over 700,000 government and military documents to WikiLeaks in the largest leak in U.S. history. Manning potentially faces up to life in prison if found guilty of the most serious charges against him, aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act. The trial is expected to last three to four months.
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BOSTON (AP) — The American Civil Liberties Union says the federal government has agreed to destroy all data obtained from a computer and other electronic devices seized from an advocate of the Army soldier accused of sending classified U.S. documents to Wikileaks.
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Finance
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Time doesn’t dwell on criticisms of Emanuel’s policies; readers are told that “the Chicago Teachers Union, a power unto itself, loosed its heavy artillery”–which sounds menacing–and that some people “charged that the closures targeted majority-black schools with majority-black faculties.”
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In its toughest sanction yet on pay-to-play-schemes, the Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered Neil M.M. Morrison, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and former top aide to ex-state treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, to pay a $100,000 civil penalty for his role as chief political adviser and fund-raiser for Cahill.
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Goldman Sachs and Glenn Hadden, one of Wall Street’s top traders, have been fined by the CME Group over a Treasury futures trade in 2008.
The CME Group, which runs commodity and futures exchanges, has notified both Goldman and Mr. Hadden, once a trader and partner at Goldman Sachs who now runs the global interest rates desk at Morgan Stanley, that both face fines and other sanctions in connection with the trade, according to a disciplinary action reviewed by The New York Times.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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With immigration reform advancing through Congress, an anti-immigrant network funded by a small group of right-wing foundations is trying to kill reform by pressuring moderate Republicans and appealing to the party’s xenophobic wing. The groups could stymie efforts by some Republicans to appeal to the country’s growing Latino population by moving to the center on immigration.
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Censorship
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Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said.
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Wikimedia Taiwan, a non-profit social group, voiced strong opposition Saturday to Taiwan’s plan to block some overseas Internet services that seriously infringe on copyright.
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Privacy
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The 10-year, $600 million cloud computing contract between Amazon Web Services and the Central Intelligence Agency first reported by FCW is under protest by one of the contract’s initial bidders.
FCW has learned that IBM filed a bid protest on Feb. 26 over the major CIA contract – awarded to AWS in January – and supplemented its protest three times, with the last amended protest filed April 11. Those actions — which are not uncommon on major contracts — are delaying AWS’ plans to build the intelligence agency a private cloud infrastructure, the full scope of which is yet unknown.
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We have long called for changes to the CRB system having seen lives ruined by over reliance on a flawed system. Following from a Court of Appeal ruling in January, this week the Home Office announced a shakeup of the CRB system which will see a much more common sense approach to a system that was ruining people’s lives.
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In the post-9/11 atmosphere of ever-increasing government secrecy and surveillance, the real surprise to me about the Department of Justice’s secret snooping on Associated Press phone records was that it would be such a surprise, given the visibly vast security and intelligence apparatus erected by the U.S. government over the past decade (admirably totted up by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the 2010 Washington Post project Top Secret America and criticized by Glenn Greenwald and others).
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The investigation and arrest of Kim Dotcom continues to show itself to be an operation that was poorly thought out, where clear liberties were taken by law enforcement who so believed the “Dr. Evil” image that the MPAA set up for them that actually following official procedures seemed of little importance. They really seemed to think that they could do anything and Dotcom would cave. But, as he’s challenged a variety of points, and won most of the battles, the carelessness and sloppiness of the whole production keeps getting highlighted over and over again. The latest example: a court has ordered New Zealand police to give Dotcom back “all digital material taken illegally” during the raid, and also “to return anything irrelevant to their investigation” — and they need to do all of this at their own cost.
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A judge has ordered the police to sift through all digital material taken illegally from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and to return anything irrelevant to their investigation- at their own cost.
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You may recall that back in April it was revealed that Google was fighting back against complying with a series of National Security Letters (NSLs), the notorious tool of law enforcement to snoop on people secretly, which has been abused widely. Google’s decision to push back on these NSLs came following a ruling by the same judge, Susan Illston, who had ruled NSLs unconstitutional. Given that ruling, it appeared that Google hoped to get the judge to say that it didn’t need to comply with 19 NSLs it had received.
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The five biggest internet companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, have privately delivered a thinly veiled warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that they will not voluntarily co-operate with the “snooper’s charter”.
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The NSA requested the program. In an interview last week, Harvey Davis, NSA director for installations and logistics, said the agency needs college graduates who understand computing and engineering.
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James Comey becomes just the latest symbol of the Obama legacy: normalizing what was very recently viewed as radical
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As Wired reported last year, the NSA’s new 1.5 million square foot facility will be the home of a major data analysis and crypto-cracking operation.
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Civil Rights
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The British government’s human rights record since the attacks of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq is facing ferocious criticism from a United Nations panel, which warns that prompt action is needed to ensure the country meets its obligations under international law.
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Yonas Fikre, an American Muslim who claims that he was tortured in the United Arab Emirates at the behest of the US government, sued the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department on Thursday. Fikre, whose story was first reported by Mother Jones in April 2012, claims he was abused by local authorities in the UAE after refusing to become an informant for the FBI.
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The news debate moves onto more calls for Internet restrictions debates today, prompted by April Jones’ murderer possessing illegal child abuse images. Some commentators have sought to blame Google – who takedown links to such material – and others have sought to link access to child abuse images to access to pornography in general, advocating restrictions for all adults.
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Whether you think that website blocking is a good idea or not, it is important to at the very least recognise that it has serious, tangible, negative consequences, especially when it is switched on by default at the network level. This post helps demonstrate what some – but by no means all – of these issues are and why they happen.
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Trenchant criticism of the UK by the United Nations over its human rights record would have been major news in the pre-Blair days. One of Blair’s “achievements”, which in the 1990s I should have thought impossible, was to win the acceptance by the public and the media of the practice of torture and other gross abuses by the state.
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Parents in Polk County, Florida are outraged after learning that students in area schools had their irises scanned as part of a new security program without obtaining proper permission.
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The Transportation Security Administration announced it has finished removing from all airports the X-ray technology that produced graphic and controversial images of passengers passing through security screening checkpoints.
In a letter released Thursday, TSA administrator John Pistole told the House Homeland Security committee that as of May 16, all US airports scanners equipped with the ability to produce the penetrating images will now only show a generic outline of a passenger to the operator. A colored box pops up if the full-body scanner detects a potentially forbidden item.
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While the public decides how to deal with Google Glass-wearing cyborgs walking among us, there are already startups trying to add facial recognition to the device. That includes the MedRef for Glass app for Doctors and an API created by Lambda Labs that’s on the way. Unfortunately, apparently due to privacy concerns, a post tonight by the Project Glass team says that it will not approve any app using the tech for release — at least until it has some privacy protections in place. That’s the same standard it previously said would need to be met before it added facial recognition to its own services.
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In fact civil conflicts are usually horribly complex, anent a variety of very bad people all trying to gain or retain power, none of them from an altruistic desire to make the world a better place. There may be ordinary people on the streets with that altruistic desire, being used and manipulated by these men; but it is not the ordinary altruistic people on the streets who ever come to power. Ever.
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The United States’ war on its citizens’ privacy has been so successful in the last decade that now even well-respected judges are stating that privacy is not a right. But it hasn’t stopped there: with the cooperation of allied governments, the US reportedly tested its most sophisticated surveillance software on the citizens of friendly nations.
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Drake accurately describes himself as someone who “became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality.” Someone that has gone through that experience can be expected, at this point, to be calling out the Obama administration attacks on press freedoms.
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All true. But Comey also helped to institutionalize the very program — the National Security Agency’s orderless domestic collection — that his refusal to sanction had put the breaks on. He did not object to the part of the program declassified by the Bush administration. He believed that the president’s Article II power did in fact provide enough cover for the NSA to collect call records from subscribers who were reasonably believed to be connected to overseas terrorists or their associates.
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Today, the California Assembly voted to approve a bill that will help render toothless the federal “indefinite detention” powers under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, by Assemblymember Tim Donnelly, was previously passed unanimously by both the Public Safety and Appropriations Committees and now moves on to the State Senate for concurrence. The final vote was 71-1 (roll call here)
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Here’s my speech yesterday at the European Parliament – talking about why we need a telecoms single market, and what EU action means for roaming, net neutrality and more.
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DRM
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Regular readers will know that there’s a hard press to put DRM in the next version of HTML, which is being standardized at the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), and that this has really grave potential consequences for the open Web that the WC3 has historically fought to build.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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One of the concerns about TAFTA/TTIP is that it would repeat the mistakes of ACTA and SOPA as far as intellectual monopolies were concerned. This led to a call by a group of public interest organizations for things like copyright and patents to be excluded from TAFTA (disclosure: I was involved in the drawing up of the text.)
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Trademarks
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I recall, a few years ago, filmmaker Kevin Smith talking about how the state of NY demanded money because a background player (I think a dancer) in Clerks II was shown wearing an “I ♥ NJ” t-shirt, and NY, somewhat infamously, holds the trademark on “I ♥ NY.” I don’t recall all of the details, but I’m pretty sure Smith said that a significant sum of money had to be paid to the state of NY. Of course, that’s an abuse of trademark law on multiple levels. The likelihood of confusion is likely nil, and even if they were arguing dilution, that seems unlikely as well. The t-shirt was in a movie, not for sale by the movie. Another time, NY threatened the guy who created the I ♥ NY design in the first place when he tried to make a new version after September 11. Because NY is an obnoxious trademark bully, that’s why.
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Copyrights
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Earlier this year, Industry Minister Christian Paradis introduced a bill aimed at ensuring that Canada complies with the discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The bill raises a host of concerns including granting border guards increased powers without court oversight or review. The bill had not been heard from since its introduction, but yesterday Paradis moved that the bill be read a second time and referred to committee for further study.
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On the night of March 23, 2011, four political operatives arrived for dinner at Scarpetta, a posh Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills’ Golden Triangle. They wore DC power suits but ditched the ties—their one concession to LA fashion. For a bunch of hacks more at ease on Capitol Hill than Rodeo Drive, they blended in well enough. Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney had spent their adult lives climbing the rungs of Democratic politics, including a stint together in the Obama White House; pundit and consultant Paul Begala had advised Bill Clinton in the 1990s; Geoff Garin had been a top pollster for some 30 years. A hostess led them through the Mediterranean-themed dining room, all dark woods and tan walls lit by golden glass lamps, then up a flight of stairs to a private room. Awaiting them was the man they hoped would be their bell cow.
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The IP Commission Report on the “theft” of American IP is the gift that keeps on taking. We’ve already discussed the commission’s suggestion that infringers’ computers be loaded up with spyware and malware and the apparent “fact” that China has singlehandendly destroyed every IP-reliant industry in America.
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Last year, we noted that one of the reasons why Psy’s Gangnam Style video and song had become so incredibly popular was Psy’s decision not to crack down on copies at all. Instead, he’s mostly celebrated the copycats and parodies, talking about how awesome they were. But, of course, once a major record label gets involved… TorrentFreak reports that Universal Music is demanding $42,000 from four mayors in Denmark who teamed up to produced a video of the four of them dancing to the song.
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Tony Smith had a porn problem. A 27-year-old nursing student in Collinsville, Ill., Smith was listening to music and doing homework one night last August when he heard a knock on his apartment door. He opened it and an imposing-looking man with a flashlight handed him a lawsuit and his business card. A name was written in pen on the back. “Give this guy a call, he can help you get through this,” the man told Smith. “He’s looking out for people like you.” Smith turned it over and read the name: John Steele.
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In an attempt to balance copyright restrictions and ever-present camera phones, some museums are loosening their ‘no photography’ policies
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.31.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux enthusiast Sebastian Satke has taken GNU/Linux to new heights — literally. He summited Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, with a GNU/Linux flag in tow.
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16.84 million of 55.01 million PCs shipped with an OS in 2011 bore GNU/Linux. That’s 30.6%. Only a million or so shipped without an OS but I would bet a good share of them had GNU/Linux as well. Good show, China. I doubt “8″ would have helped M$’s numbers in 2012.
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If a national government of a substantial nation can run on GNU/Linux, FLOSS and open standards, anyone can.
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Desktop
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Earlier this year, Google did something almost ground-breaking when it introduced the Chromebook Pixel. Sure, the Chromebook line as a whole has existed for a few years, but the entire premise of such a range of notebooks revolved around only a couple of design goals. One of those was accessibility, and almost by default, the other was affordability. The original Chromebooks were priced at $500 or less — in some cases, far less. The reason seemed obvious: Chrome OS was a great operating system for those who did little more than browse the Web and connect to cloud-based services such as Evernote, but it served less of a purpose in the productivity-minded “real world.”
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It’s no secret that I find Chromebooks to be extremely useful laptops. I have come to that conclusion from actually using them, and most of them on the market at that. All of that hands-on usage led to my hitting the One-Click button on Amazon to buy the Samsung Chromebook for $249.
It’s the end of the month and that means packing up test laptops to send back to the companies that sent them for review. This month the returns include the HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook, the Chromebook Pixel, and the Lenovo ThinkPad T432s.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Mint 15 is here! There’s a new Fedora-based respin for the Raspberry Pi. The city of Munich and the country of Australia make great progress in moving towards open source and there’s a new Humble Bundle. Hear our discoveries and your own Open Ballot opinions, plus, we welcome a new member to the team.
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Kernel Space
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Intel’s Open Source Technology Center has released an open source tool to monitor and control temperature in tablets, ultrabooks and laptops. The Linux Thermal Daemon can use the latest thermal drivers in the Linux kernel, not just the standard cpufreq subsystem, to provide CPU temperature control.
Due to constrained system size, small form factor devices reach their maximum temperature with relatively less load than desktops and servers. And as they get smaller and thinner, traditional cooling methods such as heat sinks and fans are being designed out of the devices. Developers can’t rely only on hardware and BIOS to regulate temperature without negatively impacting performance.
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Graphics Stack
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To join the GeForce GTX TITAN and GTX 780 as the newest high-performance NVIDIA GPUs, rolled out this morning was the GeForce GTX 770. NVIDIA has introduced the GTX 770 as a new high-performance graphics card that’s priced at $399 USD.
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For seeing where the current OpenGL driver performance stands for Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa development code were tested across four different processors to stress the HD 2000, HD 2500, HD 3000, and HD 4000 graphics capabilities atop Ubuntu.
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The accepted Google Summer of Code 2013 projects concerning X.Org, Nouveau, and Mesa / Gallium3D is now known. There’s some exciting stuff!
Martin Peres on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation has shared the X.Org GSoC 2013 projects on the X.Org mailing list. The projects to be attempted this summer include:
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While the Linux 3.10 kernel is only mid-way through its development cycle, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has already begun piling up many changes they would like merged for their DRM graphics driver into Linux 3.11.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Steam now carries all the versions of the game: PC, Mac and Linux
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Introversion Software have let loose Prison Architect Alpha 10. Included for your prison designing pleasure is the ability to play the game on Linux, share your prisons through the Steam Workshop, and cause absolute mayhem with prison riots that you can then quell with legions of baton-wielding riot police.
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Welcome to the The Funding Crowd. If last week we haven’t a single new bundle and many of them had finished, this time around it’s quite the opposite: except for the Get Loaded 72-hour and IndieGameStand’s Zigfrak deals, no last week’s bundles or massive sales have finished yet.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today we release the Qt Creator 2.8 beta. Thanks to the 60 individual contributors to this version, it comes with a large amount of new “stuff” and lots and lots of bug fixes.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.10 is expected in September and some of its newest features are beginning to appear in the 3.9 development branch. Version 3.9.2 is expected this week and Matthias Clasen takes us on a little tour.
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New Releases
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wattOS-R7 has been released – . The 64bit and 32bit versions are available for download immediately. Spread the words to friends and have fun with the latest version. Help is always welcome in the forums.
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The Chakra Project team is very happy to announce the third release of Chakra Benz. “Benz” is the name of a series of Chakra releases that follow the KDE Software Compilation 4.10 series.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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But if you want to look at an alternative for any reason (perhaps you just don’t like Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth, you don’t like Cinnamon or MATE, you prefer a smaller, more “personal” distribution, one where you might be able to get involved and really make a contribution, or you are just curious), I would strongly encourage anyone to give Mageia 3 a try, it is very likely to impress you, as it did me.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (RHT) makes lofty claims about its IaaS and Open Hybrid Cloud strategy. Is this a response to VMware (VMW) vCloud Hybrid Services? Absolutely yes. Here’s why.
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Red Hat logoTheStreet restated their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a report released on Tuesday, Analyst Ratings Network.com reports.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical wants to put Ubuntu onto our TVs, tablets and smartphones, as well as our PCs. Barry Collins weighs up its chances of success.
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Recently my Olivetti Olibook S1300 – a gift of Salvo Mizzi, of the Working Capital fame – died. I decided it was great time to face the experience of making my Acer Aspire one printing. While below you’ll find a detailed report about my journey to make possible to print via Linux with a Canon LBP 810, first I wish to share my thoughts about what all this means.
Plug&Play maybe a frustrating experience if something goes wrong for some reason, since most of the times you have little chances to fix an issue if that arise. On the contrary with Linux you’re given the unique opportunity to be in full control of your destiny, and you can litterally build your own future (no pun intended).
As you can easily figure out yourself – or if you don’t have the time just go on and read my painful experience to make it print – freedom really come at a price here. Note that the problem is not that by bad luck my old Canon printer for some weird reason doesn’t come with Linux drivers. To be honest the LBP810 doesn’t even come with Mac drivers.
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Canonical wants to put Ubuntu onto our TVs, tablets and smartphones, as well as our PCs. Barry Collins weighs up its chances of success.
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The votes have been counted and most of you want Ubuntu on your smartphones, according to our unscientific poll. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since an earlier poll showed a preference for Ubuntu on tablets as well. Not bad for an OS that’s not really available yet on those hardware platforms.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is a comprehensive and beginner-friendly Linux distribution. To that extent it’s a rival to Ubuntu – and in fact it’s derived from the Ubuntu codebase, which means all the same software and drivers can be used. Releases run to a similar six-monthly schedule, with periodic long-term support releases following Ubuntu’s. This newest release is Linux Mint 15, known to its friends as Olivia.
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The Linux Mint project has released the latest version of its Ubuntu-based Linux distribution and its developers are setting their sights on making the distribution the go-to choice for all Linux users on the desktop. With Ubuntu and Canonical apparently being focused on the mobile and entertainment spaces, Linux Mint 15 has a shot at accomplishing this goal. The H investigates whether “the most ambitious release since the start of the project” delivers on it.
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Enea® (NASDAQ OMX Nordic:ENEA), is today announcing Enea Linux v3.0 – a comprehensive cross-development tool chain and runtime environment with guaranteed performance and quality of service (QoS), flexible support offerings, worldwide support and maintenance, and expert professional services.
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Avnet Electronics Marketing has begun shipping an improved, production-grade version of its community-supported, Linux-ready Xilinx Zynq-7020-based development kit. The $395 ZedBoard includes a Zynq-7020 SoC with dual 667MHz Cortex-A9 cores and FPGA programmable logic, and offers gigabit Ethernet, USB OTG, HDMI, A/V ports, and more.
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Enea announced a new version of its embedded Linux distribution compatible with Yocto Project 1.4 code, and available with extensive service and customization options. The Enea Linux 3.0 cross-development tool chain and runtime environment also features varying levels of real-time Linux support for guaranteed performance and quality of service (QoS).
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Google has eventually succeeded in bringing the pure Google or Nexus experience to the flagship phones by companies like Samsung, Sony and HTC. HTC has announced that its ‘hottest’ device HTC One will come get a Google Nexus edition, which means users will be experiencing the ‘pure’ Android experience instead of HTC Sense skin.
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The new facility for the Galaxy S maker is apparently set to open in Espoo, Finland, on June 13, and will focus on “advanced technologies.”
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Android
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Samsung has officially confirmed the Galaxy S4 mini, a smaller version of the flagship smartphone Galaxy S4. The android phone manufacturer will target the mid range market with this moderate version of its flagship phone.
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DARPA announced a sensor reference system device based on a new Android-based sensor processing core called the Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT). The initial ADAPT reference device, called UGS (unattended ground sensor), is designed as the basis for a series of lower-cost, more upgradable sensor devices for military applications.
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A growing number of manufacturers are integrating smartphone operating systems into home phone handsets. But is this software actually appropriate for use as part of a landline setup in the domestic environment? Here is an overview of the ins and outs of this trend.
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According to the noted psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, it takes three positive emotions to balance out a single negative. As Fast Company reports, Fredrickson’s findings are at the heart of Google’s Android design philosophy. When considering any user interface decision, designers working on Android have to work out how to inform users of an issue — such as reaching the final homescreen — without making them feel like they’ve done something wrong, meaning pop-ups and other invasive techniques are a no-go. For the homescreen problem, Google settled on the now-familiar glimmering animation, which subtly shows that a user has no more homescreens to swipe across to, while rewarding them with an artistic flourish.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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A KDE Plasma Active powered tablet has been in works for quite some time. Aaron Seigo, the lead behind the project has given a quick update on the Plasma Active powered tablet hardware.
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Per Aaron Seigo, the once-hotly anticipated –and still hotly-anticipated-by-me — Vivaldi tablet is in the very final stages of design. Many of the necessary components are in place and the new design belongs almost entirely to the Plasma Active team. Many of you might remember that we’ve covered Plasma Active and the Vivaldi tablet quite a bit when it was a hot topic. We even went so far as to purchase the reference hardware that most closely resembled the Vivaldi tablet. Aaron will have you think that was only months ago, and he’s not lying, but those months are now dangerously close to turning into years.
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It’s been more than a year since KDE developer Aaron Seigo announced plans to build a tablet designed to run open Mer Linux and the KDE Plasma Active environment. The Vivaldi tablet project’s hit a few speed bumps since then, but this week the team has a mostly working prototype.
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The KDE Vivaldi Tablet, which has been a project led by Aaron Seigo for having a Linux-friendly tablet powered by Plasma Active and Mer Core, is finally getting closer to hopefully seeing the light of day.
This project has been going on for more than a year and originally was conceived as the KDE Spark Tablet, but then renamed to Vivaldi. In September of last year as the tablet project was struggling, they switched to a new design.
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Lately I’ve noticed a number of new themes popping up for Plasma Desktop, which is quite cool.
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Apple shipped half of all tablets in the first quarter, but the popularity of low-cost Android tablets in China is boosting that OS.
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OpenRelativity, the game engine designed by the MIT Game Lab for its educational game A Slower Speed of Light, is being released as an open-source toolset.
The engine was designed to model Einstein’s special relativity in a game environment, to communicate its principles in an exploratory format. “Education can be assisted through the use of games and other interactive media,” says MIT Game Lab’s Rik Eberhardt. “Especially for topics that frequently are hard to understand and visualize.”
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Several users of the latest build of Chromium, the open source core of the Chrome browser from Google, have taken note of the fact that Google is adding in-app payment functionality to Chrome. As noted on The Next Web: “The addition was first spotted by developer and Google open-source Chromium evangelist François Beaufort. He points to a Chromium code review titled ‘Make sure the Google wallet in-app payment support app is always installed.”
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Mozilla
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One of the most common software vulnerabilities found across all modern browsers is use-after-free code vulnerabilities. With a use-after-free vulnerability an attacker can potentially leverage allocated memory to launch an attack.
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SaaS/Big Data
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It’s a rare enterprise cloud manager today who isn’t already familiar with OpenStack, the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing project for building public, private and hybrid clouds. Included in OpenStack are several key components dedicated to virtual machine provisioning and management, storage, virtual disk management and more, but recently a new service made its debut.
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Databases
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Principal creator of MySQL Monty Widenius is concerned about the consequences of certain corporate attitudes towards open-source software.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Through out the last couple of years we have seem quite a few suggestions to a new and more modern look and feel for LibreOffice. Some of these initiatives has already found its way into the product, and you can e.g., see a much more light weight ruler in Writer and the whole sphere around using and handling templates has been reworked with a new design. Each of these examples are small steps ahead towards a more modern layout. But when will we see something more like a jump into the future?
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CMS
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The Drupal.org security team says it has discovered unauthorised access to Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org account information which has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords. No credit card information was stored on the servers, but the investigation is ongoing and the team says it “may learn about other types of information compromised”.According to Drupal.org, there are over 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org.
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Semantria announces a new innovative Open Source Plug-in for WordPress that will assist bloggers, writers, and authors in streamlining their publication processes. As a leader in cloud based text and sentiment analysis, Semantria is excited about the application of its services to a major blogging and publishing platform.
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Education
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MIT Game Lab has released the source code for an engine it hopes will inspire developers to create educational games exploring special relativity.
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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Universities and companies are being given the opportunity to use the open source RF hardware platform, MyriadRF and configurable transceiver technology developed by Lime Microsystems as a result of a tie-up with Europractice, a government-funded project of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.
Europractice will promote Lime’s LMS6002D field programmable RF transceiver and associated boards for use in research and teaching of wireless technology to its member establishments throughout Europe.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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Champions of open access to publicly funded academic research had something to celebrate last week. Creative Commons is reporting (with just a touch of cautious optimism) the progress of California’s Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609, for short), which has successfully moved through the State’s Assembly Appropriations Committee and is ready for a vote. If passed, the bill—which requires the final copy of any peer-reviewed research funded by California tax dollars to be made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication—will become a matter for the California State Senate (see the Public Library of Science blog and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for more detail).
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Open Hardware
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A few weeks back, Arduino announced its first-ever robotics kit. We’re glad to say you can finally buy your very own open source machination online through the Maker Shed for $275.
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Insane legal actions over relatively mild pranks are coming fast and furious these days. We just recently discussed the 17 years old high school girl staring down felony charges over a childish year book prank. There have also been several cases of those that fall victim to pranks turning to intellectual property law as a way to hide their gullibility. There’s something — embarrassment perhaps — that spurs victims into unreasonable legal action once the trap has been sprung.
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Science
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What’s the best predictor of success? IQ, talent, socioeconomic status, luck?
Nope. It’s ‘grit,’ more than anything else.
Through her research at the University of Pennsylvania — and firsthand experience teaching in New York City’s public schools —psychologist Angela Duckworth has found that the ability to withstand stress and move past failures to achieve a goal is the best indicator of future success.
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Meteorite impacts thousands of years ago may have helped to inspire ancient religion.
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If a dangerous asteroid appears to be on a collision course for Earth, one option is to send a spacecraft to destroy it with a nuclear warhead. Such a mission, which would cost about $1 billion, could be developed from work NASA is already funding, a prominent asteroid defense expert says.
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Health/Nutrition
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Protesters from at least 268 cities in 40 countries participated in the May 25 international outcry against that company.
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Hackers from the Anonymous collective claimed to have infiltrated the website for the biotech giant Monsanto, which has been the subject of recent international protests.
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When it’s suggested that our food system be comprised of millions of small, organic gardens, there’s almost always someone who says that it isn’t realistic. And they’ll quip something along the lines of, “There’s no way you could feed the world’s growing population with just gardens, let alone organically.” Really? Has anybody told Russia this?
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Security
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For professional security researchers, participating in bug bounty programs is one means of earning money on the side. It is also the easiest means of building up street-cred. And many companies take advantage of their skills, recognizing that its either they find and fix bugs in their products first or the bad guys do and exploit them. For Black Hats, the underground market for exploit code is a very lucrative one.
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On Wednesday night, payment processor PayPal closed the security hole in its portal that had been publicly known for five days. The company had been aware of the vulnerability for about two weeks. The hole was a critical one: it allowed attackers to inject arbitrary JavaScript code into the PayPal site, potentially enabling them to harvest users’ access credentials.
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After having first decided against forcing a suspect to decrypt a number of hard drives that were believed to be his and to contain child pornography, a U.S. judge has changed his mind and has now ordered the suspect to provide law enforcement agents heading the investigation with a decrypted version of the contents of his encrypted data storage system, or the passwords needed to decrypt forensic copies of those storage devices.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A polio vaccination campaign worker was shot to death in Pakistan on Tuesday, which The New York Times wasted no time in reporting. What the Times article neglected to mention was that the killing followed a CIA operation in which agents orchestrated a fake vaccination program in order to gain entry to Osama Bin Laden’s home.
[...]
Like some kind of Billy Mays infomercial—‘But wait, there’s more!’—the Times’ shameful coverage doesn’t end there. They go on to say that, “Also [in addition to the Taliban], religious extremists claim that the real aim of vaccination campaigns is to sterilize Pakistan’s Muslim population.” The implication is again that Pakistan is populated with menacing religious zealots whose fundamentalism stands in the way of scientific progress. Characterizations such as these conform very nicely to the view that clashes between the West (i.e. NATO) and the Middle East are not rooted in any sort of real economic or political grievances (e.g., the U.S.’ installation of dictators like the Shah in Iran; or the U.S.’ theft of oil resources), but rather “a clash of civilizations”, as Foreign Affairs once put it. The view that there are irrevocable religious differences between the West and the Middle East is very useful to Western leaders seeking to justify acts of aggression, like the invasion of Iraq.
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While efforts at gun control are still being fought, children’s advocates are urging parents and communities to take their own steps to protect kids.
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The number of gun deaths in the U.S. since the Newtown elementary school massacre has exceeded the total number of U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war.
According to a tally of gun deaths from Slate, the number of people killed since the Dec. 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary is now 4,499. The number of U.S. armed forces killed during the Iraq war was 4,409, according to the Defense Department.
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While serving as deputy executive director of the CIA under the Bush administration, President Obama’s nominee for CIA chief and current counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan “had detailed, contemporaneous knowledge” of the use of torture on detainees in US prisons, Reuters reports.
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The UK Government faced fresh questions last night over what it knew about CIA-linked flights which landed in the north and north-east at the height of the US “extraordinary rendition” programme.
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Researchers looking at the use of CIA-linked planes for prisoner transfers in the “war on terror” have highlighted “conclusive” evidence of landings at Scottish airports.
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Thus, in the mid-1970s the Church and Pike Committees revealed abuses by the CIA, FBI and NSA, including “domestic spying on Americans, harassment and disruption of targeted individuals and groups, assassination plots targeting foreign leaders, infiltration and manipulation of media and business.” As a result, Congress created in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which greatly limited the surveillance of U.S. citizens.
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The purpose of the stepped-up military activity and basing arrangements are surrounded in secrecy, misinformation and outright lies—including the claim by Defence Minister Stephen Smith that “there are no US bases in Australia.” In fact, the new facilities being opened up represent an expansion of the US military’s longstanding use of Australia, facilitated by successive Labor and Liberal-led governments since World War II, for some of its most critical bases in the world.
Chief among them is what is known as Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, which was established in central Australia near the town of Alice Springs in 1970. Pine Gap is one of three major satellite tracking stations operated by US intelligence agencies and military. The others are located in Colorado and Britain.
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Through his lawyer, the former agent who spoke out against torture, details federal prison experience
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Extraordinary renditions include arbitrary abductions and extrajudicial transfers from one country to another. Targeted individuals are called terrorists.
Corroborating evidence isn’t needed. What Washington says goes. Rogue hegemons operate that way.
International, constitutional, and US statute laws don’t matter. They’re spurned. Victims are guilty by accusation. It’s official US policy.
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The CIA recently had another embarrassing reminder that it remains a spy agency without many competent spies. This incident occurred in Russia where a CIA agent was expelled from the country on May 14th after getting caught while trying to carry out an embarrassingly amateur operation. The man (operating as a junior State Department employee at the U.S. embassy) had been arrested earlier while trying to recruit a senior Russian security official. That offer failed and the CIA man did not detect a trap. Russia later revealed that this also happened back in January but was kept quiet so as to maintain good relations with the U.S. But now the Russians saw an opportunity to use these sloppy CIA operations for domestic propaganda, to remind Russians that in one area at least they are better than the Americans. To add insult to injury the Russians also showed their displeasure by revealing the name of the senior CIA official (the “resident” in spy-speak) in Russia. This fellow will also have to leave now, which is what the Russians apparently want. They hold the CIA resident responsible for this sloppy and embarrassing use of spy craft. By mutual consent, Russia and the U.S. usually keep the names of their own and the other nation’s residents secret. That rule is only breached when you want to send an important message to the other side.
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Cablegate
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Julian Assange and his lawyer Michael Ratner joined Al Jazeera’s The Stream today, to field questions from journalist pundits and members of the media organization’s online social community. The white-haired punk rock persona of open information has spent nearly a year living at Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he Skyped in from, with Ratner present in the studio.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the foreign minister’s “ignorance is only eclipsed by his arrogance”.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy last year to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sex assault and rape allegations. He fears that Sweden will agree to extradite him to the United States. On Tuesday, Ecuador’s foreign minister accused the British government of trampling on Assange’s rights by refusing to allow him to travel to Ecuador, which granted him political asylum almost a year ago. Joining us from the embassy, Assange addresses what he calls “attacks on all fronts against WikiLeaks,” from a monetary embargo involving some of the world’s largest financial firms to a new Hollywood documentary on WikiLeaks, “We Steal Secrets.”
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More than three years after his arrest, Army Private First Class Bradley Manning faces court martial on Monday, a military proceeding that has been widely criticized for its secretive nature.
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Questions have already arisen as to whether that statement constituted perjury given that Holder personally approved a warrant that listed a reporter James Rosen as a co-conspirator. And now the House Judiciary Committee is investigating Holder’s statements.
But there may be another more clear cut case of Holder “hearing of” a potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material – Wikileaks.
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Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks is slick and dangerous in the same way Zero Dark Thirty is. People walk away finding it “balanced”, and thinking that certain conduct (whistleblowing and torture, respectively) is “bad” or “good”. We live in such a perverse moment in society that a film is portrayed as “balanced” when it paints whistleblowing as deviant behavior.
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David House had filed a lawsuit accusing authorities of violating his constitutional rights when he was stopped at a Chicago airport in 2010 while returning from abroad.
House is a founding member of The Bradley Manning Support Network, which raised money for Manning’s legal defense.
“The seizure of David House’s computer is a chilling example of the government’s overbroad ability to conduct a search at the border that intrudes into a person’s political beliefs and associations,” said John Reinstein, an ACLU attorney.
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The US government’s intimidation of anyone even remotely connected to Wikileaks is somewhat insane. The difficulty that former Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum has every time he crosses the border is well documented. Two years ago, we noted that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had seized David House’s laptop as he re-entered the country from a vacation. House has been a friend and supporter of Bradley Manning, and the feds kept his laptop for 49 days, and only returned it after the ACLU sent a sternly worded letter. House then sued the government. The government’s defense was basically “we’re the US fucking government and we can do what we want with your laptops at the border” (slight paraphrase). The court, however, didn’t quite see it that way, and noted that politically motivated searches and seizures may be unconstitutional, under the First Amendment. This is important, because courts have let DHS/ICE ignore the 4th Amendment at the border, but here the court said that intimidating House and others could violate their 1st Amendment rights to freedom of association.
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The federal government has agreed to destroy all data obtained from a computer and other electronic devices seized from an outspoken advocate of an Army private accused of sending more than 700,000 classified U.S. documents to Wikileaks, the American Civil Liberties Union announced Thursday.
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Ecuadoran Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said he would travel to London to meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, living at Ecuador’s embassy for nearly a year to avoid extradition.
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EnviroLeaks. PirateLeaks. BrusselsLeaks. RuLeaks. QuebecLeaks. BaltiLeaks. And that’s just a few of them.
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The establishment of a centralised database of Indian citizens such as the Unique Identification (UID) project will result in the loss of freedoms on a “societal scale,” according to Jacob Appelbaum, a staunch supporter of the WikiLeaks project.
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In this 40-minute web exclusive interview, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks discusses his more than 300 days in the Ecuadorean embassy, the U.S. Justice Department spying on journalists, the future of WikiLeaks and Visa’s financial blockade on WikiLeaks.
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An American spy aircraft fired a missiles in Pakistan North Waziristan tribal region early Wednesday and killed seven people, security officials said.
Two missiles were fired at a house in Chashma village of Miranshah, the headquarters of North Waziristan, killing seven people. Four people died at the scene and three people died in hospital and wounds.
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Obama used the first part of his much-hyped counterterrorism speech last week to outline what he said was a new, restrictive policy on drone strikes. But as Fred Kaplan explained, in reality the policy itself was neither new nor restrictive. News of today’s strike is all the more sensitive because in the lead-up to the president’s policy speech the focus was on whether and how to change the practice of using drones to kill terrorist suspects in countries outside formal war zones, namely, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
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Finance
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The US government through aggressive – and in my view illegal – pressure on banks and financial services providers managed to cut off Wikileaks from almost all avenues of sources of international donation funding by individuals. You cannot trust governments to have the power to control all funds transfers. Governments will abuse that power.
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Nasdaq has settled with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for $10 million (£6.6m) over “poor systems and decision-making” during the Facebook initial public offering (IPO).
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The top ten tax deductions, credits and exclusions will keep $12 trillion out of federal government coffers over the next decade, and several of them mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans, a new study from the Congressional Budget Office shows.
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Canadian bankers were among some of the highest-paid banking executives in North America last year, with three in the Top 10, according to a new list compiled by Bloomberg Markets magazine.
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Eileen Stokes and her family live a basic life, one of 16 Irish Traveller families settled on an established halting site at the edge of Knocknaheeny, a run-down northern suburb of Cork.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker got a boost last week from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in its annual Rich States, Poor States report. Despite Bureau of Labor Statistics data putting Wisconsin in 44th place for private-sector job creation, ALEC placed the state as 15th in the country in its ranking of economic outlook, giving Walker — a former ALEC member — a boost as he lays the groundwork for a re-election campaign and a possible Presidential bid.
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A Wisconsin appellate court has overturned one decision by a lower court finding the state’s voter ID law unconstitutional, but the legislation remains blocked, with a separate challenge to the law pending before a different appellate court. Despite upholding the voter ID law, the judge deciding today’s case appeared to imply that there could be a different outcome for a challenge that provides more evidence of the law’s burdens on the right to vote.
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Censorship
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A tech-savvy China-based Redditor has spotted a hassle-free way of ensuring he or she is always able to bypass the Great Firewall, even when out and about, using the Raspberry Pi to connect to a virtual private network (VPN).
VPNs are a necessity for foreigners living in the People’s Republic who want to access sites prohibited by the country’s ubiquitous internet censorship apparatus – business users and consumers alike have come to rely on them to connect to a banned site.
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Currently ranked 149th globally in terms of press freedom, alongside Iraq and Myanmar, the Singapore government has chosen to further tighten its grip on the media instead of letting up.
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Websites that regularly report on Singapore including Yahoo News will have to get a license from June 1, putting them on par with newspapers and television news outlets, in a move seen by some as a bid to rein in free-wheeling Internet news.
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Most actors are good at deception. But Matthew Rhys – a Welshman playing a Russian pretending to be American – takes things to extremes in ITV’s new US spy thriller, The Americans. He talks to Craig McLean.
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Privacy
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All-flash array upstart Pure Storage has received the blessing of the CIA after the spooks’ venture capital arm In-Q-Tel made an investment in the firm.
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While no computer networks are impenetrable, federal agencies like the FBI, DOD and NSA devote significant resources to guard their computer networks, and also have in place rules to protect sensitive data.
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It is not clear how often the government has obtained communications records of reporters. While Fox News was informed nearly three years ago about the subpoena for call logs for five lines related to Rosen – apparently after the phone company had already provided them – it did not publicly disclose the action. Instead, it emerged only this month when court papers were unsealed that also showed that the government had separately obtained a warrant for the contents of Rosen’s private email account. A lawyer and spokesmen for Fox did not respond to requests for comment.
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Many people fear that the government will use the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse to push more surveillance on us. However, the National Security Agency has spied on American citizens since at least 2001, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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This week has seen an extraordinary deluge of comment on the Snooper’s Charter, seemingly co-ordinated by the Home Office. A succession of hardline Home Office sympathisers have sought to link the events at Woolwich with a need to spy on every citizen: despite the fact that the perpetrator was known to the police.
Even MI5 agents have declared that the Snooper’s Charter could not have prevented Woolwich, and that calls for its revival are a “cheap argument”
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New details have emerged about a secretive unit inside the National Security Agency called Tailored Access Operations that hacks into foreign computers to conduct cyber-espionage. According to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article titled “How the U.S. Government Hacks the World,” the Pentagon hackers harvest nearly 2.1 million gigabytes every hour.
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The key role NSA hackers play in intelligence gathering makes it difficult for Washington to pressure other nations—China in particular—to stop hacking U.S. companies to mine their databanks for product details and trade secrets. In recent months the Obama administration has tried to shame China by publicly calling attention to its cyber-espionage program, which has targeted numerous companies, including Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), and Intel (INTC), to steal source code and other secrets. This spring, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traveled to Beijing to press Chinese officials about the hacking. National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon is scheduled to visit China on May 26.
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The whole purpose of an organization like the National Security Agency (NSA) is to know things far enough ahead of time that its human nodes are never surprised. Certainly that’s a big part of the reason the agency has been building a heavily fortified, $2 billion data center on the thinly populated, dry mountain plain just south of Salt Lake City.
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Dreamt up by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson in 1991, Enemy Of The State follows the exploits of naughty NSA director Thomas Reynolds (played by professional scene chewer Jon Voight), who, angry that he can’t blackmail a congressman into supporting a law giving the NSA greater snooping powers, decides to kill him instead and make it look like a heart attack.
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Much of the details of NSA’s work must be kept secret, but processes are in place to let leaders like John talk about the agency, which means when he speaks it can be a great opportunity to learn about an important agency.
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Almost needless to say, Republicans sensing an Obama weakness are going along for the ride — even many who thought Bush attorney general Alberto Gonzales’ threat to prosecute New York Times reporters for revealing the existence of a massive NSA eavesdropping operation was a terrific idea.
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The FBI wants a new law that will make it easier to wiretap the Internet. Although its claim is that the new law will only maintain the status quo, it’s really much worse than that. This law will result in less-secure Internet products and create a foreign industry in more-secure alternatives. It will impose costly burdens on affected companies. It will assist totalitarian governments in spying on their own citizens. And it won’t do much to hinder actual criminals and terrorists.
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Media outlets have awakened to the serious threats posed to journalism, but show little sign of doing anything about it
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Economic cyber-espionage is particularly thorny point of discussion because the US, unlike China, distinguishes between attacks on private industry and more bread and butter political and military espionage. The US would like to limit Chinese theft of intellectual property from American companies, but is not particularly interested in negotiating any constraints over US intelligence gathering. As Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, put it: “You spy, we spy, but you just steal the wrong stuff.’ That’s a hard conversation.”
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AP and others are reporting that President Obama plans to nominate, for FBI Director, Republican James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General under then AG John Ashcroft, during some of the darkest days of the George W. Bush Administration.
The news offer a moment to revisit what a real White House scandal looked like — back when Republicans had no interest in them and back when there were real investigative Congressional hearings and no need to create pretend “whistleblowers” in order to gin up political “outrage” and “scandal”!
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In a major admission, the Attorney-General’s Department has revealed Australia’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies are seeking the legal power to break into internet routing encryption services such as Tor, after admitting the centerpiece of its proposed national security reforms, data retention, will be “trivially easy” to defeat.
The admission by officials to Senate Estimates last night will give rise to further concerns that the department, which has systematically and aggressively expanded the powers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies at the expense of civil liberties and privacy, wants far stronger powers to regulate the internet and break into encrypted systems in order to keep an eye on what Australians are doing online.
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Comey resigned from Bridgewater in February and is currently serving at Columbia University as senior researcher and lecturer. Comey is a registered Republican and has served as Deputy Attorney General under the Bush administration. During that time, Comey received high praise for his vicious opposition of Bush’s no holds barred surveillance program. Reports say that he had threatened to quit if the NSA implemented the intrusive program. He was also against the interrogation tactics practiced under the Bush regime.
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Indeed, the stigma associated with offensive cyber activity is breaking down, now that cyber attacks have exploded in frequency and scale. The banks are now asking the Feds to join the fight, so DHS, FBI and NSA are trying to figure out how to collaborate, without going to jail themselves for hacking or disclosing classified data.
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Big Brother has become more emboldened than ever with the recent revelation that the Justice Department had obtained from telephone companies the records of Associated Press and other reporters to investigate an alleged national security leak, according to a report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
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The Justice Department may soon be forced to reveal a classified document that details unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. The Justice Department has fought to keep the document secret for about a year, but a recent court order demands that they respond to a formal request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by next week, June 7, 2013.
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In October 2008, a 39-year-old former U.S. navy linguist who worked at a National Security Agency (NSA) centre in Georgia went on ABC News and blew the whistle on himself and his fellow NSA operators for listening in on the private conversations of hundreds of American aid workers and soldiers calling home to the United States from Iraq.
“Hey, check this out,” David Murfee Faulk says he would be told. “There’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out.”
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Well, put out is not quite the right phrase, because the super-secret NSA won’t tell you anything about what they are doing with your tax money unless forced to.
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Civil Rights
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The father of a Chechen immigrant killed in Florida while being interrogated by the FBI about his ties to a Boston Marathon bombings suspect said Thursday that the U.S. agents killed his son ‘‘execution-style.’’
At news conference in Moscow, Abdul-Baki Todashev showed journalists 16 photographs that he said were of his son, Ibragim, in a Florida morgue. He said his son had six gunshot wounds to his torso and one to the back of his head and the pictures were taken by his son’s friend, Khusen Taramov.
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ORGCon2013 is a great place to find about new threats to our online rights – and ways to combat them. One of these issues is the Digital Arms Trade, a new area for ORG, but one that is increasingly gaining attention and action. We’re delighted that Eric King of Privacy International, Hauke Gierow, Reporters without Borders and Simone Halink, Bits of Freedom will be sharing their expertise at the conference.
The Internet is a tool for communication that has been shown over and over again to be a source of empowerment. It connects the LGBT teenager who is being bullied to find support and a network of friends online, it connects the activists suffering under oppressive regimes to one another, and allows groups on the ground to communicate human rights abuses to the world.
But the trade in surveillance technology undermines this potential and treats this technology as a tool for governments to surveil citizens and control their communications.
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…governmental action against leaks and the constitutional right of the press to inform the public.
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Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is currently on his nationwide “I’m probably running for president” tour. He’s made the requisite stops in the early election states of Iowa and New Hampshire, courting the GOP faithful and bringing the figurative freezers full of red meat to throw their way. Demonstrating impressive political savvy, he’s also making a habit of making bold statements that set him apart from potential Establishment competitors from both sides of the aisle.
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Obama’s speech included a full-throated defense of drone strikes. Disturbingly, the speech all but wrote off the hundreds – if not thousands – of civilians who died from U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other nations. Obama claimed that as president, he “must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies [civilian causalities from drone strikes] against the alternatives.” He followed this assertion with the equally bizarre justification, “Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians.” This is the Barack Doctrine: To save the civilians who would die in terrorist attacks, we need to kill them before the terrorists do.
Although the U.S. media already clamors over the very minor changes to the president’s drone program – the Los Angeles Times called it “throttling back on drones” – these changes will do little to nothing in reducing civilian casualties. The president calls for tougher standards when deciding to launch drone strikes. This requires “a near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured,” according to White House staff.
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This leads me to more salient matters. While my local press corps was babbling about some ancient history-Michael Jackson-related minutia bullshit, another media storm was brewing. Apparently the Associated Press and Fox News recently found themselves on the business end of the Obama Administration’s hostility toward journalists. The AP learned the Justice Department searched troves of their phone records. Meantime, Fox News’ James Rosen had his personal email account scoured by the DOJ and he’s being called an “aider and abettor” and “co-conspirator” in a criminal case regarding classified document leaks.
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A Catholic seminary in Germany says it is investigating claims that trainee priests made anti-Semitic jokes, played far-right music and gave Nazi salutes.
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In one level, Blazkowicz discovers some Nazi plans. He looks over some documents. They’re written in Hebrew. He’s able to translate.
The hints are there that B.J. Blazkowicz, video game killer of Nazis since his debut in 1992′s Wolfenstein 3D, is Jewish.
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From Jeremy Hammond to Bradley Manning and the AP, Obama’s ‘assault on journalism’ is a threat to our democracy
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In 1996, the newspaper and its fledgling website published a jaw-dropping series called “Dark Alliance,” in which Webb drew a connection between the Central Intelligence Agency and the crack cocaine epidemic plaguing U.S. inner cities.
The series was not well received by the nation’s top newspapers. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A. Times all attacked Webb’s reporting, and his career sharply declined. He committed suicide in 2004.
Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Back in February we reported on a worrying attempt by the European Commission to reframe the discussion about modernizing copyright in Europe purely in terms of licensing, reflected in the name of the initiative, “Licences for Europe”. Although originally a series of discussions were promised to “explore the potential and limits of innovative licensing and technological solutions in making EU copyright law and practice fit for the digital age,” in practice moderators shut down discussions of things like exceptions or even Creative Commons licensing. As far as the Commission was concerned, it seemed the answer to updating copyright for the modern age was just old-style licensing and nothing else.
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The new measures will move Taiwan closer to China’s Great Firewall in terms of censorship, and will therefore probably be well-received on the mainland as a result. But there are surely better ways of improving relations between the two countries than instituting these kind of measures that won’t stop people sharing unauthorized copies online, but will damage the Internet, and not just in Taiwan.
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The FBI and authorities in New Zealand have suffered a blow in their pursuit of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload, after a New Zealand court ordered them to return all personal data from the service that was seized during raids last year. Furthermore, they must specify exactly what information is at the core of their case against the file-sharing service.
High Court Justice Helen Winkelmann ruled (once again) that the raid on Dotcom’s mansion in January 2012 was illegal due to incorrect warrants. Today, the Justice ordered the national police to return to Megaupload any digital data they possess that is not relevant to the case, as Stuff NZ reports.
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As part of a criminal investigation by Italian authorities, 27 file-sharing related sites had their domains blocked by local ISPs last month. Rapidgator, one of the largest cyberlockers on the Internet, was among the targeted sites and chose to appeal the verdict. This week Rome’s Court of Appeal ruled that the Rapidgator blockade should be lifted as the site’s operators are not responsible for alleged copyright infringements carried out by their users.
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The guys over at Humble Bundle are offering another set of great games to users, for which they can pay as much or as little they want and as always the money raised is used to support good causes.
This package, the Humble Indie Bundle 8, includes five games for those who pay below the average (which stands at $5.69 at the time of writing) and seven for those who pay above the average.
The five games that are unlocked, through Steam, to those who pay between $1 and the average are Little Inferno, Awesomenauts, Capsized, Thomas Was Alone and Dear Esther, with the two extra unlockable games that come with a payment larger than the average being Hotline Miami and Proteus.
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Aereo then did exactly what it should: it sued first, seeking a declaratory judgment that its service was legal and that it could launch in other markets without fear of expensive lawsuits from CBS. This is what the whole declaratory judgment setup is for. Exactly cases like this where one party threatens another in an effort to scare them off by the threat of expensive court battles.
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In April we wrote about how Italian law enforcement had blocked over two dozen websites after the industry claimed they were responsible for copyright infringement. There was no trial, no adversarial hearing where the sites were able to defend themselves. Just: entertainment industry complains, law enforcement buys the complaints, tells a judge and boom, site gone. One of the cyberlockers blocked in this effort, Rapidgator, challenged this blockade, and it has quickly won a reversal. Rapidgator’s lawyer, Fulvio Sarzana, was kind enough to send us the details, and it appears the court understood why the initial blockade was hugely problematic.
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As Mike discussed in a previous post, the IP Commission’s report on “theft of American IP” points a finger almost exclusively at China. And, as was pointed out in another post, the report is also loaded with some genuinely terrible ideas (protect IP with malware, anyone?). Here’s another one: starting a trade war with China over intellectual property. This recommendation, taken from the final pages of the document, is both a broadside against China and a genuinely terrible idea.
Generally speaking, instigating a trade war is a bad idea, even when you have the upper hand. Instigating a trade war over something as poorly defined (especially in this report) as “IP theft” is a worse idea. Instigating a trade war with a country that already has you staring down the barrel of a steep trade deficit is just asking for trouble. The US has tried this sort of thing before (to protect the American steel industry) and found itself facing retaliatory tariffs from European nations as well as having its tariffs declared illegal by the World Trade Organization.
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We’ve discussed in the past a favorite talking point of the RIAA, claiming a 40% decline in employment for musicians over the past decade or so, which simply isn’t supported by the numbers. We’ve been seeing a lot of people claiming this again lately, so we decided to take a look at what the numbers actually showed, and can’t seem to figure out where that decline is coming from, because the numbers show a very different story — one that suggests things are actually much better for independent musicians than in the past, just as we would expect. In fact, there’s been an astounding 510% increase in independent musicians making their full time living from music in just the past decade.
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Earlier this week, we wrote about John Steele’s attempt at the character assassination of Alan Cooper, his former home caretaker who accused Steele of forging his name on various documents concerning shell companies associated with Prenda, the law firm Steele worked for. As part of that filing, Steele tried to suggest that Cooper was a willing participant, and that Steele was merely helping his “friend” get introduced into the porn copyright trolling business. As we noted, Steele’s story directly contradicts Cooper’s story, which certainly suggests that one of them is not telling the truth in court. That’s generally a bad idea. As more people look into Steele’s claims, they don’t seem to hold up under scrutiny, suggesting that if one of the two has a credibility problem, it’s probably Steele.
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In the end, though, the crux of the RIAA’s argument entirely misses the point of Carrier’s piece. It basically says “look, there are lots of services today, what are you complaining about?” But the point was never that killing Napster stopped innovation, but rather that it hindered the pace and nature of that innovation. And the RIAA doesn’t address it at all. There’s a difference between the direction of change and the rate of change, and the key point is the rate of change, but all the RIAA wants to discuss is the direction, which is meaningless. Innovation can’t be denied forever, so of course the direction will move forward. What Carrier’s piece discussed, quite clearly, was the pace — and the RIAA wants to avoid that, and pretend that everything that happened between 15 years ago and now didn’t happen to get here. If we were at the point we’re at today in 2003, they might have a point. The fact that it’s taken us this long and we’re still just reinventing radio… well, we’ve got a long way to go and should have been much further along.
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05.30.13
Posted in News Roundup at 4:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Cadillac, Ford, Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, Toyota. These carmakers are transforming their industry through software. Cars are no longer just about metal. A new car already has 5 to 15 million lines of software code that are reliant on and integrated with thousands of mechanical and electrical components. If you’re in the car business today you’re also a software maker.
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For more years than I care to count, I read statements and saw Microsoft server events where Bob Muglia declared why Microsoft’s server was so good.
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Desktop
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ome December, about 500 Indonesian schools will be running openSUSE Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education).
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Let’s commence with a joke. If the British automotive industry of the 70s had been the one to invent the display server protocol, they would have called it British Wayland. Get it? It’s subtle. Very subtle. Anyhow, without focusing too much on the technical lingo, Wayland is a new protocol, designed to replace the sturdy and reliable X Windows System. The idea is to create a more modern, more relevant method of transferring video frames from applications to the on-screen display, in a manner that is fast, efficient and extensible. On paper, it’s an interesting approach to an old problem, but the question is, is there a problem really?
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Benchmarks
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With the testing of the very latest Intel X.Org graphics driver, the SNA 2D acceleration back-end for the Ivy Bridge graphics is now the clear-cut winner for the Linux desktop over using the default UXA back-end.
If you aren’t familiar with Intel SNA, you surely haven’t been reading enough of Phoronix as it’s been extensively covered on the site over the past two years through many articles. Long story short, SNA is an experimental 2D acceleration architecture that’s been extensively tuned to insane detail by Intel OTC’s Chris Wilson. For the past several months now it’s generally been working well across all generations of Intel hardware from Sandy/Ivy Bridge to even old Intel IGPs.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The following tutorial will teach any computer user how to install the Arch Linux operating system on their personal computer or laptop.
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With incrontab_t (hopefully) complete, let’s look at the incrond_t domain. As this domain will also be used to execute the user (and system) commands provided through the incrontabs, we need to consider how we are going to deal with this wide range of possible permissions that it might take. One would be to make incrond_t quite powerful, and extend its privileges as we go further. But in my opinion, that’s not a good way to deal with it.
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Games
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Vertigo Games would like $75,000, please. Once they have it, they’re going to try and procedurally generate all of the Earth’s oceans. Right now you probably think them mad, but know this: they come armed with perpetual grins, charming Dutch accents and talk of actual geographic and geological data. Your scepticism may not last the three minutes 21 seconds running time of their pitch video.
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Awesomenauts is a new approach on the multiplayer online battle arena genre. Just like Dota 2 and League of Legends, Awesomenauts involves defending bases, destroying towers and lanes to defend and attack. The critical difference being it is on a 2D platform, with emphasis being more on player skills in platforming rather than levels and equipment. Awesomenauts makes it Linux debut with the Humble Bundle 8.
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[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.]
Bumblebee and Application Systems Heidelberg Software GmbH working in cooperation are happy to announce an exciting new joint project. The project codenamed “GhostControl Inc.” is going to be a reality very soon.
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That means Ankh 3 will be ported to Linux soon. Ankh and Ankh 2 were ported by RuneSoft and distributed by online retailers years ago. Ankh 3 was never ported due to the lack of interest by the Linux community.
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The drill, as always, remains the same: the Humble folks have some games and you can buy them during the next 2 weeks for however much you like.
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In a world where evil scientists with monkeys growing out of their heads are a dime-a-dozen, where goldfish customarily plot planetary domination with the oratory style of a televangelist, where furry sidekicks commonly cope with stress by turning into a monster and attacking the hero… In such a world, the gaming public is justified in wondering why they should care whether Doug TenNapel returns to the field of game design.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Independent of the meeting, a stabilization request has already been filed for KDE 4.10.3; thanks to the work of the kde stable testers, we can keep everyone uptodate. And as a final note, my laptop is back to kmail1… Cheers!
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KDE is the leading desktop system for linux, and is very rich in features. I prefer it over gnome and have been using it for years now. It keeps getting better with each new release.
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Nepomuk, the social semantic desktop search component used by KDE as well as GNOME through Zeitgeist, is a whole lot faster in conjunction with KDE 4.11.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Even with the latest version of GNOME 3 looking a whole lot better than earlier versions, I still find that it is not suitable for my daily desktop computing. But thanks to a couple of extensions, I can customize my GNOME 3 desktop to suite me, in a manner that makes for a more productive time in front of the monitor.
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Many user-facing features coming to the GNOME 3.10 desktop are starting to see the light of day. Here’s some of them.
We already know that GNOME 3.10 will see better Wayland support. There’s also been some advancements to GNOME Shell and Mutter. Now being deep into GNOME 3.9/3.10 development, more features are reaching a workable state.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Two and half years ago, Mageia was forked off of Mandriva Linux, and the group behind it put out stable releases in June 2011 and May 2012; now, Mageia 3 is available for download for desktops and servers.
[...]
We haven’t take Mageia for a spin ourselves, but it’s encouraging to see good progress on a Linux distro, and the screenshots surely look hot. You can download Mageia 3 for free here.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora’s upcoming release, v19 (codenamed Schrödinger’s Cat), has entered beta stage. Fedora 19 Beta is out for testing enthusiasts and early adopters who want to either test the hell of it or just check on the new features and enhancements that would be part of this “bleeding edge” distro’s v19 stable release. Like Ubuntu and openSUSE, Fedora follows a 6-month release cycle, which is notorious for getting delayed.
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Users can file reports about bugs, if any, found in this pre-release version.
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Fedora is taking some specific steps with Schrodinger’s Cat to make sure it is an ideal development base for developers.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 15 “Olivia”.
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Linux Mint 15, codenamed Olivia, was officially released earlier today. The announcement sounded a bit familiar saying, “Linux Mint 15 is the most ambitious release since the start of the project. MATE 1.6 is greatly improved and Cinnamon 1.8 offers a ton of new features, including a screensaver and a unified control center. The login screen can now be themed in HTML5 and two new tools make their first appearance in Linux Mint.”
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Many people have been wondering what the official release date for Linux Mint 15 will be. The Mint team is known for not providing a firm release calendar. It’s been about a week and a half since the Release Candidate for Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” was released and I’ve noticed that a few people have posted on Google+ that Linux Mint 15 has been released.
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The folks behind the XBMC media center application have made a lot of progress porting the software to run on Android. But if you’d rather have a small, low-power XBMC box that runs on Linux, new options might be available soon.
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Linux crept up slightly in the EE Times 2013 Embedded Market Study, representing 34 percent of current projects while Android showed the greatest growth, jumping to 16 percent, for a total of 50 percent for Linux-based platforms. Meanwhile, ARM processors continue to attract more embedded developers.
In early March, UBM Technology shared some preliminary details on current OS use from its survey-based EE Times “2013 Embedded Market Study.” Now, UBM has released the full report, showing further details on future OS plans among embedded developers, processor preferences, and much more.
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Phones
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Android
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Ever since Android became a mainstream mobile operating system, companies like Samsung and HTC have continuously tinkered with their phone and tablet interfaces to deliver their own unique take on the platform. While these manufacturer modifications have improved over time, some users still yearn for the stock Android experience — one that can only be found on a handful of devices, primarily with Google’s own Nexus line of smartphones and tablets. Fortunately, there is more than one way to use the OS in the way Google intended, which can be enjoyed by owners of both rooted and non-rooted devices.
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Nivis, a global company active in smart grid and industrial wireless networks, has announced the release of an ISA100 Wireless Application Layer Software Development Kit (SDK) along with the availability of the ISA100.11a communication stack and related code on an open source basis. The SDK and open source ISA100.11a code can improve supplier’s ROI for ISA100 Wireless products by reducing development time and per-unit costs.
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Web Browsers
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One of Google Chrome’s major weaknesses or shortcomings is the browser’s lack of user interface customization options. It is a take it or leave it interface that is giving users no options whatsoever to customize it.
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Mozilla
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Anahita is the ancient Persian goddess of water, which is essential for life, health, and fertility. It’s also a very modern set of software building blocks for a social infrastructure for everything essential for enterprise-level life, health, and — in a sense — fertility.
At least, according to Vancouver-based project founder and core architect Rastin Mehr.
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Apple OEM contractor Foxconn is prepping several products based on Mozilla’s Firefox OS, says an industry report. The new products, one of which is rumored to be a tablet, are expected to be announced on June 3 in collaboration with Mozilla.
On May 27, Focus Taiwan reported that Mozilla and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn, will on June 3 unveil a device running Mozilla’s Linux- and HTML5-based Firefox OS. The story also noted that an industry insider told the publication the product was likely to be a tablet.
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Foxconn is rumoured to be making a new tablet PC for Firefox OS, and we could catch our first glimpse next week.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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One of the most common user questions I see on the Facebook and Twitter streams for Apache OpenOffice is “Do you have a iPad version?” or “Do you have a tablet version”? Although there are companies that offer access to OpenOffice via a virtualized remote session, there is no native tablet version of OpenOffice.
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Healthcare
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Choosing to run free software on your computer is a powerful statement. Unfortunately, regardless of what you have installed on your desktop or laptop, you are almost certainly running hundreds of nonfree programs as you surf the Web. Web sites often use programs written in JavaScript to expand the capabilities of HTML, adding menus, buttons, text editors, music players, and many other features. Browsers come configured to download and run the JavaScript without ever making the user aware of it. Contrary to popular perception, JavaScript does not run “on the Web site” — it runs locally on users’ computers when they visit a site.
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The Free Software is defined such as software that gives some freedoms to his users: use, copy, modify and redistribute modified copies. So, we can understand the free software as collective property generated by the users and developers.
Although, from the Open Source philosophy, this problem has changed until that if the Free Software continues being collective property, sometimes is not being generated by the real interests of users and developers, it’s generated by the market interest, with especulative criteria and financial bumbles in a similar way than another market product.
So, the Open Source philosophy, drop the ethical arguments about if is reasonable or don’t use Free Software, the only argument will be if technically is or don’t a good option, if is a good business and another similar arguments. But they don’t think if it’s good the good common, it’s out of the discourse. Many corporations has done good contributions creating Free Software products from this philosophy, but sometimes mixed with the philosopy of the propietary software: Ubuntu, Android, etc.
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Licensing
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Google and MPEG-LA recently disclosed a draft cross-license under which patents related to the VP8 video compression format would be licensed to the general public. SFLC reviewed these terms and considered some criticisms that have arisen in the free software community. Our opinion expressed here is ours alone, and does not necessarily reflect the position of any client of SFLC.1
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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While we’re all arguing about the future of Australian manufacturing in the wake of Ford announcing the closure of their Australian factories, the entire manufacturing industry is facing another wave of massive change as 3D printing and open source hardware change the economics of the sector.
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Science
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The fossilised ‘Dawn bird’, Aurornis xui, lived 160m years ago and had downy feathers but was probably unable to fly
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Health/Nutrition
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In the midst of a week of debates and speeches about the federal farm bill (S. 954), supporters of the right to know whether or not food products contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) suffered a setback on May 23. An amendment (S. Amdt. 965) sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) would have helped states to pass laws requiring labeling of GMO foods. (Vermont recently made history when its House of Representatives passed such a labeling bill, as CMD reported.) Sander’s amendment lost, 27-71.
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Security
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Naturally, we’re filled with umbrage and are busy blaming the Chinese military for being dastardly. How dare they do what we would expect any country’s military to do? Also naturally, we’re not putting any blame on ourselves. No one is suggesting that such sensitive information, perhaps, shouldn’t be placed on a computer facing the Internet, no matter how secure. Nor is anyone suggesting that maybe the largest and most advanced military on the planet needs to have their own world wide web that’s not connected to the one used by the rest of us. No one is suggesting that this isn’t the way we won World War II.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Jeremy Hammond of the hacktivist group Anonymous has pleaded guilty to hacking into the private intelligence firm Stratfor, the FBI and other institutions. Hammond says his goal was to shed light on how governments and corporations act behind closed doors. Some five million Stratfor emails ended up on the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, shedding light on how the private intelligence firm monitors activists and spies for corporate clients. In a statement, Hammond said he accepted the plea deal in part to avoid an overzealous prosecution that could have resulted in at least 30 years in prison. He has already served 15 months, including weeks in solitary confinement. Joining us from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Hammond’s prosecution comes as part of a wider crackdown “on effective political activists and alleged journalistic sources.” Click here to watch our web-only extended interview with Assange.
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Bradley Manning, the Army private accused of disclosing a trove of government documents and cables to WikiLeaks, is set to go on trial next week. Manning has already pleaded guilty to misusing classified material he felt “should become public,” but has denied the top charge of aiding the enemy. Speaking from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange calls Manning’s case “a show trial … to terrorize people from communicating with journalists and communicating with the public.” Assange also discusses his own legal status as he continues to evade extradition to Sweden. Assange fears that returning to Sweden would result in him being sent to the United States, where he fears a grand jury has secretly indicted him for publishing the diplomatic cables leaked by Manning. Click here to watch our web-only extended interview with Assange.
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Finance
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When you look into the numbers, it looks more dubious still. The average U.S. household spends about 4 percent of its gross income on gasoline–so you’d need a pretty dramatic change in gas prices to have an appreciable impact on a typical family’s finances. In fact, they’re down roughly 15 percent from their peak earlier this year, but they’re still about 15 percent more than the low they hit around this time last year–and if you look at gas prices over the past couple of years, they’ve bounced up and down without really going anywhere.
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The bank announced plans to undergo a “rigorous self-examination” to avoid an Abacus repeat. Goldman certainly took its time, but the deep look into the mirror is complete. Meet the new and improved Goldman Sachs.
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German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble urges adherence to Europe’s welfare model
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A Wisconsin legislator has managed to bundle nearly all of the excesses associated with dirty elections into a single bill that good government advocates are describing as a “sweeping assault on democracy:” the legislation would try reinstating restrictive voter ID requirements, make it easier for donors to secretly influence elections, expand lobbyist influence, restrict early voting, and make it harder to register, among other measures.
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Censorship
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A teenager from a small town outside Boston has been held without bail for weeks. He faces terrorism charges and 20 years in prison for posting rap lyrics on the internet.
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Civil Rights
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I’ve just returned from Egypt: impressed by the courage and ambition I found, worried by some of trends I saw, and pleased that the Minister was willing to commit the open internet.
Deep inside one of the Pyramids in Giza (you can climb many stories into them! incredible experience), the guide turned and announced: “the problem with Egypt is that we talk too much about the things we DID, and nothing about the things we will DO.”
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I don’t think any single person who has considered the matter seriously, has any real doubt that Jack Straw was complicit in torture in an active and involved way, and has lied about it continually. There are some who would argue he was ethically justified, but that is a different argument. It is not worth engaging in ethical argument with anybody who maintains that the facts which are the basis of the argument, should not be known.
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A few quick updates on the continuing saga of the DOJ’s highly questionable spying on the communications of reporters. First up, we find out that the AP is claiming that the DOJ’s scooping up of phone records wasn’t nearly as limited as some people have suggested, but rather contained records for “thousands and thousands” of phone calls. Remember, the DOJ’s own guidelines say that any such record retrieval must be very targeted rather than broad.
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DRM
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Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a formal objection to the inclusion of digital rights management (DRM) in HTML5, arguing that a draft proposal from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) could stymie Web innovation and block access to content for people across the globe.
The W3C’s HTML working group is creating a technical standard for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the computer language that creates webpages and otherwise displays content online. The working group has accepted a draft that includes discussion of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), which will hard-wire the requirements of DRM vendors into the HTML standard.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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European Food Safety Authority mishandled a major revolving doors case with biotechnology company Syngenta
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The World Health Organization (WHO) warned countries with possible cases of the SARS-like novel coronavirus on Thursday that they must share information and not allow commercial labs to profit from the virus, which has killed 22 people worldwide.
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Fortunately, the virus does not seem to have spread widely during that three-month delay, but next time we might not be so lucky. It seems bordering suicidal that concerns about patenting should over-ride health concerns, especially when a viral pandemic could potentially kill a hundred million people, as it did in 1918. Let’s hope that the Supreme Court recognizes this as yet another reason not to allow patents on genes, and that this becomes part of a broader move to share freely vital knowledge that can save lives and alleviate suffering around the world.
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Copyrights
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Last week, we discussed a recent We The People petition at the White House, asking the administration to support the treaty for the blind, which would make it easier to access creative works for the blind by creating a few small “exceptions” to copyright law (i.e., returning rights to the public) for the sake of sharing formats that are accessible to the blind across borders. However, some blind advocacy groups have discovered that, if you happen to be blind/visually impaired, it’s basically impossible to sign the petition.
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The National Federation of the Blind is fuming mad over the White House web site, complaining that its members have been unable to sign an important online petition.
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Is the battle over the digital distribution of broadcast television eventually headed to the U.S. Supreme Court?
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On Friday, we wrote about how the RIAA has already started pitching the terrible idea that we should do away with the important DMCA safe harbors, which make sure that liability for infringement is properly applied to those actually infringing, rather than tools and services. The RIAA, however, thinks that it should be everyone else’s responsibility to prop up their increasingly obsolete business model, so they want to do away with the safe harbors and make every internet service liable if anyone uses their service for infringement. Of course, what this would do is stifle innovation broadly, because companies would avoid any kind of user generated services, because the liability would be super high. Sure, some of the big players would stick around, because they’ve got enough money and lawyers, but new startups would be few and far between.
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Last fall, law professor Michael Carrier came out with a really wonderful paper, called Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story. He interviewed dozens of people involved in the internet world and the music world, to look at what the impact was of the legal case against Napster, leading to the shutdown of the original service (the name and a few related assets were later sold off to another company). The stories (again, coming from a variety of different perspectives) helps fill in a key part of the story that many of us have heard, but which has never really been written about: what an astounding chill that episode cast over the innovation space when it came to music. Entrepreneurs and investors realized that they, too, were likely to get sued, and focused their efforts elsewhere. The record labels, on the other hand, got the wrong idea, and became totally convinced that a legal strategy was the way to stem the tide of innovation.
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05.29.13
Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The administration of the city of Munich in Germany has completed the switch to the open source desktop, says Peter Hofmann, head of the migration project last week Wednesday. The IT department is now securing the strategy, to make sure it can be maintained by the city and to sustainably support interactions with citizens, businesses and other public authorities.
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Chromebooks: you either love them or hate them based on the constant flood of correspondence I get almost daily. They are either an expensive web browser, even at $200, or they are good hardware done cheaply with lots of utility.
My thoughts of the utility of Chromebooks are all over ZDNet, but it’s the regular folks’ take on the laptops running Google’s OS that I find interesting.
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No roll-out in a single organization would be large enough to give this effect; crossing borders and rapid change excludes government and no business is larger than government.
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Server
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Karl Triebes has been the CTO of F5 Networks since August 2004. Over the course of his tenure, he has seen some big changes in the networking market and has helped to oversee technical and product development at F5.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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AMD today released AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta Drivers for Windows and Linux users. The major new addition in these drivers is the support for the new “Richland” A10, A8, A6 and A4 APUs. It also has AMD Enduro technology enhancement, AMD wireless display for Windows 8 and AMD GPU & AMD APU OpenCL 1.2 acceleration in Adobe Premiere PRO CC. No game improvements or fixes were mentioned in the release highlights. You can download AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta drivers here.
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The AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series of graphics cards now has GL Shading Language 1.30 support exposed by default.
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With Qualcomm’s newer Snapdragon SoCs no longer having a 2D acceleration core for graphics, the Freedreno driver has implemented XA acceleration support within the reverse-engineered software for implementing 2D over the 3D engine via its Gallium3D driver.
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AMD has announced a new beta Catalyst Linux graphics driver. This time around, there are some new features to this Catalyst 13.6 Beta.
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Applications
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As part of the release of Puppet 3.2.1, Puppet Labs has added a programming language aimed at providing administrators with greater flexibility for writing deployment routines. With the first public release of the 3.2 branch of the open source configuration management tool it is now also possible to integrate external certification authorities, enabling companies to use their own in-house authorisation systems within Puppet installations. The latter has been implemented in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation.
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There’s something disconcerting about using software full of features you don’t need — especially if the unwanted options are always in your face. Exaile is a music player that knows what most people want most of the time, and it gives you a great deal of flexibility in how to put its robust features to use. The result is elegant simplicity — and a great listening experience.
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Proprietary
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Opera Software today released the first beta version of its flagship browser that uses the open-source WebKit rendering engine, making good on a pledge from February.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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The Wine development release 1.5.31 is now available.
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Games
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Awesomenauts, the 2D MOBA based on a Saturday morning cartoon that never existed, is now available on Linux. We really liked the game when it debuted a year ago on Xbox Live and PSN, and now the Steam version has seen numerous updates and extra characters.
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Painkiller Hell & Damnation, a remake and a sequel for the immensely popular Painkiller made by People Can Fly in 2004, will be arriving on Linux, soon.
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The Raven – Legacy of a Master Thief is a thrilling crime adventure in three episodes from the creators of ‘The Book of Unwritten Tales’. Full of twists and turns, it immerses you in both sides of the story, combining thrill-of-the-chase whodunit with the risk and reward of a heist story.
Paris, 1960. Europe is in the grip of the gentleman master thief The Raven. His burglaries are spectacular and he always emerges unscathed. Young hotshot investigator Nicolas Legrand stuns the public when he confronts the master thief and fatally wounds him.
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Well folks it’s that awesome time again, time to get your game on! Humble Indie Bundle 8 is live and with a really amazing selection too.
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It was in early June of last year that developers behind the ioquake3 open-source game engine announced Baseio as a new standalone Quake3-inspired game to include assets licensed under the Creative Commons. One year later, there really isn’t anything to show for this open-source game.
The point of Baseio was to have a standalone game powered by ioquake3, the de facto open-source version of the id Software Quake 3 engine, to show off gameplay possibilities and other features. All of the games maps, audio, and other content would be put out under the Creative Commons, which is different than how many of the open-source game art assets are handled today by other projects.
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The MIT Game Lab has released a new beta version of its educational game A Slower Speed of Light. The Spring 2013 Beta Release of the game now works on Linux as well as Windows and Mac OS X and the MIT developers have also open sourced the engine and game development tools used in the creation of the game. The OpenRelativity tools have been designed to help game developers create educational experiments that explain and demonstrate special relativity. OpenRelativity is licensed under the MIT License and is based on the Unity3D game engine, simulating the effects of travelling near the speed of light in a game world.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Dragon Player’s power comes from the integrated KDE media backend Phonon. What this means for the user is that it is completely compatible with all installed system codecs. Speaking of codecs, Dragon Player prompts you whenever it doesn’t recognize a new piece of media and offers the ability to automatically search and install the required codecs. This works very well and allows you to keep your system relatively free of nonsense codecs you’ll never actually use, instead installing what you need as you need it.
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For those who doesn’t know print-manager is a project I started back in 2010 (yes it’s 3 years old now!), but only got included into KDE 4.10 (the current stable release). The reason for that is that since it was meant to replace system-config-printer-kde it needed to provide at least the most used features, and that was only possible as the logic to find a good PPD for a given printer was then exposed through DBus, so we could use that but not it’s GUI.
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Since we are not using kao:ResourceScoreCache anywhere in core KDE software, Vishesh asked me to disable pushing those into Nepomuk.
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There have been 4 more student proposals (some of them very good) for Amarok that we unfortunately couldn’t accept, due to lack of mentoring manpower. You’re encouraged to keep submitting patches, an excellent preparation for the next time.
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With the 4.10 release of Nepomuk, we decided to move away from Strigi and write our own indexers. We support most of the commonly used formats. Also, the new code is faster and more importantly more maintainable and easier to contribute to. So far this decision has worked pretty well for us.
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Since taste is such a personal thing and specific types of users are drawn to specific types of distributions, it’s almost impossible to say “Distribution A is best suited for User X” because there are too many variables to affect your opinion. When you dive into the waters of enterprise computing, however, things begin to get a little clearer. Certain distributions begin to rise to the top. I thought I’d take a moment to offer up my list of best Linux distros for large companies. This list is not based on sales numbers, Distrowatch, or marketing hype. For this list, it’s all about experience and (hopefully) a sound insight into what is to come. And I’m not going to compare feature for feature. Why? This is open source, so it’s possible to roll in whatever feature you want. Even proprietary features eventually can be reverse-engineered.
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A Linux distribution that uses Wayland’s reference compositor Weston as the default for handling its graphical user interface has been released by a developer who is only known by his screen name, “nerdopolis”. Icons in the top menu bar allow users to start a terminal and Qt 5′s demo browser, both of which run as native Wayland software components. Other icons start programs that are designed for X11 and use XWayland to run under the Wayland compositor; among these applications is KDE’s Kicker start menu, which can be launched via the icon at the left side of the top bar.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Fedora developers have lifted the lid on the first beta of Fedora 19, code name “Schrödinger’s Cat”, and say they have observed it is alive. At this point, Fedora 19 is feature frozen and only critical updates will be pushed to users before the general release. The Fedora project are now looking for users prepared to test the beta and provide feedback on the state of Fedora 19 before final release.
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Fedora 18 was slow to arrive, but Fedora 19, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” Red Hat’s latest community Linux, is on schedule.
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The Fedora Project team has reached the beta release of the free Fedora 19 operating system, code-named “Schrödinger’s Cat.”
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The first beta of Schrödinger’s Cat, or more widely known as Fedora 19, is now available for testing. As usual, there’s lots of new upstream improvements incorporated into this latest Fedora Linux build.
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The following screen shots show what the latest GNOME 3 desktop looks like and a few new features it brings to the table. Also included are a few screen shots from the other desktop environments.
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Debian Family
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A week ago, we started the Debian systemd survey. The goal was to figure out a few trends and answer the following two questions:
– Do our subjective impressions from the discussions on debian-devel reflect the general sentiment about systemd?
– What are the main concerns that most people have?
Thank you all for your participation!
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Derivatives
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I still am using my old Gateway machine with Crunchbang, although since Waldorf is the current stable version of Crunchbang, I’m using mostly Debian Testing (Jessie), which is eventually going to become the new Crunchbang 12 codenamed Janice.
Crunchbang uses Muppet names for their releases based on the first letter of the equivalent Debian release codename. Thus Debian Squeeze was Statler, Wheezy is Waldorf, and Jessie will become Janice (the lead guitarist of the Muppet band “Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem”.)
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Recently we announced a contest to spot Ubuntu billboards in the wild in Russia and the Ukraine. The contest required you to take an original photograph of a billboard containing a Dell advertisement with Ubuntu. Due to extenuating circumstances, we have been informed the billboards have been taken down. In light of this news, we unfortunately have to end the Ubuntu billboard photo contest early.
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Ubuntu has been forced to axe a competition offering an Ubuntu-loaded Dell XPS laptop as a prize after just two weeks.
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While Apache is the predominant open-source web-server software currently used by Linux systems, including Ubuntu, NGINX continues to rise in popularity. NGINX continues its push with high performance while having a smaller memory footprint and carrying a BSD license. The NGINX server might be included in future releases of the Ubuntu Server and part of the Ubuntu “main” repository.
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PC maker Cirrus7 plans to ship a new fanless desktop computer by the end of June. It’s called the Nimbus, and it looks more like a heatsink than a PC, because that’s basically what the entire case is.
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Wind River announced in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) software for integrating iOS devices into IVI systems based on the company’s IVI-oriented Linux OS offering. The Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Linux enables a car’s infotainment head unit to be used for viewing and playing content streamed from late-model iPhones, iPads, and iPods.
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Transforming a bare-bones Raspberry Pi into a fully-functional portable station is a popular pastime among enterprising users, and you can easily find instructions on how to build a Kindleberry Pi, a Kindleberry Wireless, and even a Raspberry Pi Linux laptop. But if you happen to use an Android device, you can opt for a less complicated and more modular solution devised by yours truly.
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Phones
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Android
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The encrypted instant messaging (IM) app Threema is now available for Android. The application was previously only available for iOS and essentially works in the same way as the widely-used texting alternative WhatsApp with one crucial difference: Threema employs end-to-end encryption. Messages undergo asymmetric encryption before sending and can only be decrypted by the intended recipient.
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It’s no surprise that many Tumblr users are less than pleased with Yahoo!’s recent acquisition of their favorite personal publishing platform. The news is a sobering reminder that creators who don’t control the tools of their trade are at the mercy of those who do.
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Frank Bergmann, founder of ]project-open[, talks with us about the open source project management solution and how the company strives for an open culture at the office. He says maintaining communication is essential, and it entails complete transparency and honesty.
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After seeing MSCEs spend hours trying to update one of my computer labs I found I was able to convert most labs to the latest installation of Debian GNU/Linux in one hour and update all the software in a few minutes for routine updates and less than an hour for migration to a new release. The rest of my time was then freed for useful business, education. With that other OS, I was a slave giving very little economic benefit to my employer because that other OS was constantly giving us trouble.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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According to Focus Taiwan, Taiwan’s Hon Hai, which trades as Foxconn, and Mozilla will be holding a press conference on Monday 3 June to announced a partnership around the Firefox OS mobile device operating system. The event will take place in Taipei in the run up to the Computex trade show and will, says the news site, be the nineteenth wireless telecomms company to form a partnership with Mozilla.
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While Mozilla has not officially taken the wraps off a specific device, The Register, CNET and other media outlets have followed up on reports regarding the Mozilla Foundation saying that it is working with Apple hardware specialist Foxconn on a tablet device that will run the new Firefox OS mobile platform. Until now, there had only been phones discussed for the operating system, which Mozilla is putting massive resources behind. Not only is the news of a tablet of interest, but Foxconn is a world-class hardware partner for Mozilla to have.
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Mozilla is working with Apple hardware-maker Foxconn to release a mobile device running Firefox OS, it told news outlets on Monday, and plans to unveil it at an event next week.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The current OpenStack open source cloud platform release is named Grizzly – due to the fact that OpenStack had a Summit in San Diego, which is in California, which has a Grizzly bear on its flag.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Last weekend Thorsten Behrens announced LibreOffice 4.10 Beta1 on the LibreOffice developers mailing list saying it comes with a nice set of new features. It also included the obligatory “not ready for production use” warning, but we don’t need a warning to scope out documentation. Let’s see what new features are coming.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.2, the third release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.
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Project Releases
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A new version of xine-lib was released today, which is the library that powers the Xine multimedia playback engine. The xine-lib 1.2.3 release brings numerous features including VA-API hardware video decoding and support for OpenGL 2.0 output.
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Public Services/Government
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I’ve been thinking a bit too much lately about GitHub and Drupal.org. More broadly, I’ve had my mind on open source + community. Sometimes this is called social coding.
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More than six years after Cabinet approved a policy for free and open source software (FOSS) in government, little has been achieved.
This was conceded by chairman of the State IT Agency’s (SITA’s) board, Jerry Vilakazi, at the Government Information Technology Officers (GITO) Council Summit yesterday.
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Following their overall Free Software and Open Standards strategy, the public schools in the Swiss city of Basel are providing the Open Source Kolab Groupware Solution to their teachers, students and administrative staff. This enables them to coordinate their work and collaborate as efficiently as possible. The students are learning early to make use of modern information and communication technologies. Markus Bäumler head of the responsible ICT Media department in Basel says “We are delighted to have a Free Software solution that we can deploy for this purpose which reliably meets our professional requirements.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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One aspect of the feds’ new Open Data Policy presents both an opportunity and a challenge. It specifically calls for improved interoperability as a way to advance open data implementation. “Right now, standards setting for interoperability seems to be nobody’s job — and the federal government has the opportunity to take the lead here,” said Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition.
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Programming
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The developers behind the EclipseLink persistence libraries have now delivered a reference implementation of JPA (Java Persistence API) 2.1, JSR338, in the form of the newly released EclipseLink 2.5.0. The JPA 2.1 support means that EclipseLink now supports performing bulk updates using the Criteria API with the addition of CriteriaUpdate and CriteriaDelete classes.
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Standards/Consortia
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oogle is feeling the heat over its decision to build its new Hangouts IM and audio/video chat product with proprietary technology that doesn’t support server federation via the XMPP industry standard, but the company is defending its move.
Specifically, Google maintains that XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) industry support is weak, which dilutes its purpose as a common protocol, and that its technology hasn’t kept up with the times.
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It’s more good than bad that a lot of mainstream reporters are speaking openly about the chilling effect of the Obama White House’s investigations into leaks of classified material. But this willingness to talk about how the White House operates can lead some journalists to make some rather strange arguments.
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A Columbia high school student faces a possible felony charge after her arrest for changing a classmate’s name in the school yearbook to a sexually suggestive term.
The 17-year-old Hickman High School junior was arrested May 14 after she allegedly changed a student’s last name from Mastain to “masturbate” in the 100th edition of the Hickman Cresset yearbook. She could be charged with first-degree property damage, a felony, and harassment.
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Science
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Russian scientists claimed Wednesday they have discovered blood in the carcass of a woolly mammoth, adding that the rare find could boost their chances of cloning the prehistoric animal.
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Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the “underclasses” from multiplying.
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Security
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17-year old German schoolboy Robert Kugler has posted information on a cross-site scripting vulnerability in payment processing service PayPal to the Full Disclosure mailing list. Kugler wanted to report the bug to PayPal as part of its official Bug Bounty Program, but the program only pays out to participants who are 18 or over. To vent his frustration, he has now gone public with the bug.
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Individuals claiming to be part of international hacktivist group Anonymous have published phone numbers and addresses for supporters of the English Defence League (EDL) as part of what they said was the first phase of a campaign to destroy the far-right street protest movement.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The economic crisis in Greece has led to a rise in support for the far-right Golden Dawn and an increase in racist attacks. Jamal Osman talks to one man who is fighting back.
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A man staying at Toronto’s Sheraton Centre Hotel used his Blackberry to video-record police who were arresting another guest. The police objected and several of them piled onto him, beating him savagely while screaming “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” They broke two of his ribs. The whole thing was captured on the man’s phone and on hotel CCTV. He’s suing.
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In case you missed it, Senator John McCain took the opportunity this Memorial Day to cross the Turkey-Syria border and hang out with Syrian rebels. These are the same rebels with ties to Al Qaeda. These are the same rebels cutting out and eating the hearts of dead soldiers. According to reports, Senator McCain wanted to go further into combat but was not allowed.
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Last week, the California Liberty Preservation Act, AB351, was passed unanimously by the Assembly Appropriations Committee and sent to the full State Assembly for a vote.
The bill would play a big part in nullifying the “indefinite detention” provisions of both the NDAA and the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF).
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On Monday the Washington Post published a classified list compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board of military systems and technologies allegedly compromised by Chinese hacking. Though the previously undisclosed report does not present any evidence for these claims, it is being used to escalate charges against China that it is hacking US secrets.
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LAW profs deem force-feeding “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”
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Our political strategy brings to mind the definition of insanity often attributed to Albert Einstein..
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I’ve been reading a few articles on the “alternative” media which really have me thinking. One, by Chris Hedges entitled “Rise Up or Die” made me think about just how bad things really are nowadays here in the USA. The other article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, “You are The Hope” was also a particularly dark piece.
It’s not that I don’t agree with what the two have said…I do; still, I don’t think they quite accurately reflect the growing dis-connects between what many Americans and the mainstream media, along with the Powers That Be would have us believe.
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One of the world’s leading terrorism experts has branded the government’s proposals to muzzle Islamist hate preachers and crack down on violent extremism in the wake of the Woolwich attack as “a waste of time”.
Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA operations officer who worked with the Afghan mujahedin in the late 1980s, says that “a good [counter-extremism] policy should be based on an understanding on what’s happening on the ground.
“The notion that there is any serious process called ‘radicalisation’, or indoctrination, is really a mistake. What you have is some young people acquiring some extreme ideas – but it’s a similar process to acquiring any type of ideas. It often begins with discussions with a friend.”
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As promised in his speech this week, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is largely assuming control of the embattled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) combat operations in the Middle East. The program had been run over the past several years by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and was responsible for death strikes on four Americans, only one of which was an intended target for death.
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In response to the hacking to death of Lee Rigby, a young off-duty British soldier killed on a London street in broad daylight, Britain’s Home Office plans measures to prevent the radicalization of Muslim youth which include censorship of jihadist Internet websites, a crackdown on extremist organizations and the cleansing of mosques and place of learning from preachers promoting “a poisonous narrative.” That’s all very well but unless the government acknowledges the root of the problem those steps will constitute a mere band-aid covering a suppurating sore.
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Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood held a press conference last Thursday to declare his department’s innocence in the death of David Silva. This claim is based on the coroner’s report prepared by the Kern County Coroner’s office, which reports to the Sheriff’s Office. David Silva’s death has been declared “accidental,” with the official cause of death listed as “cardiac hypertension.”
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Cablegate
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Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in Guwahati, AGP secretary Durga Das Boro said that the party was contemplating legal action against Rahul Gandhi for making such a comment on the Assam’s regional party, which formed the government in the state for three terms since 1986. Boro said that the WikiLeaks had recently revealed that “(Gandhi) had said that AGP leaders were insurgents and India allowed separatists to form the government in Assam and the United States should also allow Hamas.”
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Ecuador has accused the UK of violating Julian Assange’s human rights by refusing to allow the WikiLeaks founder to take shelter in South America, which granted him political asylum nearly a year ago.
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Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond agrees to “non-cooperating plea agreement” as alternative to endless court battle and decades of prison time
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In yet another Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case, in which the DOJ piled on charge after charge after charge until the person they were pressuring accepted a plea bargain, Jeremy Hammond has officially accepted a plea deal for helping LulzSec/Anonymous hack Stratfor. He admits that he did it, and given that, it’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that some punishment is warranted, but it still seems troubling the amount of pressure that the DOJ used to get him to take a plea bargain.
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WikiLeaks released an enormous treasure-trove of classified US government documents in 2010. It included US military logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 250,000 diplomatic cables, and Collateral Murder, a video depicting the killing of 12 civilians by a US helicopter gunship in Iraq.
The source of the leaks, US Private Bradley Manning, acted on his conscience. He believed that people have a right to see the information he had been privy to as an army intelligence analyst. He was prepared to risk his life and liberty to reveal that information.
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Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney held a special screening for his new documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, in Washington, DC, on May 21. Gibney also participated in a question and answer session after the film that was moderated by POLITICO‘s Josh Gerstein.
First, the title reinforces widespread perceptions created by the United States government that the WikiLeaks organization is out to “steal” secrets. Gibney has claimed that the title is “ironic.” Actually, the US government steals secrets. Former NSA director Michael Hayden says this in the film, but this aspect of US government operations takes up only a few seconds of the film. He does not explore how US government agencies are actually the ones engaged in stealing so the “irony” does not come through at all.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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But in Haiti’s Central Plateau, the flow of energy is intermittent at best. Consider that in Mirebalais, located 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the power goes out for an average of three hours each day. This poses an enormous challenge to running any hospital; surgeries are jeopardized, neonatal ventilators stall, the cold chain is interrupted, and countless everyday tasks get derailed. As Partners In Health co-founder Paul Farmer noted during a recent lecture at the Harvard School of Public Health, “It’s not great if you’re a surgeon and you have to think about getting the generator going.”
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By 2020, 1.5 percent of the energy that public utilities in Minnesota generate will have to come from solar. It’s estimated that this new requirement, signed into law last week by Gov. Mark Dayton, will result in a 32-fold increase in solar capacity in the state, up to 450 megawatts.
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Finance
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Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that “inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve,” with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.
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Digital currency Liberty Reserve has been shut down after U.S. and Costa Rican authorities arrested founder Arthur Budovsky Belanchuk in Spain.
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On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years, which distorts the natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia. Two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking due to pumping out groundwater, oil and gas. Some deltas are falling at a rate four times faster than global sea level is rising.
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Censorship
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Company agrees to update policies in response to protest by more than 100 advocacy groups
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PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is incensed over an article in the Huffington Post that details that organization’s unsettling practice of euthanizing animals in a Virginia facility that many have assumed is a no kill shelter.
According to the New York Post, PETA wants to sue some of the people who have left comments on the article. The problem is that, following the practice of many on the Internet, many of the comments are under assumed names or are anonymous. PETA is attempting to discover the true identities of their critics so that it can sue them for defamation.
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Cameron D’Ambrosio, the Massachusetts teen arrested and charged with “communicating terroristic threats” (or “bomb threats,” depending on who’s doing the reporting) via a Facebook post (in the form of rap lyrics — CammyDee has aspirations), has been denied bail by the state’s Superior Court.
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There’s been a big push around the globe to ramp up data retention rules, which require various online services to keep all sorts of data on their users for a long time, just in case it’s possible that law enforcement officials might need that data at some later date. That this only adds to the pile of data, and often makes it more difficult to find useful data, is never discussed. That this likely puts more people’s private data at risk of being hacked or accidentally revealed is never discussed. Also, almost never discussed: whether or not such data retention laws actually help solve crimes.
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Privacy
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What does the Woolwich murder teach us about the need for the Communications Data Bill? Nothing at all; the security services seem to have known all about the suspect using existing powers.
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While reform languishes in Congress, Austin moves to protect Texans’ inboxes.
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The Madras high court on Wednesday ordered notice to the state government on a petition filed by Vanniyar Sangam state president Kaduvetti Guru challenging his detention under the National Security Act. A division bench comprising Justice B Rajendran and K Ravichandra Baabu also admitted the habeas corpus petition filed by Guru and posted further hearing of the case after six weeks.
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Remember the gigantic data-center that the NSA is building in Utah in order to (illegally) process the electronic communications of the whole world? Turns out that the state of Utah plans on taxing the titanic amounts of electricity it will consume at 6%. The NSA is pissed.
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Washington • Gov. Gary Herbert and National Security Agency officials are confident they can work out an agreement to avert taxing the new Utah Data Center on millions of dollars in electricity it needs to run the mammoth computer farm.
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Journeyman Pictures’ short documentary “Naked Citizens” is an absolutely terrifying…
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President Obama delivered a much-anticipated speech yesterday on national security policy, where he unexpectedly touched on the recent AP and Fox News press freedom scandals. While he condemned leaks, he emphasized that “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs,” and that he’s “troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”
The President’s words are long overdue, given, as media lawyer Ted Boutrous writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “The Justice Department has completely lost sight of the First Amendment.” But Obama’s supposed remedy is to have Eric Holder review Justice Department policy, the same man who has overseen the Justice Department prosecute leakers to the press at a record rate.
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Civil Rights
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Around 350 workers have been dismissed from their jobs at a factory in Alexandria on Sunday morning, without adequate justification, according to the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR).
Mohamed Adel, a lawyer at ECESR said that between 350 and 400 workers at the Hi Tech Textile factory in Alexandria were relieved of their duties because they demanded higher wages. According to Adel, the owner of the factory laid off the Egyptian workers in favour of foreign workers because their wage demands are lower than the Egyptian workers.
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An Illinois community is rallying around a teacher who is reportedly up against disciplinary action for informing his students of their rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment before the high-schoolers answered a survey regarding their personal behavior.
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The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time.
The new details are revealed in a court filing detailing a back and forth between the Justice Department and the federal judges who oversaw the request to search a Gmail account belonging to Rosen, a reporter for Fox News. A 2009 article Rosen had written about North Korea sparked an investigation; Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department adviser who allegedly leaked classified information to Rosen, insisted that the reporter should not be notified of the search and seizure of his e-mails, even after a lengthy delay.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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There was plenty of attention paid to the failed WCIT meeting last year, in which some countries effectively sought greater control over the internet, leading many countries to refuse to sign on. There has since been plenty of reasonable concern that the end result of this is a fragmented internet, with one internet for those who believe in internet freedom and openness… and one for those who don’t.
And, of course, the whole ITU WCIT process was never going to be the end of such discussions. Eli Dourado, who has been following this stuff closely for a while, recently had a good report about how various authoritarian governments made a bit of a power play for more control over internet governance. The issue may seem bureaucratic and messy, but that’s also why it’s important to pay attention. Because mixed in with all that bureaucracy are some key decisions.
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So… we’d already taken a stab at debunking Jaron Lanier’s “gobbledygook economics” a few weeks back when it started appearing, but since then there’s been more Lanier everywhere (obviously, in coordination with his book release), and each time it seems more ridiculous than the last. Each time, the focus is on the following economically ridiculous concepts: (1) there should be micropayments for anyone doing anything free online because someone benefits somewhere (2) modern efficiency via technology has destroyed the middle class. Both of these claims make no sense at all.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on a report that came out last week, grandly titled “The IP Commission Report” as if it were some sort of official body. In the subhead, we find out that it’s actually by the even more ridiculously named “The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.” Who put together this “commission”? Well, it’s the National Bureau of Asian Research, which also is not an official government organization as you might think, but a private think tank that more or less was spun out of the University of Washington, and was originally the National Bureau of Asian and Soviet Research, put together at the behest of Senator Henry Jackson, who believed strongly that America should intervene around the globe to promote American interests, often at the expense of those where we were intervening. He supported interning Japanese Americans during WWII. He strongly supported the Vietnam War. He’s considered the spiritual father of today’s neoconservatives. As you may have guessed, the “National Bureau of Asian Research” is not exactly about figuring out the best way to understand and improve relationships between the US and Asia. It’s about how US interests can dominate Asia.
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For the last few months, Techdirt has been following the surprisingly rapid embrace on both sides of the Atlantic of the proposed transatlantic free trade agreement, known variously as TAFTA or TTIP. Coming out of nowhere, the agreement is being talked about as if its success and benefits are more or less guaranteed.
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…they patented the virus…
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Send this to a friend
05.28.13
Posted in News Roundup at 6:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux continues to grow not just because of any one vendor or particular use case, but because Linux is applicable to so many different use cases.
Two such very different use-cases were on display this past week, with new releases of Pupply Linux and Backbox Linux
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Sometime this July will mark my seventh anniversary of becoming a desktop Linux user. While I may or may not bake a cake to celebrate the occasion, it has gotten me thinking about what has changed in the world of Linux since I entered it — and, especially, how much more usable my Linux PC has become then. And what better way to quantify those improvements than to take stock of just how many apps are now available for Linux users that were not seven years ago?
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Desktop
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A while back DesktopLinux.com changed ownership when the corporation owning it was sold. Since then the site has been rudderless with no moderator/authour and gradually fewer contributors to the public forum.
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Kernel Space
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Rust, the general purpose programming language developed by Mozilla for being a safe, concurrent, and practical language, can even be used to write a system kernel.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that AllGo Embedded Systems, Suntec Software and Wargaming are joining the organization.
The demand for devices to become more intelligent and connected in the gaming and automotive industries is driving more demand for interactive entertainment and embedded software in the Linux market. The newest Linux Foundation members are expanding investment in Linux in order to advance software in-vehicle systems and online gaming and leverage the collaborative development model. These and other topics will be discussed this week at the Automotive Linux Summit Spring 2013 in Japan on May 27-28 followed by LinuxCon Japan and CloudOpen JapThe Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that AllGo Embedded Systems, Suntec Software and Wargaming are joining the organization.
The demand for devices to become more intelligent and connected in the gaming and automotive industries is driving more demand for interactive entertainment and embedded software in the Linux market. The newest Linux Foundation members are expanding investment in Linux in order to advance software in-vehicle systems and online gaming and leverage the collaborative development model. These and other topics will be discussed this week at the Automotive Linux Summit Spring 2013 in Japan on May 27-28 followed by LinuxCon Japan and CloudOpen Japan on May 29-31.an on May 29-31.
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Graphics Stack
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Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged.
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Just one week after the Intel X.Org driver was updated with support for all known Haswell variants and introducing some new copy-on-write support for cloning pixmaps, a new release has been warranted.
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The Debian-based “Raspbian” Linux distribution for the Rasperry Pi ARM development board is now a heck of a lot faster thanks to recent software improvements.
Raspbian is the Debian Linux distribution optimized for the ARMv7 Raspberry Pi. Older versions of Raspbian are based upon Debian Linux 6.0 on the Linux 3.1 kernel and GCC 4.4.5. However, the latest Debian Linux 7.0 on the latest Raspbian package-set has the Linux 3.6.11 armv6l kernel and GC 4.6.
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Benchmarks
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Being benchmarked today at Phoronix is a comparison of eight different BSD and Linux operating systems. The contenders for this performance roundabout include PC-BSD 9.1, DragonFlyBSD 3.4.1, Ubuntu 13.04, Linux Mint 15 RC, CentOS 6.4, Fedora 18, Mageia 3, and openSUSE 12.3. Which of these operating systems are the fastest and slowest for a variety of different workloads? Read on to find out.
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A system profiler is a utility that presents information about the hardware attached to a computer. Having access to hard information about your hardware can be indispensable when you need to establish exactly what hardware is installed in your machine. For example, the information will help a technical support individual diagnose problems, or help to evaluate whether a system will support certain software or hardware.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Famed for its World of Tanks game, UK and America-based Wargaming has announced details for the version 8.6 update of the game at the same time as its commitment to three front line open-source development foundations.
Wargaming will now support the Linux Software Foundation, the Django Software Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation.
“Wargaming relies heavily on a number of different open-source technologies to help us create our legendary MMO universe, whether it’s using Linux to power our servers, Django to build our web project frameworks or Wikimedia to help us in our research efforts,” said Maksim Melnikau, solution architect at Wargaming.
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The Heavy Gear Assault team are going all-out to get their Kickstarter pledge numbers up. In search of $800,000 USD, the campaign is currently sat on $29,000 USD.
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Dutch indie developer Vertigo Games has announced a funding drive for World of Diving, its aquatic exploration game for PC, Mac and Linux that includes Oculus Rift headset support.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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As you probably know we are having Akademy-es 2013 just a few days earlier than Akademy in Bilbao, from 11th to 12th of July.
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For helping user to generate a KMail theme based on Grantlee, I created an application: “headerthemeeditor”.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The accepted students for Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women have just been announced. I am so happy that we were able to accept 50 students for GSoC.
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Google has just announced the 2013 Google Summer of Code students! And that means that the Outreach Program for Women list is also announced. It’s been some weeks of anxious waiting, not just for the students and interns involved, but also for the whole Krita community, developers and artists. But everyone can breathe again now!
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I’ve used Mageia 3 full time since its release and it’s not perfect – but it’s darn close. Nothing is perfect and that is so true for Linux. It’s a matter of what bugs bug you less. I used Mageia 1 for quite a while and I’ll probably hang around in Mageia 3 too. It performs well. It boots really quickly and the desktop as well as most applications are very responsive. Never underestimate the charm of instantaneous results. I have a nice fresh install of Sabayon Linux 13.04 just waiting, but it looks like I may end up not using it.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora 19 Linux is not a thought experiment; it’s a real Linux distribution and it’s now out as Beta.
Codenamed Schrödinger’s cat, Fedora 19 includes new features that will delight server admins, developers and desktop users alike.
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Debian Family
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The Debian GNU/Hurd team announced the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. On the Debian Ports archive you can find the installation ISO images to download (netinst, CD or DVD), as well as a pre-installed disk image which makes it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd. Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10,000 software packages available.
Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.
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This version includes some misc features like:
Bug fixes in the automatic date and time configuration
If you move to another country it is automatically detected and your time is updated to the new location
Updated firmwares to support a wider range of wifi’s and other devices
Automatic detection of lvm devices inside crypted filesystem
Fixed a bug with thumblerd process, which can sometimes block devices from unmounting
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I’ve been experimenting with installing the new Debian release across a number of devices – here’s what I’ve found so far.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has released a stable version of Ubuntu Server 13.04, a.k.a. Raring Ringtail, promising graphical user interface (GUI) improvements and better performance. This server version of the popular Linux distribution is not a long term support (LTS) release, and comes midway through the platform’s two year development cycle as a prelude to Canonical’s next mascot, the Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu 13.10 set for an October release.
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Wandboard.org announced a quad-core version of its Linux- and Android-ready Freescale i.MX 6-based open source boardset. The Wandboard Quad moves up to four Cortex-A9 cores at the same 1GHz speed, provides a more powerful Vivante GC355 GPU, doubles DDR3 RAM to 2GB, and adds a SATA port.
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Wind River®, a world leader in embedded and mobile software, has introduced Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for Linux, which allows consumers to connect their iOS devices to Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.
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I’ve written a number of posts looking at less-familiar advantages of open source over closed source, and here’s another one. Proprietary systems can’t be forked, which means that it’s not possible to change the underlying ethos, for example by tweaking the software or using code on a different platform. But you can with open source, as this interesting example shows.
Fairphone is, as its name implies, built with fairness in mind. That contrasts with today’s smartphones which contain many minerals sourced in a variety of unsavoury ways, ranging from being “merely” exploitative to downright bloodstained. That’s not something we think about much as we play with our latest shiny toy, but Fairphone wants to change that. And of course, as part of its fairness, everything will be open (although it’s based on Android 4.2, so I wonder whether some elements will be closed nonetheless.)
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Perhaps you’ve considered migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? There are a host of good reasons for such a move. The most obvious one that comes to mind is to save on license fees, but don’t be fooled. For the migration process to be a success and the full benefits to be reaped, you must invest in the changeover itself. Don’t believe that because you want to save money long term you should skimp short-term. A look at the City of Freiburg’s attempted migration reveals the dangers of treating the new software as a drop-in replacement.
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Probably the best corporate ownership of free and open source products comes from Red Hat, for reasons that should be obvious. Red Hat makes their living developing and supporting FOSS products, so they tend to be excellent FOSS players, obeying both the spirit and letter of the GPL. In addition, they defend the license, because what’s good for free and open source software is good for Red Hat.
The other side of the coin, the bad players in the free software world, might be best represented by Oracle, who inherited a slew of important open source projects with their takeover of Sun Microsystems a few years back. As we’ve observed before, part of the problem with Oracle is that sharing and software freedom isn’t in the company’s genetic structure. Like many proprietary vendors, they believe in nurturing their clients by using the mushroom philosophy–that is by keeping them in the dark and feeding them plenty of malarkey.
Oracle also obviously has some conflict-of-interest issues when it comes to one of their most important FOSS offerings, the MySQL database, which probably steers at least half of the worlds websites. Oracle, of course, became one of the biggest companies in tech by selling their own proprietary database. Although in most instances Oracle’s database doesn’t directly compete with MySQL, we know it gripes Larry Ellison’s arse to be giving a database away when he thinks he could be making money selling it.
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I love the spring. Not, of course, because of the glorious weather, since we don’t have any. But because it’s time for the annual BSA report on piracy, which is guaranteed to provide me with hours of innocent fun as I go through finding its methodological errors and dodgy data.
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“When you really need performance/weight as in the space program, who are you going to call: an OS designed by salesmen in secret and in league with hardware suppliers,” asked blogger Robert Pogson, “or an OS designed by computer geeks trying hard in the open to get the last bit of performance and reliability out of hardware?”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The two companies invite the press to the unveiling of a new device on June 3, which has rumors flying that a tablet running Firefox OS may be on the horizon.
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SaaS/Big Data
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GitHub Pages: GitHub is most well known as a popular source code repository, but they also offer free hosting as part of GitHub Pages. You can use a standard git repository to publish your site, which is how I managed my personal blog for years. For each new article, run the jekyll command line tool, and then push the site to GitHub. GitHub’s Pages takes care of the rest. There is also a web based tool with a few themes and an online markdown editor.
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The OpenStack® community will take part in CeBIT Australia for the first time when the show opens in Sydney this week, bringing the promise of cost savings, speed of deployment and freedom from vendor lockin to Australian enterprises. CeBIT will run from May 28th through 30th and will be held at the Sydney Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour; OpenStack will be on stand O01 in the Cloud Ecosystem section in Hall 4.
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CMS
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Ten years ago today, WordPress, the open source blogging software, was born. It’s amazing to think that it’s been that long, but considering it had all of the elements that other startups and projects have tried to emulate over the past 10 years, then it makes sense.
When speaking with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, you’d think that he was only a small part of the movement that attempted to empower anyone and everyone to self-publish. While that might be partially true, Mullenweg has taken all of his learnings over the years and poured them into the for-profit arm, Automattic.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Earlier I wrote about how this year we are participating in Google Summer of Code and GNOME Outreach Program for Women.
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GIFT has moved to using the GIT DVCS. This move is in order to more nimbly manage the source code, during a revamp. Almost done: a shell script for image importing (with caches, and taking advantage of multiple cores!).
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Openness/Sharing
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Think of a world where you could simply download the blueprints of your future home for free just like you download any open source software today. A team of British architects developed just that and they are hoping their project called WikiHouse will radically change the way we think about building homes.
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Open Hardware
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In Shelly’s awesome post on 3D printing,he hints at a future where spare parts will live on files and not shelves.
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Programming
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CGit, the widely-used replacement to GitWeb, has out a new release today. Besides incorporating some useful new functionality, it also takes care of a security fix where out-of-date CGit installations could allow arbitrary access to files from the system.
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For those looking at new static code analysis tools, OCLint is an open-source utility powered by LLVM’s Clang foundation to provide a variety of features when inspecting C, Objective-C, and C++ code-bases. In recent testing of OCLint for an internal C-based Phoronix code-base, OCLint proved to be quite useful.
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers to the silver screen.
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A 17-year-old German student contends PayPal has denied him a reward for finding a vulnerability in its website.
Robert Kugler said he notified PayPal of the vulnerability on May 19. He said he was informed by email that because he is under 18 years old, he did not qualify for its Bug Bounty Program. He will turn 18 next March.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In defiance of societal trends, a K-8 principal fired all his public school’s security guards and reinvested in the arts, drastically improving grades and test scores in a school that once “had a prison feel,” NBC News reports.
Orchard Gardens, of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was founded in 2003, but quickly fell to the bottom of public schools in the state. Of 800 students, “more than 90% qualify for free or reduced lunch, 25% are learning to speak English, and 25% require Individual Education Plans to meet special needs,” according to the pilot school’s website.
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followed the coverage of President Barack Obama’s May 23 speech at the National Defense University, you would think something big happened to the “war on terror.” Specifically, its scope was narrowed, perhaps considerably, as the war as it is currently being waged winds down.
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Cablegate
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Today I pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This was a very difficult decision. I hope this statement will explain my reasoning. I believe in the power of the truth. In keeping with that, I do not want to hide what I did or to shy away from my actions. This non-cooperating plea agreement frees me to tell the world what I did and why, without exposing any tactics or information to the government and without jeopardizing the lives and well-being of other activists on and offline.
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Finance
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Unless you live under a rock, you know about the Libor scandal.
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The number and value of overdue student loans has reached an all-time high in the US as nearly a third of 20- to 24-year-olds are currently unemployed, according to a report by the Department of Education.
With continued concern regarding rising college costs, the amount of outstanding student loans has now reached $1 trillion, making that the largest category of consumer debt in the US aside from home mortgages.
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The idea would establish the courts service as a commercial enterprise, paying its way and freed from Treasury control, with court buildings and thousands of staff put in the hands of private companies. It would save the Ministry of Justice pound stg. 1 billion ($1.56bn) a year.
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Censorship
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Houston singer Dominique attended the library screening and said it was shut down due to “technical difficulties.” It was rescheduled for later that night/morning, but police eventually shuttered that screening, too, after a tense back and forth.
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Privacy
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There has been a lot of outrage expressed recently over the contents of an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant to search the e-mail accounts of reporter James Rosen. The government’s affidavit offered the view that Rosen violated the law by aiding and abetting the alleged violations of laws prohibiting the disclosure of classified national security information. Specifically, the affidavit stated, “there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter . . . has committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. 793(d) either as Mr. Kim’s co-conspirator and/or aider and abetter.” To some, the fact that the government would make this argument shows that the Obama Administration is engaging in a War on Journalism. According to this thinking, the Obama Administration is not only trampling on the rights of a free press by going after its sources. Incredibly, they even think of a reporter as a criminal — and are willing to say so in court.
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Leaks to reporters — and investigations of the leaks that included subpoenas of reporters’ e-mail logs and searches of reporters’ e-mail — have been in the news; see this post by Orin about the AP story and this post by Conor Friedersdorf (The Atlantic) about the Fox News story. I thought I’d say a few things about the First Amendment issues involved in such matters, especially in response to the Friedersdorf post.
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During the debate about the Communications Data Bill, one of the points we repeatedly made was that while this bill was not about reading the contents of messages, but that the details of who you communicate with were still incredibly private information.
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The Snoopers’ Charter is back in the news. It’s come back sooner than any of us expected. We’ve stopped it twice already so we know we can win. What can you do to help stop a revived Snoopers’ Charter?
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The reports suggested that the Metropolitan Police were offered access to mobile users’ individual personal information – including web history, location and spending patterns. The claims were subsequently rejected by Ipsos MORI and mobile operator EE.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Anybody who has any involvement with Intellectual Property (“IP”) knows full well that protecting IP means a multi-step process. Obviously, step one is the conception of the invention, idea, trademark, trade name, or other innovation where protection might be necessary. Step two is the decision about what to do with the “new” idea, etc. in terms of the need to try for exclusivity on it –or not. Many “new” things do not need IP protection – and other “new” things may not qualify for it. If the “new” idea fits into the area where protection is desirable and it qualifies, then the next step is to seek legal protection. Of course, such protection will have a cost – whether or not the protection is sought by the inventor/conceptualizer himself/herself or itself (in the case of an organization) or assistance of counsel is required.
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Copyrights
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The hilariously named “Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property” has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that’s pretty bonkers. But amidst all that crazy, there’s a bit that stands out as particularly insane: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware.
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What does video tool Vine have in common with iconic rappers like the Beastie Boys and the Notorious BIG? More than you think. Like hip-hop, Vine is a way to sample and collect culture — and it may have to run the same legal gambit that rappers did a decade ago.
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Two major Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove the homepage of Kim Dotcom’s Mega from its search results. Warner Bros. and NBC Universal claim that their copyrighted content is hosted on the URL and want it taken down. Dotcom is disappointed by the news and points out that constant takedown abuse is restricting access to legitimate files. “This is in line with the unreasonable content industry behavior we have experienced for years,” he says in a response.
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Should owners of intellectual property be allowed to attack anyone they suspect of pirating their goodies? That’s a question that was raised last week by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property.
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Police assisted by the Federation Against Copyright Theft showed up in large numbers to arrest an alleged movie pirate in the UK this week. Armed with an emergency search warrant issued out of hours by a judge, five undercover police vehicles containing detectives and FACT officers were deployed to arrest a 24-year-old said to have recorded the movie Fast and Furious 6.
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We’ve discussed in the past the oddity of how a UK anti-piracy group, FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft), which is a private organization set up and controlled by large entertainment industry players, being deeply involved in criminal investigations and cases against individuals. In the case against Surfthechannel, FACT was directly involved in seizing and keeping the computers involved and then in paying the police for the prosecution. Even if you can reasonably argue that they should be involved in helping with providing information for the investigation, you’d think most people would agree that that’s where the industry’s involvement should end. They shouldn’t be present on raids. They shouldn’t get to touch or keep the evidence. And they certainly shouldn’t be financing and pressing the criminal case.
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Send this to a friend
05.27.13
Posted in News Roundup at 1:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Most of the characteristics of GNU/Linux he describes as suitable for use in India are applicable everywhere for some of us. I spent years in Canada’s North in schools that certainly benefited by using GNU/Linux. We didn’t have the time, money or resources to prop up Wintel. Even buying a new PC sometimes cost $200 just for the freight. All the more need to keep PCs working until they died, something we could not do with Wintel because of malware.
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Open-source software, or more precisely the FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) is arguably one of the best gifts the 20th century had presented us with. With the turn of the century, we continued to nurture this gift, and polish it more and more. A vast array of open-source software arose from our collective efforts, and indeed they’re helping make the world a better place for everyone.
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You’re not a power user unless you’re running one of these distros
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Kanotix, a rock-solid Linux distro based on Debian, which contains the newest packages and recognizes more modern hardware than any other operating system in use today, has just received a special edition called LinuxTag 2013.
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This news just blew my mind. Quantum computing is here and you can buy yourself a quantum computer today. Actually you could buy one for quite a while now but there is a new model which is 512 QuBits up from 128 QuBits of the previous model.
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The Linux Foundation today is releasing its annual Enterprise End User Report. Because this is the third year we’ve surveyed the world’s largest enterprises and The Linux Foundation’s End User Council about Linux adoption, we’re able to share some interesting trending data.
But perhaps most interesting is the opportunity to understand how Linux is outpacing Windows in server revenue in the enterprise. IDC’s latest quarterly tracker shows Linux growing at 12.7 percent year-over-year while Windows is stagnating at 3.2 percent year-over-year growth. In fact, the quarter prior (Q312), Windows was actually in decline while Linux was growing.
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Desktop
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Riku Voipio of Linaro, Andrew Wafaa of ARM, Olof Johannson of Google, Sonny Rao of Google and Marcin Juszkiewicz of Linaro talk about hacking and using the full performance of the ARM Powered Samsung Chromebook to run Ubuntu, Debian, Open Suse on this ARM Powered laptop, talking about how much the Mali-T604 is being used in this ARM Powered Chrome OS, which feature improvements the ARM Powered Chromebook may get to possibly improve battery life, and a bit about the possibility of running Chromium OS or Chrome OS on older/cheaper ARM Powered laptops such as ARM Cortex-A9 and previous.
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The most recent Linaro Connect (Linaro Connect Asia 2013 – LCA), held in Hong Kong the first week of March, really put a spotlight on the incredible momentum around ARM based technology and products moving into the Data Center. Yes – you read that correctly – the DATA CENTER!
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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With these releases, a large amount of upstream bug/security fixes have been applied (1,368 with 3.0,79-LTSI; 944 with 3.4.46-LTSI). This should result in a dramatic reduction of in-house maintenance costs for the companies who use LTSI Kernel.
In addition to the back port of bug/security fixes, LTSI has many patch collections now that are not merged and can be very useful and easy to apply to products.
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Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.10-rc3 kernel on Sunday afternoon, but to his dissatisfaction, this third release candidate is bigger than its predecessor.
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Graphics Stack
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After years of work near single-handedly by James Simmons, the independently-created DRM kernel mode-setting driver for many VIA Chrome IGPs is finally looking for inclusion into the mainline kernel.
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Applications
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Somewhere in my music writing, I remember an anecdote about Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriting team behind many hits by Elvis, The Coasters, and many others. Apparently when Leiber & Stoller hits were topping the charts, a music producer walked into a drum store and asked for the Leiber & Stoller drum kit. The store owner did a slack take, then responded that if he really wanted the Leiber & Stoller sound, he’d have to buy every drum in the store.
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Making a list of the best Linux software is a tough task. Hell, you could fill an entire book just by listing the various distros and desktop environments, let alone making a list of the best software for each one. So while this is by no means a comprehensive list, we did our best to include a wide variety of programs that the average user will find helpful. Below, you’ll find a hodgepodge of different software – mostly stuff for KDE and GNOME, but also a good number of programs that work in any desktop environment. So no matter what flavor of Linux you prefer, there’s something here for everyone.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Football Manager is a football management simulation video game developed by Sports Interactive and published by Sega. The game series dates back to the early 90s. From the original Facebook post, there is no information available right now for new features to Football Manager 2014 over Football Manager 2013 nor is a release date set.
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The news was confirmed by studio director Miles Jacobson on Twitter, alongside the announcement that next year’s game will be available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
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As a way of giving back to the groups behind software which has made World of Tanks possible, developer Wargaming.net has announced plans to fund foundations which support open-source development.
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Rise of the Ravager offers classic arcade action reminiscent of a fast action Missile Command while players blast descending waves of coloured enemies that can only be annihilated by a matching colour bullet (in a similar fashion to Guitar Hero or Ikaruga). Seek the favour of the Old Ones to prevent an ancient god’s avatar from rising, signalling the End of Times.
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Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter developed by Valve that was released back in 2004 and it has recently been ported on the Linux platform. The first patches have started to arrive.
Porting a complex title such as Half-Life 2 is a very difficult task and the developers have to release a lot of updates until the game exist the Beta stages.
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Element4l is an immersive and experimental indie platform game, with a strong focus on flow and smooth gameplay, wrapped in an exceptional soundtrack by Mind Tree.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I have spent the last two weeks working to make print-manager experience in 4.11 the best I could. And this post should be about it. Sadly it’s not.
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As a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education, SugarLabs has created a Sugar Learning Platform that encourages critical thinking and collaborative learning for children. It first existed as a desktop environment for the various Linux distro, but has now become its own distro that can be run directly from the USB stick.
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Conky-lua is a great and stylish conky that I got from Deviantart. I like its simplicity and appeal. However, conkies doesn’t tend to work with modern Gnome 3, Unity and KDE desktops, as it is. Some subtle changes are required to make them work work with these modern desktops.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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For those that still hold some nostalgia for Mandriva/Mandrake, there’s good news. The OpenMandriva project was able to obtain a lot of the files before their server was scrapped. An archive has been set up by the OpenMandriva gang for all to share.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Raspberry Pi users have another operation system option, after the folks behind Fedora Linux changed their recipe and issued a “remix” of the OS for the tiny computer.
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These settings will give your Fedora 18 a much more familiar look and feel. This will move you to fallback mode and enable your desktop.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Overall, the Unity-based flavor of Raring Ringtail, I repeat the Unity-based flavor, not Kubuntu or Xubuntu, which are quite alright really, deserves 0/10.
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The application youtube-dl no longer works on Ubuntu 12.04 due to a change in the format of urls for videos. This is terrible as who doesn’t like to download videos! Looking at the bug report we can see that the test case is quite simple, on an Ubuntu 12.04 system (for this bug you could even use a virtual machine or a chroot) with youtube-dl installed try downloading something and it will fail. It is important that we also verify that we are impacted by the bug, because something may be different about our configuration, setup, or hardware.
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Canonical’s long-term Ubuntu strategy remains focused on convergence — a single operating system designed for smartphones, tablets and PCs. But here’s the thing: Can Ubuntu really achieve mass-market consumer success without a proper multi-million-dollar consumer marketing push? Hmmm…
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Ubuntu 13.10 (Suacy Salamander) coming to us with a Touch Animation User Interface may be a reality, as a video detailing a new theme for Ubuntu has surfaced, which showcases the Touch interface being used on a Ubuntu based mobile phone. Reportedly made by Ubuntu designers, the video showcases various visual animations put to use in scenarios including unlocking the Ubuntu mobile-phone display.
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Expectations were high for the release of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, but let’s see if the hype was well deserved. 13.04 delivers improved performance, and some refinements for the Unity desktop. The critics and the community have spoken, but as always I demand the final word.
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Flavours and Variants
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I often say, Lubuntu and LXLE are like a Ford Mustang and a Ford Shelby Mustang. Both are fords, both are mustangs, but the Shelby version is much more feature rich, with very different goals/purpose. Same is true for LXLE.
In other words, I want everyone to realize and understand that LXLE is the “Shelby” version of Lubuntu. This makes finding help, support and or overall camaraderie easier within the community.
As for LXLE being lightweight, I have a general rule, I keep it as light as I can, with great apps and a overall goal of being a drop in and go operating system for aging computers. Not light just to be light.
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It’s been almost a year since Zorin OS 6 made its debut, and since then several minor updates to the user-friendly Linux distribution have been released as well.
On Thursday, however, the Zorin project team rolled out a release candidate for Zorin OS 7, the next major version of the software.
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Coreboot support for the popular BeagleBone ARM development board is being pushed mainline.
Hitting the Coreboot Git repository on Sunday morning by Google developers was the initial BeagleBone support.
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Wardriving is the act of searching for Wifi networks by a someone on a vehicle, using a laptop, smartphone or personal digital assistant. A 22 year old IT security consultant and motorcycle enthusiast from New Zealand, Denis Andzakovic, has taken wardriving to a new level of coolness, with the help of the mighty tiny Raspberry Pi.
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Generally speaking most recent cars have an on-board computer (called an engine control unit) that uses a 32bit, nominally 40Mhz, ARM based SOC and runs some version of Linux.
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ARM’s Development Studio 5 (DS-5) Community Edition (CE) to feature industry standard, and free-to-use software development environment for ARM Embedded Linux applications. DS-5 CE to offer Eclipse IDE, GNU cross-compiler, DS-5 Debugger, Streamline performance analyzer, online help and software examples. This product to help microcontroller users moving into the world of Linux.
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Phones
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Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that’s backed by Samsung and which is expected to ship on Samsung smartphones this year. But the OS isn’t just for mobile devices like phones and tablets.
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Ballnux
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A month after being released to mostly positive reviews, Samsung’s flagship phone is getting some validation from Consumer Reports. The publication has run all its tests, kicked the phone’s tires, and named the Android-powered Galaxy S4 its top rated smartphone.
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Calling all Android developers — if you have a great idea for an app, then you could win cold hard cash from Samsung.
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Android
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Update to Chrome for Android and desktop computers offers faster speed and better query understanding.
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The Wandboard is a tiny computer or developer board which looks a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but which has a starting price about three times as high and which packs significantly more power.
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Samsung phones running a secure version of Android have been approved for use by the US Department of Defense.
The approval is the start of a process that will see many different types of mobile devices used by US soldiers.
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While covering the launch of Appcelerator Enterprise Platform at Mountain View last week, we enjoyed a short chat with Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator.
Haynie explained that his company’s new enterprise platform is important because it leverages mobility, cloud, and Big Data. These three game-changing advancements have really transformed the way the enterprise does business. We are moving away from package software deployed inside of middleware and enterprise app software that has been the trend for the last 15 years, and now towards on-demand subscription-oriented software, Haynie says.
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Joeffice is an alpha version of a open source Java-based office suite, which was created by its author, Anthony Goubard, in thirty days. Goubard documented the development process in a series of videos now available on YouTube.
The application’s framework, and the tool used to develop the application, is the NetBeans platform. It is well known that NetBeans is an IDE, but the IDE also supports being effectively hollowed out and being used as the basis for applications. This is called the NetBeans platform and gives applications all the support for customisable editors for documents and having a fully tab-supporting, dock-enabled, single window or multi window environment with toolbars, menus and other interface elements.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Are you ready for Google to take over the desktop? You’d better be if you use Chrome. With it, Google is making a play to rule the computing world as a back door to a new app economy.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Local OpenStack Innovators and Tech Leaders Will Demonstrate Cloud Capabilities at Premier Technology Event
SYDNEY May 27, 2013 – The OpenStack® community will take part in CeBIT Australia for the first time when the show opens in Sydney tomorrow, bringing the promise of cost savings, speed of deployment and freedom from vendor lock in to Australian enterprises. CeBIT will run from May 28 through 30 and will be held at the Sydney Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour; OpenStack will be on stand 001 in the Cloud Ecosystem section in Hall 4.
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Education
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April welcomes the recognition by the culture, education and communication committee at the French Senate, of the importance of open formats and of free software to the education public service because only them guarantee equal access for all to this future public service.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Devops represents a dramatic change from the old siloed developers and script-heavy system administrators of yesterday. Any tools that can provide some common ground for developers and IT operations professionals can help, and it seems Chef and Puppet often do.
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Project Releases
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The libjpeg-turbo library, which is the increasingly-used fork of the JPEG library that provides faster performance through SIMD optimizations, has out a new release.
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Public Services/Government
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The Department of Science and Technology revealed plans to adopt InaSAFE, a disaster mitigation technology from Indonesia, to its Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazard (NOAH) project in a bid to improve disaster planning and preparedness in the country.
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The website Futuregov Asia reported that the Philippines are planning to improve their disaster mitigation efforts by adopting an Indonesian mapping and planning tool: “The Department of Science and Technology revealed plans to adopt InaSAFE, a disaster mitigation technology from Indonesia, to its Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazard (NOAH) project in a bid to improve disaster planning and preparedness in the country. InaSAFE, or Indonesia Scenario Assessment for Emergency, is an open source software that produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios to help decision makers in their disaster planning, preparedness and response activities.
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Programming
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With next month’s release of LLVM 3.3 quickly approaching, here’s an overview of some of the best and most exciting features coming to this next major update of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and Clang C/C++ compiler front-end.
Some of our favorite features coming to LLVM 3.3 include:
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Science
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People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information, say US researchers.
Instead, they are good at detecting small moving objects.
The findings come in a study of 53 people given a simple, visual test in Current Biology.
The results could help scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and more intelligent.
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Health/Nutrition
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In what has been roundly declared a victory for food rights and private food transactions by supporters, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty on three of four charges against Wisconsin raw milk farmer Vernon Hershberger in the early morning hours of March 25. “It’s a beautiful day. . . . They tried their best to set me free,” Hershberger told The Complete Patient after a few hours of sleep.
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Security
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There has been a lot of outrage expressed recently over the contents of an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant to search the e-mail accounts of reporter James Rosen. The government’s affidavit offered the view that Rosen violated the law by aiding and abetting the alleged violations of laws prohibiting the disclosure of classified national security information. Specifically, the affidavit stated, “there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter . . . has committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. 793(d) either as Mr. Kim’s co-conspirator and/or aider and abetter.” To some, the fact that the government would make this argument shows that the Obama Administration is engaging in a War on Journalism.
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Scripps News reporters discovered 170,000 Lifeline phone customer records online that contained everything needed for identity theft. After requesting an interview with the COO of TerraCom and YourTel, the reaction was kill-the-messenger style; the reporters were called “Scripps Hackers” and threatened with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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The ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack.
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On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site “stress testing” services. Today, we’ll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site’s proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity.
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Twitter introduced multi-factor login verification on Wednesday. Good news? Well… that depends.
Twitter’s initial implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) relies on SMS.
But… Twitter also uses SMS as a way to send and receive Tweets (making use of SMS for double-duty: social and security). It’s possible to “STOP” incoming Tweets via SMS, and that makes sense, because people sometimes end up roaming unexpectedly — and there needs to be a way to stop the SMS feature. Otherwise it could generate a costly bill.
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Those users who are still using Novell Client for Windows should look around for alternatives. In recent weeks, at least two 0-day exploits for the kernel driver have surfaced on the internet. The security firm eEye has documented the issues with the ids 20130510 and 20130522.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Those 86 prisoners have not been, and will not be, charged with any crime whatsoever; they are not “terror suspects.”
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The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert’s fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, “the seeds of our death”. An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. “Before the Gulf war,” he said, “we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years’ time to begin with, then long after. That’s almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can’t be eaten.”
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The rally, now in its third year, is tolerated by the authorities, but just like a year ago when 10,000 participated, it was not given official permission to take place.
Like last year’s parade, hardliners managed to spray graffiti on parliament, leading authorities to take extra precautions. Bern’s Old Town was locked down on the eve of the event, with extensive riot police deployments and barricades erected around Parliament Square.
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Investigators believe they have found “conclusive” new proof that CIA-linked planes landed regularly in Scottish airports as part of the “extraordinary rendition” programme.
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SNP MSPs have urged the UK government to come clean on what knowledge it has on rendition flights using Inverness, Wick and Aberdeen airports.
Rob Gibson, who has campaigned against these flights, said new findings that claim to have “conclusive” proof rendition planes landed regularly in Scottish airports, was “shocking”.
The study by Kingston and Kent universities found that 13 flights to these airports may have been involved in the US security service’s rendition programme.
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The UK’s support for the CIA’s global rendition programme after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US was far more substantial than has previously been recognised, according to a new research project that draws on a vast number of publicly available data and documentation.
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Storm was offered $250,000 (£165,000) to help track down the radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the relationship soured when the CIA refused to pay him, saying that despite his assistance, the information that led to the kill came from other sources.
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When the New York Times reported recently that the CIA routinely provides cash payments to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, many were surprised. I wasn’t among them. The Karzai scandal cycle has developed a certain amount of redundancy: his odd outbursts, his family’s endless corruption, the vacillating positions on peace negotiations and about faces on the Taliban one day and the United States the next — it has lost the power to shock. CIA payments are not even at the front of this parade of infamies.
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Currently ex-CIA agent John Kiriakou is serving a 30-month prison term essentially for embarrassing the U.S. government. What was so embarrassing? He exposed the CIA’s torture program during the Bush administration.
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Russian agents warned them that both Zubeidat Tsarnaeva and 26-year-old Tamerlan were militant Islamists
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Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent.
US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.
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On the other hand, we now also know (again thanks to the Washington Post) that James Rosen, the Fox News reporter almost certainly communicated some of the time with his alleged source Stephen Jin-Woo Kim through a Gmail account. Those communications are at the heart of a leak investigation in which DOJ is, as Jack has noted, pushing very hard. So, apparently what I consider an obvious lapse in tradecraft is, to at least one sophisticated news reporter, …. a surprise. And if Fox News doesn’t know that Gmail is insecure, maybe it is too much to expect that the CIA would know.
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In the first part, geopolitical analyst William Engdahl discussed the role of CIA’s Graham Fuller in creating the policy of using angry Jihadist Muslims as trained terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere against the Soviet Union. Herein—largely drawing on the revelations made by FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edwards—Engdahl throws the spotlight on the entire CIA-sponsored Islamic Jihadist operations run through Fetullah Gülen across Turkey into Central Asia and Russia and China.
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Amnesty International has stated in its annual report that it is concerned about the pace of Poland’s investigation into alleged CIA prisons for terrorists on Polish soil.
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Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States rounded up suspected terrorists wherever they were and then moved them to secret prisons around the globe, where they were detained and questioned. The program, largely carried out by the CIA, was known as extraordinary rendition.
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Prosecutors are applying to the Attorney General to extend the investigation into an alleged CIA prison in Poland, where renditioned prisoners have complained they were imprisoned and tortured.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks has lashed out at a forthcoming US-made documentary on founder Julian Assange. The whistleblowing group decried the film for its alleged inaccuracies, chiefly implications that Assange conspired with Bradley Manning to commit espionage.
The anti-secrecy organization released an annotated copy of the film’s transcript that took no prisoners. Even the documentary’s name – ‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’ – was condemned by the group as misleading.
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As I noted in intro to my interview with Alex Gibney, director of the new We Steal Secrets film re WikilLeaks, he has been slammed by Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks Twitter feed for months, for various reasons, no doubt. It seems that Assange early on got some kind of leaked script or transcript for the film in process. Gibney hit back for basing a critique on some words on the page, when a film is a quite different experience.
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The disclosures known as the “Kissinger cables” make the US Administration ethically and morally, if not legally, responsible for the Bhopal Gas Disaster that took thousands of lives, sickened and maimed many more. If one looks at the larger picture of the Bhopal tragedy one would find officials of the US Administration including those in its Indian embassy and some Indian collaborators working against all ethical or moral and legal norms from the beginning to end for the benefit of a big corporation. The entire script, however, was prepared and choreographed by the US.
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In Nigeria, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the drafting of legislation to assist the progress of GE crop approval there. Other forms of coercion were more gentle, even glamorous; they included a “magical evening” with famed Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli on Venice’s San Giorio Maggiore island and State-sponsored biotech conferences, receptions and delegations of agriculture officials and reporters to U.S.-based biotech centers.
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At Freedom of the Press Foundation, we believe it’s vital to defend WikiLeaks’ right to gather and publish classified information in the public interest, just as it’s vital to protect the rights of Associated Press and Fox News to do the same. Under the law, the AP, Fox News, and WikiLeaks are no different (a fact that even the government argues). If one falls, the others will not be far behind.
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Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd fulfilled his campaign pledge to withdraw Australian “combat” forces from Southern Iraq on June 2008. Rudd used the occasion to condemn former Prime Minister John Howard for joining the war, but US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks show the Rudd government wanted to keep more Australian forces in Iraq than it had withdrawn.
After the withdrawal of soldiers, about 1000 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel remained in Iraq, including sailors on board warships in the Persian Gulf ― Australia’s contribution to the multinational Task Force 158 (TF158) guarding Iraqi oil platforms.
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The Aafia Siddiqu case that Archibald was involved with became controversial in Pakistan. The facts surrounding Siddiqui’s activities and arrest remain disputed and though she was eventually tried and convicted in New York City her case remains controversial due to questions surrounding her possible kidnapping, detainment, and torture by U.S. forces as well as disputes regarding forensic evidence and due process rights.
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London: An interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would cost an interviewer as high as a million dollars.
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Finance
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On Tuesday evening I gave an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills to a friendly long-haired young man I’d never met in an undistinguished coffee-shop in an undistinguished neighborhood. By the time I got home, the BitCoins I’d bought were worth noticeably less than I paid.
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Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, has continued to defend the company’s tax affairs, insisting it would comply with British law if it was changed and claiming to be perplexed by the debate.
In a phrase less snappy than the more celebrated “don’t be evil”, Schmidt said Google had “a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders” that prevented the internet company from paying more tax abroad. However, he said: “It’s not a debate. You pay the taxes.”
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nearly half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 a day.
[...]
The incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again. The exact total of the wealth of these individuals is actually something of a mystery, thanks to the tax havens they use to hide their fortunes. There are trillions of dollars squirrelled away in those havens – no one knows quite how much – and the subtraction of that money from the global economy has a direct and debilitating effect on the people not fortunate enough to be part of that elite 100.
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Censorship
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A prominent Vietnamese blogger has been arrested for posting articles critical of the communist government, reports said on Monday, in the latest crackdown on dissent in the authoritarian country.
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Privacy
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Responding to calls to revive the communications data bill…
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Depending on your point of view, U.S. General Keith Alexander is either an Army four-star trying to stave off a cyber Pearl Harbor attack, or an overreaching spy chief who wants to eavesdrop on the private emails of every American.
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The 1 million square-foot Camp Williams facility in Bluffdale, Utah will house a 100,000 square foot data center, while the remaining 900,000 SF will be used for technical support and administrative space. Wired has estimated the Utah Data Center would consume $40 million of electricity a year, which translates into about $2.4 million annually in additional taxes under HB325.
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It was the first time the NSA made public the number of people who work for the agency, whose post-9/11 workforce is now estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000.
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….every telephone conversation… with or without a search warrant — “is being captured as we speak.”
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Civil Rights
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Journalists, First Amendment watchdogs and government transparency advocates reacted with outrage Monday to the revelation that the Justice Department had investigated the newsgathering activities of a Fox News reporter as a potential crime in a probe of classified leaks.
Critics said the government’s suggestion that James Rosen, Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent, was a “co-conspirator” for soliciting classified information threatened to criminalize press freedoms protected by the First Amendment. Others also suggested that the Justice Department’s claim in pursuing an alleged leak from the State Department was little more than pretext to seize his e-mails to build their case against the suspected leaker.
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The Senate immigration bill’s H-1B restrictions have clearly upset Indian firms. But sometimes being in a tough spot can prompt new ways of approaching problems. One firm is implementing software robots.
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In late April, the 16-year-old central Florida honor student was accused of igniting a chemical explosion on school grounds, leading to her arrest and suspension from school, but authorities dropped criminal charges last week.
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A federal judge has ruled that the office of America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff systematically singled out Latinos in its trademark immigration patrols, marking the first finding by a court that the agency racially profiles people.
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A dramatic battery of measures to prevent radicalisation of British Muslims was outlined on Sunday by the home secretary, Theresa May, including tougher pre-emptive censorship of internet sites, a lower threshold for banning extremist groups and renewed pressure on universities and mosques to reject so-called hate preachers.
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Today, the California Assembly Appropriations Committee gave a “Do-Pass” approval to a bill that could render toothless the federal “indefinite detention” powers under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, by ASM Tim Donnelly was previously passed unanimously by the Public Safety Committee and is expected to get a vote in the full state assembly in the coming week.
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In the past few years we have witnessed the worst of government. President Barack Obama now represents a lawless government incapable of any accountability. It’s my belief that “Articles of Impeachment” must be brought forward in order to check the executive branch. Congress must make itself relevant again; otherwise no president will fear anything and the executive branch of will become more and more tyrannical.
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When President Obama delivered a major speech on America’s drone program and the ongoing existence of the Guantanamo prison, the majority of those most affected by the latter – the prisoners themselves – were, ironically, unable to hear his speech.
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Late on Friday evening, RT published an article I had been commissioned to write for them, entitled, “In Guantánamo, fine words are no substitute for freedom.” In it, I examined in detail the parts of President Obama’s national security speech on Thursday that dealt with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a prison-wide hunger strike has been raging for nearly four months.
The 166 men still held are expressing their despair at having been abandoned by all three branches of the US government — by President Obama and his administration, by Congress and by the judiciary, and for good reason — 86 of these men were cleared for release three years ago by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and most of the 80 others would be entirely justified in concluding that, in their cases, justice has gone AWOL.
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A counter-rally, under the name of Newcastle Unites, was also held in the city, with people chanting: “NazI scum, off our streets”.
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Website of Liberty Reserve, a digital currency, has been shut with the founder arrested by police in Spain this week over his alleged involvement in money laundering.
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DRM
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In an unusual move before a trial, a federal judge expressed a tentative view that the U.S. Justice Department will be able to show evidence that Apple Inc engaged in a conspiracy with publishers to increase e-book prices.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Today EFF joins organizations from the around the world representing a diversity of interests in launching a new coalition to ask for A Fair Deal on intellectual property (IP) in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The coalition has launched a website at www.OurFairDeal.org calling for TPP negotiators to “reject copyright proposals that restrict the open Internet, access to knowledge, economic opportunity and our fundamental rights.” The TPP meetings are taking place in Lima, Peru this week until May 25th, and EFF has been on the ground working with groups to fight those provisions and demand a seat at the table at these secretive negotiations.
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One of the longer-running and higher stakes high-tech patent disputes has been laid to rest. Brocade and A10 Networks settled their patent and copyright dispute over their competing application delivery controllers today. The deal was struck just one hour before a San Jose jury was going to hear opening statements in a damages trial, according to Mike Swift, a reporter for the MLex legal and regulatory news service.
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Copyrights
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There have been many small-to-medium developments in the Prenda Law saga. I’m preparing for trial, so I won’t be covering them any time soon. But I will leave you with one: a consequence for a Prenda Law lawyer in the Ninth Circuit.
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The four lawyers linked to the Prenda Law copyright-trolling organization were slapped with an $81,000 sanctions order, which as of today, they have missed the deadline to pay. They did make time to file a last-minute motion to delay the sanctions, which only got referred back to the judge who’s angry at them in the first place: US District Judge Otis Wright.
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Yesterday we had a story about how a judge in Minnesota, Judge Ann Alton, angrily accused Paul Hansmeier of fraud in the lawsuit filed by Alan Cooper against Prenda. There was some confusion by the judge about whether Cooper and Godfread were in on the fraud too, which seems to have made the judge less open to possible damages against Prenda. Either way, without a court reporter, Matthew Sparby, who was in attendance, wrote up the following first-hand account of what happened in the court room. It’s definitely disappointing to see that the judge made a few bad assumptions about Cooper/Godfread, but good to see that she knew that Prenda has been up to no good.
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The RIAA has submitted its latest Form 990 tax filing to the IRS, which details the organization’s precipitous shelving off in budget and employees (though the execs gave themselves fat raises)…
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ABC, NBC, and Fox file a new copyright suit against a far less formidable opponent
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In recent weeks a new Demonoid-inspired standalone tracker entered the BitTorrent ecosystem with a bang. Blessed by The Pirate Bay, Demonii has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. TorrentFreak decided to catch up with the admin to find out how it all came to be.
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In recent weeks a new Demonoid-inspired standalone tracker entered the BitTorrent ecosystem with a bang. Blessed by The Pirate Bay, Demonii has quickly become one of the most used BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. TorrentFreak decided to catch up with the admin to find out how it all came to be.
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With a reputation of taking harsh measures against unauthorized file-sharing, the RIAA has made quite a few enemies over the years. How ironic is it then that the RIAA website now appears to be seeding more than a dozen pirated porn videos? Or could it be that someone is trying to nail the RIAA in a clever way?
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While we realize that the intricacies of IP law (and its often-attendant ridiculousness) can be rather difficult for the average, uninterested person to parse, it’s really not asking too much to expect large international news agencies to make an effort to get the terminology right.
As you recall, Kim Dotcom recently announced he holds a patent for two-factor authentication, which he then waved in the direction of other internet titans like Twitter and Google, promising not to sue in exchange for contributions to his legal defense fund.
Here’s how AFP (Agence France-Presse), the third-largest news agency in the world (and one of the oldest) titled its coverage of the Dotcom/patent story: Kim Dotcom might sue Twitter, Google and Facebook over copyright infringement.
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