11.08.12
Posted in Microsoft at 4:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
An achievement even the NSA would envy
Summary: Microsoft, a large shareholder of Facebook, is putting cameras with antifeatures in people’s houses and also uses Skype as a listening device
Inevitably, Vista 8 gets cracked quickly and this is how it goes:
Windows 8 was released late last week, and already this week French security firm VUPEN says it has broken Microsoft’s latest and greatest security features. The company claims it has developed a 0-day exploit for Windows 8 and IE10, by chaining multiple undisclosed flaws together.
Vista 8 has back doors anyway.
A lot of security firms employ crackers, so these practices are not too shocking. In fact, Microsoft Skype feeds them user data against the law. Skype is the latest surveillance/listening device that Microsoft bought. Here comes another. From a pro-Microsoft site (caution for bias):
Xbox team’s ‘consumer detector’ would dis-Kinect freeloading TV viewers
A newly surfaced patent filing from Microsoft’s Xbox Incubation team details one of the new innovations they’ve been thinking about. This one could be very popular among major movie and television studios. But it probably wouldn’t generate much excitement among Xbox users.
It is said that Microsoft will centralise the spying, capitalising on Skype misuse that it makes possible:
The security firm, iSIGHT, was hired by PayPal to investigate the attacks, and an employee of the company reached out to Skype seeking information about one user who he thought might be involved. And Skype coughed up the info — including username, real name, email address and home address — no questions asked. As the article notes, there was no court order or anything like that. Just a guy from a private company asking and Skype said, “sure, here’s all the info.”
This ought to worry everyone who cares about tech rights. It is why we oppose the companies which we do. We have some more detailed posts on Microsoft surveillance through Skype. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 3:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at how Microsoft deals with having an unwanted operating system
THE Vista 8 astroturf has been carrying on with limited success. We did not cover it closely, but many examples were mentioned by yours truly in sites like Identi.ca. Many reviewers, probably most, dislike Vista 8, so it is like Vista in a sense. Ed Bott, somewhat of a peripheral PR outpost for Microsoft, calls people who dislike this Vista successor not “normal” (link omitted). He likes to insult people who don't agree with Microsoft.
So people who do not like Vista 8 are not “normal”, insists Microsoft, but what’s not “normal” is bloggers whom Microsoft bribes to write positive articles about Vista 8.
The strategy is doomed. Microsoft tries to change people rather than the OS and it introduces artificial barriers like UEFI, which complicate everything and can in fact discourage Vista 8 installs. See this new post:
The computer I used is the same one I’ve used in the past, a system I assembled using an ASRock motherboard. The board has a UEFI firmware. The process was the same. Install Windows 8 Pro first, then attempt to install Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop alongside it.
Back In 2009 we concentrated on Vista 7 failures, but three years later the landscape is different (Android is dominant), so we need only focus on few bad reviews which stand out. Here is what a Microsoft partner called Dominic Connor says:
Are you an IT pro? It’s no longer safe to bet your career on Microsoft
As an IT worker, you have to gamble on which technology will keep you fed and housed over the coming years. For a really long time that has been Microsoft, but you don’t get paid on the past. Instead you need to peer into an uncertain future.
The Windows 8 launch was remarkably stealthy compared to the good old days when it was an event on an Apple scale. In fact, if you weren’t an IT pro you’d easily assume that Apple was a majority of the world’s IT. In the UK there was so little in the way of launch events that I cornered an Microsoft’s PR to find out if they’d “forgotten” to invite me.
[...]
Dominic Connor is a headhunter who has been a professional developer on every major and most minor MS platforms and is a director of a firm that is a Microsoft Partner.
Borrowing a lesson from OLPC days, Microsoft is targeting children now, trying as characteristically as always to collect revenue from government, i.e. in the public sector, all at the expense of Free software.
Free software advocates should keep their heads up and not carry the baggage of being an underdog; now we have a much more compelling product and philosophy to promote. We need no longer worry about Microsoft; in fact, Apple has become equally burdensome, albeit far less corrupt. Vista 8 will fail on its own, even without much criticism from the likes of FSF (not that this criticism is not welcomed). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: FRAND wars as fought by politicians and by monopolists with their lobbyists
THE other week in Twitter we saw some claims that Spain had buried FRAND. Some people who can read Spanish said so, but we could not corroborate. Here is just one example:
Open Standard, according to Spanish law http://ur1.ca/atsfv (page 17) Public and freely available, not subject to royalties of any kind
Spain also opposed the unitary patent [1, 2], so for the country to dodge FRAND like the UK did [1, 2] would simply make sense.
The FRAND (e.g. MPEG tax,)lobbyist hired by proprietary software companies is unsurprisingly doing all he can to promote FRAND. After all, he is paid to promote it. Yes, Microsoft Florian, who was hired by patent thugs from Microsoft, is spreading more smears and lies. From a rebuttal:
So far, we are unaware of any credible allegations of ‘extortion’ having been made against any Korean companies, or of any diplomatic repercussions, or indeed of any impact on the US presidential race now drawing to a conclusion!
However, this week we have come into possession of a full English translation of the Media Report issued by the Seoul Court on 24 August in relation to its ruling on the Samsung patents, and we have to say it makes very interesting reading, with none of the hallmarks you might expect of a document issued by a ‘rogue state’.
Nilay Patel, who previously gave a platform to Microsoft Florian, is giving a platform to the patent terrorists at Microsoft — those who pay Florian to plant their spin and lies in the media (they proxify the unethical mass-mailing). To quote Microsoft: “We certainly care. We care a great deal about the ability to have protection on software and software-related patents, and so we certainly see quite a bit of the discussion around software patents. We take that very seriously.”
This is why they are lobbying for software patents (or loopholes like FRAND) all around the world and then using these to tax Linux:
Microsoft has begun the long process of phasing out the FAT (File Allocation Table) filesystem and replacing it with exFAT, signing agreements with five hardware vendors to licence the format for use in peripheral devices.
First introduced in 1977 as an eight-bit storage format for Microsoft’s BASIC language, the format received its last serious upgrade in 1996 with the launch of FAT32 as part of Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2.) Designed to extend the existing FAT16 format, FAT32 expanded the possible size of a partition on a hard drive from 2GB to 16TB but retained a file size limit that meant no single file could be larger than 4GB. While extensions to the format, including the open FAT+ standard, attempted to extend this to 256GB per file, few gained commercial traction in mainstream operating systems.
Tuxera helps this agenda. It is a loophole for software patents, especially where these patents are not allowed. Hopefully the new British and Spanish policies can push back against it.
It sure seems, based on what Dr. Moody is saying, like FRAND is on its way out.
Last week’s big announcement by the UK government was principally about procurement, detailing the new rules that will apply when government departments acquire software. Naturally, then, it concentrated on the details of that approach, and how it would be deployed and enforced. A key part of that was using open standards to create a level playing field for all companies, regardless of whether they offered open source or proprietary code.
As I explained in my post last week, the critical issue then became what exactly “open standards” meant, and, specifically, how standards that might be encumbered by patents would be dealt with. As I’ve noted many times before, the only way open source can implement general interoperability standards is if any claimed patents are licensed under royalty/restriction-free (RF) terms. Although that’s the preferred mode for key Internet organisations like the W3C, it stands in contrast to the older approach, which was based on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” – FRAND.
FRAND is also being used by apple, mainly against Android [1, 2]. We’ll focus on Apple tomorrow. 4 articles about Apple are being drafted. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It would be difficult to overstate the popularity of the tiny Raspberry Pi computer that launched earlier this year, but it’s just one example of a rapidly growing class of small, inexpensive, Linux-powered devices, as I’ve already noted on several occasions before.
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Rod Aldridge, president of the Hamilton PC Computer Club Inc, tells Chris Gardner why his favourite gadget is a computer running Linux Mint.
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Server
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Linaro is ramping up its efforts to get ARM more deeply embedded into mainstream enterprise computing.
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Kernel Space
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As part of a process to reduce its staff by 15 per cent, AMD has closed the Dresden, Germany-based Operating System Research Center (OSRC) and dismissed the centre’s employees. First indications of this move already surfaced last week, when several OSRC developers had announced on the Linux kernel developers’ mailing list that they will no longer be available on their AMD email addresses. At the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, The H’s associates at heise open learned that the Operating System Research Center has now been shut down completely.
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During a panel discussion with Intel’s Dirk Hohndel, Linus Torvalds discussed the latest technical advancements and problems in kernel development. The creator of Linux and Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist took the stage on day three of the LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Barcelona, Spain.
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The Linux Foundation made several membership announcements over the weekend, welcoming new members Cloudsoft, Cloudscaling, CloudSigma and DreamHost to the fold at LinuxCon Europe, currently being held in Barcelona.
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The Linux kernel has been ported to a new family of processors commonly found in TV set-top boxes, digital media players, and other devices.
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While AMD is letting go of their Linux staff responsible for new CPU enablement, there’s no slowdown on the Intel side for future hardware enablement under Linux. New Haswell Linux patches were published yesterday, which also reveal a few more details about the video playback improvements to be found on these Intel processors to be introduced in 2013.
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Graphics Stack
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Valve announced today that the closed beta for Linux is now beginning for those lucky few who were selected out of the 60,000 applicants. Those players will be able to start playing native versions of games like Team Fortress 2, but the performance may be a little spotty if the drivers aren’t up to date. It’s a good thing Nvidia is here with an update.
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Pekka Paalanen has published initial patches that allow Wayland’s Weston reference compositor to run from the popular low-cost Raspberry Pi ARM computer.
Pekka’s patches for Weston allow for a configurable Weston back-end at build time, contains a small fix to the OpenGL ES 2.0 support, and introduces a Raspberry Pi back-end for the compositor. The “RPI” back-end is around 2,000 lines of new code for Weston.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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In Humble Indie Bundle 6, we wrote that Vessel was coming to Mac and Linux in 24-72 hours. Unfortunately, this estimate was way off, and Vessel is still under development. The port is still being developed as fast as possible, but has hit quite a few unexpected setbacks along the way.
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Scrolls is a fresh take on the collectible card games of old. It’s developed by Mojang – creators of Minecraft. You’ll create your own personalised army from a digital deck before unleashing it in battles with players around the world. It will eventually be released on PC, Mac, Android and iOS.
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Steam is a great source for any gamer. It is a place that will allow you to try out and enjoy many of the more popular video games that are available on the market today. Steam Greenlight will allow you to vote on games that you would like to see come available. It is a great system for gamers, so they do not have to drop $50 to purchase every game off the shelf. They can simply join Steam and enjoy the most popular ones at a reduced price.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.9.3 are available for Kubuntu 12.10 and Raring. You can get them from the Kubuntu Updates PPA for 12.10. Raring testers will get it with the regular updates.
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Today I am pleased to publish an interview with Gabriele, leader of the project SalentOS, as well as owner of the interesting blog gmstyle.org , in the past we exchanged emails and articles and today I want to write a little more information about him and his project.
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Slax is a Linux-based operating system that you can run from a CD or USB flash drive. Developer Tomáš Matějíček is getting ready to release version 7, and this week he’s launched the first release candidate of Slax 7.
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SLAX 7 is now up to a release candidate state and it packs a KDE 4 desktop environment while the entire operating system is less than 200MB in size.
SLAX is one of my favorite lightweight distributions that I have come across but hadn’t heard much about it in the past couple of years until receiving an email this week from Tomas, the SLAX maintainer. He was sharing that SLAX 7 is nearly ready for release and packs in KDE4 while still being fairly lightweight.
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The latest ARM Linux benchmarks to share at Phoronix is a comparison of Ubuntu 12.10, Linaro 12.10, Fedora 17, and Arch Linux when running from the dual-core Cortex-A9 OMAP4460-based PandaBoard ES development board.
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New Releases
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The Zorin OS Team are pleased to announce the release of Zorin OS 6.1 Core, our operating system designed for Windows users and those who are dissatisfied with the Unity and Gnome Shell offerings. Zorin OS 6.1 Core builds on top of our popular previous release of Zorin OS 6 Core with newly updated software and a newer kernel out of the box. As Zorin OS 6.1 is based on Ubuntu 12.04 it is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, provided with 5 years of security updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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There was another go/no-go meeting today for the Fedora 18 Beta and it was decided to delay the release for a seventh time. The Fedora 18 Beta was decided to be delayed by two weeks (compared to the normal one week delays) and the final F18 release will be set-back into 2013.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) that took place in Copenhagen last week, the developer community for Canonical’s Linux distribution laid down the goals for the next release of the project, expected in April of next year. This information is now publicly available thanks to the work of Ubuntu community member Alan Bell, who extracted the meeting notes from the Etherpad instance used at the summit.
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The Citrix-owned enterprise collaboration platform Podio is keen to plug into as many other platforms as it can. That’s why it’s already integrated access to Google Docs, ShareFiles and Dropbox files, and why it’s just done the same for Ubuntu One.
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As I mentioned last week, our LoCo Teams are a core part of the Ubuntu community. They provide wonderful contributions in spreading the word about Ubuntu, introducing users in how to get started with the desktop/server, and providing a fantastic support safety net for new users. I want to help to better support the work of LoCo Teams in the 13.04 cycle.
One idea I was discussing with my team the other day was the idea of an Advocacy Development Kit (ADK). Let me explain…
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As always, the latest edition of Ubuntu was released on schedule. Ubuntu 12.10, code-named Quantal Quetzal, was released on October 18. What’s different about this release, is that it is the first October release that I can recall in a long time that comes with new features that are at once cool and controversial. End-to-end and bumper-to-bumper, it is the most interesting Ubuntu (Desktop) release in a long time.
Even as a non-Ubuntu user, I still find one of the new desktop features a true innovation. Unless another distribution or operating system beat Ubuntu to it. In this review, I’ll highlight what that new feature is, why I think it’s cool and a few other details about this latest offering from Mark Shuttleworth’s crew.
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Flavours and Variants
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The most recent buzz related to desktop Linux OEMs has centered around Canonical. But Linux Mint, the Ubuntu-based distribution that remains fiercely independent of Canonical, has been striking deals of its own with hardware manufacturers to preinstall Mint on their devices. Could there be a commercial future for this outspoken member of the open source channel?
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation yesterday announced the availability of RISC OS for the tiny computer. RISC OS dates to 1987, having been developed for ARM-based personal computers by the now-defunct Acorn Computers.
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RISC OS, the operating system with its roots in Acorn’s 1987 Archimedes micro and therefore the birth of the ARM processor architecture, has been released for the Raspberry Pi.
Available as a free download, or pre-loaded onto an SD card for £10 plus postage, the release for the Pi is version 5.19 RC6. There’s also a £35 software bundle on offer, dubbed NutPi, that includes all manner of useful applications to turn a RISC OS Pi into a viable everyday machine.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung has released some new open source Android files for some of its devices, the files ate for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and they apply to a number of devices.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Apple Inc’s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition from Android devices such as Samsung Electronic Co’s Galaxy tablets and Google Inc’s Nexus 7.
Apple still had a solid lead and shipped more iPads worldwide than a year earlier, Monday’s study by IDC showed. Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter and also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad.
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Once-skeptical developers may be coming around to the idea of building tablet apps.
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Hundreds of people were due to celebrate the achievements of the open source software industry at its biennial awards in Wellington last night.
Technology awards can resemble a Hairy Maclary book, with lots of repetition as the same familiar names doing the same things crop up on every page.
But Don Christie, managing director of 150-person open source firm Catalyst IT, one of the award’s top sponsors, said these had again attracted a healthy tally of about 100 entries.
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The CloudStack project, based on Citrix’s CloudStack code which was contributed to Apache earlier this year, has had its first official release from within the Apache Incubator, where it is currently being mentored and matured into a future top-level Apache project. The Apache CloudStack 4.0.0-incubating release offers a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud orchestration system. Apache CloudStack competes with other open source IaaS platforms such as OpenStack, the European OpenNebula and the Amazon AWS-API compatible Eucalyptus.
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Having the Open Source Awards presentation ceremony last night, on the same night as the US election results were announced, allowed some analogies to be made between the spirit of open source and democracy.
In both systems, everyone is welcome to make a contribution and the profit motive is absent, said Awards judge and senior advisor at the Inland Revenue Department, Austin Sinclair, introducing the award for Open Source use in government.
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Events
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LinuxCon Europe has been buzzing with energy and lively ideas ever since its kickoff on Monday morning. As day two sessions wound down and everyone was gearing up for the much-anticipated Intel-sponsored reception at Gaudi’s Casa Batillo, we took a few moments to check in with attendees. They told us what’s inspiring them at this year’s conference—and how they’ll funnel that inspiration into action when they return to their workplaces next week.
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The OpenStack team, a software community collaborating on a standard open source platform, had to solve this dilemma—and solve it fast—when the tech community became “ludicrously excited” about their new project. “We experienced growing pains … I guess I’m supposed to call them ‘opportunities’,” said Monty Taylor, manager of automation and deployment at Hewlett-Packard, and one of the creators of the project.
In his Scaling an Open Source Community keynote presentation on Tuesday morning at LinuxCon Europe, Taylor explained how OpenStack overcame early challenges to create a truly non-hierarchical environment focused not only on open source, but also on open design, open development, and an open community.
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Several open source oriented conferences are calling for the submission of papers to their 2013 events. ApacheCon North America (NA), EclipseCon and the Northeast Linux Fest are all accepting talks from interested community members.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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The Chrome team has officially announced the latest update for Chrome, which arrives as Chrome 23 and for Windows, Mac and Linux users. More specifically, Chrome version 23.0.1271.64 has been released. This update will arrive automatically for current Chrome users. Or alternatively, those not using Chrome and those feeling like they simply cannot wait even a second — you can grab the latest version by navigating to google.com/chrome.
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Google is out with the new Stable Release version 23 of the Chrome browser, which is notable for several reasons. Thanks to the way it handles video decoding, users on portable devices such as laptops who are, say, watching YouTube videos will get longer battery life. And, with this version of Chrome, Google has finally adopted the Do Not Track privacy protection scheme that lets users choose not to be followed when online.
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SaaS
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Cloudera’s CEO has sold out to Oracle before. Will he do it again? And what are the economics of the Big Data business, anyway?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users.
Other skills and knowledge needed to become a Certified Developer include, researching and developing solutions to new or unknown issues, designing and developing one or more courses of action, evaluating each of them in a test case environment, and implementing the best solution to the problem. Once the solution is verified, it is delivered to the customer and given back to the community.
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Education
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Municipalities across America should be working to bring open source educational tools to schoolchildren so they will have the necessary digital literacy skills to tap into their creativity and imagination, or even to provide them with valuable future life and workforce skills. And the case of the Feoffees of the Grammar School in Ipswich, Massachusetts—the oldest charitable trust in America—illustrates this point well.
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Business
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BSD
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After talking about FreeBSD’s transition to Clang as the default C/C++ compiler rather than GCC, the move has finally happened where for x86/x86_64 systems the LLVM-based compiler has replaced GCC.
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Project Releases
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It is always a pleasure to announce the official release of the new stable version 0.8.0 of the FreeMedForms project. This anniversary version (the FreeMedForms EMR one and its main admin) brings two major innovations:
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Public Services/Government
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France is the latest government to move from open source-friendly to open source-active, to paraphrase the European Commission’s aspirational reference to Cloud Computing.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The BBC is trying to wriggle out of some responsibilities when it comes to responding to requests for data made under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming it’s more of a private body than a public one and should therefore be exempt from having to answer some personal questions.
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BBC lawyers are insisting the law treats the public-funded broadcaster as a private body in a battle to resist a Freedom of Information request.
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Open Access/Content
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Class2Go, developed by a group of Stanford engineers, will be the basis for online courses at the University of Western Australia accessible through mobile devices. The mobile app will then be available for use by Stanford – and anyone else.
The beauty of open-source technology is that people around the world can build things together. Like bricolage, technology can grow flexibly as developers respond directly and creatively to users’ needs and imaginations.
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Online classes are nothing new, but the University of Western Australia wants to take the technology one step further with the help of Stanford’s recently launched Class2Go platform. Using an open-source approach to content creation, Class2Go not only allows educators to fine tune their teaching material, but also provides a tool that can be used by anyone regardless of location or enrollment status. As explained by PhysOrg, David Glance, director of the Centre for Software Practice at the University of Western Australia, feels that platform paves way to the new methods of learning used in universities, allowing students to take entire classes using their smartphone or tablet via an app.
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Open Hardware
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The AlaMode board makes it possible to build a bridge between the Raspberry Pi mini-computer and the Arduino prototyping platform and the many shields available for it. Although the Arduino-compatible board connects to the Pi’s GPIO header, the two boards operate independently, sharing data via the GPIO connectors. The AlaMode board is able to connect standard Arduino shields.
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What’s cooler than a humanoid robot? Why, a humanoid robot that plays soccer, of course. And you can get one for just 25 grand.
The robot, developed by researchers at the University of Bonn, is more than just another droid headed for the intensely competitive RoboCup tournament. The little guy features some serious technical upgrades with a simple design and open source code so others can build their own ‘bot. The software and CAD files (.zip) are available on GitHub.
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Standards/Consortia
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If you’re creating Web apps, you’re designing APIs. Here are some things to keep in mind before you begin.
The Web was designed for people. When Tim Berners-Lee created the trio of standards that make up the Web—HTTP, HTML and URLs—the intention was for people to browse Web sites, submit information to them and be at the heart of the experience. But for some time now, the notion of the Web as a set of sites that people browse has been somewhat untrue. True, hundreds of millions of people visit an equally large number of sites each day; however, more and more of the visitors to sites aren’t people, but programs.
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Software architect Gabriel Nistor talks to Trevor Parsons about Ally-Py, the new Free Software framework designed to get the most from web APIs.
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This one is just funny. First noticed by folks on Reddit, former Presidential candidate Rick Santorum — perhaps most well known among internet kids for the Google bombing of his name to associate it with… something unpleasant — apparently has a picture of Chris Poole, better known as moot, the creator of the web’s most popular home for internet trolls, 4chan (and yes, there’s much more at 4chan, but… ).
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Health/Nutrition
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German pharmaceuticals firm Merck KGaA is no longer delivering cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals, a spokesman said on Saturday, the latest sign of how an economic and budget crisis is hurting frontline public services.
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Security
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Inspector Knacker of the Yard has fingered the collar of a 41 year-old man who he thinks hacked the websites of Theresa May and the Home Office.
The attacks were attributed to members of the hacktivist group Anonymous.
The Stoke man, who has not been named, allegedly carried out a DDoS attack on the sites. Coppers were seen removing computers, telephones and electronic storage devices from his house.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The sources added that as Palestinians medics rushed to the scene in an attempt to rescue the wounded resident, but Israeli soldiers fired several warning shots, and prevented the medics from reaching the wounded resident; six hours later, the medics were allowed to reach the resident who bled to death before the medics were allowed through.
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NGO says it fears the illegal settlements are part of renewed push to resume building outposts; IDF issues demolition orders.
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Some 80,000 Palestinians families depend on the annual olive harvest for their livelihoods. This year alone, settlers, with the backing of the army, have destroyed or damaged thousands of olive trees, threatening both a major source of income and an age-old agricultural custom.
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Under the law of occupation, which is part of international humanitarian law,’territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.’
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Campaigners call for end to ‘unjust poor country debts’ after government figures show arms were used against civilians
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Cablegate
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Searches for “WikiLeaks” in the public search engine for the US National Archives have been blocked, according to a posting at Cryptome.org. Any search containing the word “WikiLeaks (like “Congress” and “WikiLeaks”) turns up an error message.
WikiLeaks reacted on Twitter, “The US National Archives has literally turned into Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.” In another more vivid message, “The US state is literally eating its own brain by censoring its own collective memories about WikiLeaks.” And, in another message, “The US National Archives censoring searches for its records containing the word ‘WikiLeaks’ is absolutely absurd.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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What happens when a recycling plan is too successful? Sweden does such a good job recycling and turning its waste to energy that it has started importing trash from its neighbors.
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Finance
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Brian Rinfret likes imported beer from Germany. He sometimes buys Spaten. He enjoys an occasional Bitburger. When he was 25 years old, he discovered Beck’s, a pilsner brewed in the city of Bremen in accordance with the Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law of 1516. It said so right on the label. After that, Rinfret was hooked.
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Censorship
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The chilling effects of Lord Leveson are already being felt in every newsroom in the country — and it is the rich, powerful and influential who are reaping the benefits. I know this because after 17 years working in national newspapers, the last seven of which I spent on the Daily Mail, I have just walked away from a job I loved. The decision — one of the hardest of my life — was driven partly by a desire to spend more time with my young family. But a major factor was the menacing post-Leveson culture in which journalists are already forced to operate.
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More than 100 Nigerians have been charged with treason after a protest march calling for an independent state of Biafra.
Supporters of the Biafran Zionist Movement were arrested after an independence rally in the regional capital, Enugu. The protesters included many elderly war veterans from the bloody 1967 conflict in which Biafra tried to break away from the newly independent Nigeria.
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Privacy
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Smart appliances and devices connected to the web, the coming Internet of Things, will be like Americans planted bugging devices in their homes. The CIA is looking forward to such an opportunity for mass monitoring. In the not-too-distant future, household appliances and web-connected devices will offer the government unfettered access to spy on citizens.
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Civil Rights
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As people head to the polls today to cast their ballots, a critical “battleground” state in the presidential election faces a last-minute controversy over its voting machines.
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Earlier in the week I casually retweeted a note from the activist Bob Fitrakis. He’d posted a story about secret new software patches that had been rolled out to Ohio voting machines, with dark suggestions of shenanigans afoot in the counting of the votes there. Election maniacs may recall Fitrakis from the Ohio debacle of 2004, when he worked with Cliff Arnebeck to try to prove election fraud. (The questionability of the 2004 results is not quite in tinfoil territory; many not-outwardly-foaming observers do still believe that the Kerry-Bush election was stolen in Ohio.)
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Why did Amy Searcy, Hamilton County Board of Elections director of elections, tell the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Washington Post that Hart InterCivic is not involved with operations or maintenance of their voting machines in Hamilton County — when her signature is on a quote from Hart InterCivic for voting machine repairs? View the document as a PDF.
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Earlier today, Brad Friedman reported in detail on the uncertified, “experimental” software patches that Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) had secretly contracted [PDF] with Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) to create and install at the very last minute onto electronic central vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties, encompassing more than 4 million Buckeye State voters.
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Electronic voting machines being used by Ohio in today’s election contain a software “back door” that could allow manipulation of the results, a Green Party candidate for one of the state’s 16 U.S. congressional districts claimed in lawsuit.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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AS California voters consider Prop. 37 to require businesses to label genetically modified food, people should consider that the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research to develop genetically modified crops around the world instead of more natural products.
In June, the foundation granted $9.8 million to British scientists at the John Innes Centre to investigate whether a symbiosis of cereal crops and bacteria could be genetically modified to fix atmospheric nitrogen.
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Footnote: the other side and engine of the Gates empire, Microsoft, got into the UN its so-called “Ambassador to Africa,” who just happens to be the brother of Ban’s then Special Adviser on Africa. Extra budgetary, indeed..
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Bill Gates never finished college, but he is one of the single most powerful figures shaping higher education today.
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California’s landmark Proposition 37 was soundly and sadly defeated on Tuesday by corporate interests and big money politics. As of Wednesday morning, with more than 94 percent of the precincts reporting, news outlets reported that the measure has been rejected.
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Copyrights
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Tuesday’s election marked the end of a career for an icon of southern California Democratic Party politics. After a race marked by intense attacks from both sides, fifteen-term Congressman Howard Berman lost to fellow Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman in the newly drawn 30th District in the western San Fernando Valley.
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Gabon’s government said Tuesday it was suspending the website www.me.ga, which Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom had planned to use to launch a new version of his defunct Megaupload file-sharing site.
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A few different folks have submitted variations on this story of singer Taylor Swift copying a single lyric from a singer for whom she’d long expressed admiration. That singer, Matt Nathanson, responded the way any normal person would: by being happy about the homage and recognizing how it might draw more attention… I’m sorry, what was I saying? I meant that he called one of his biggest fans, who just happens to be a hugely popular singer with a ridiculously loyal following, a thief.
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