TechrightsSearch results for 'xandros' (page 1 of 25) http://techrights.org Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Wed, 11 Jan 2017 01:18:36 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 La EPO esta en Huelga, Battistelli Escapa a Londres con su Guardia Pretoriana para más Cabildeo por la UPC, FTI Consulting Va a Bruselas http://techrights.org/2016/04/08/battistelli-cabildeo-upc-en-uk/ http://techrights.org/2016/04/08/battistelli-cabildeo-upc-en-uk/#comments Fri, 08 Apr 2016 09:52:12 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=91489 This great search was powered by Search Unleashed.
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Una sacudída de manos de un Billón de dólares: Una reunión de un 1% de clase para el avance de los interéses de la élite…

Sumario: Con trillónes de dólares en riesgo (a largo plazo) los ricos y poderosos, muchos de ellos evaden taxes (s u

no apar ició n en los Papeles Panameños es algo sospechoso ¿Quiénes …

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/04/08/battistelli-cabildeo-upc-en-uk/feed/ 0 EPO is on Strike, Battistelli Escapes to London With His Bodyguards for More UPC Lobbying, FTI Consulting Goes for Brussels http://techrights.org/2016/04/07/battistelli-uk-upc-lobbying/ http://techrights.org/2016/04/07/battistelli-uk-upc-lobbying/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:39:19 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=91444 Billion-dollar handshakes: A 1% kind of meeting for the advancement of elite interests…

Neville-Rolfe and Battistelli

Summary: With trillions of dollars at stake (over the long run) the rich and the powerful, many of whom evade tax, continue to work behind closed doors (through agents or middlemen) in an effort to change the law in their favour while ordinary people are either uninformed or furious

THE EPO became an instrument of the rich and the powerful (perpetuating their wealth and power), which definitely isn’t what its creators foresaw or had in mind (way back in the EPC days).

Battistelli’s expected trip to London is starting to bear fruit (see this morning’s tweet from Neville-Rolfe) and maybe he can also pay a visit to his London lawyers who are threatening me (two legal firms in London).

“Battistelli’s expected trip to London is starting to bear fruit (see this morning’s tweet from Neville-Rolfe) and maybe he can also pay a visit to his London lawyers who are threatening me (two legal firms in London).”Techrights is quite frankly disgusted by Battistelli’s visit to the UK. He is not British, yet he is bending British law, and at the EPO he makes a mockery of British law while stomping on an Irish judge. To deport or extradite Battistelli would require him to be poor and less well-connected [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. These people, just like in Croatia, can seemingly get away anything. It’s all about one’s status; that’s why people like Julian Assange have an arrest warrant against them (also in London, where he continues to expose/publish rich people’s secrets) and Battistelli is treated like some kind of celebrity.

As we showed several weeks ago, Battistelli is expected to do some UPC lobbying over here. Now we have Bristows LLP staff (Annsley) doing an ‘article’ on Brian Cordery (Bristows LLP). The London-based IP Kat did what seems more like an ad, including UPC PR from Bristows LLP. What gives? Sites outside the UK do the same thing [via] because few people who work for very affluent people stand to gain from it.

“Techrights is quite frankly disgusted by Battistelli’s visit to the UK. He is not British, yet he is bending British law, and at the EPO he makes a mockery of British law while stomping on an Irish judge.”The other day we saw a legal firm citing Jane Lambert [1, 2], a loud proponent of the UPC. Lambert is used to spreading around the impression that irrespective of UK membership in the EU the UPC is inevitable, or some nonsense along those lines. Here we have lawyers quoting other lawyers for ‘support’: “Hopefully the United Kingdom won’t jeopardize the Unitary Patent project with a vote to withdraw the European Union, says Jane Lambert, barrister from 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square in London. ‘However, it could still continue without us’, Lambert told Kluwer IP Law in an interview.”

This ‘interview’ is more like PR or lobbying. It’s designed for perception-setting. Greedy patent lawyers in the UK lick their lips over the UPC, but at whose expense? They don’t mind crushing democracy (the public is not consulted at all) because it’s all about serving themselves and their very affluent clients. Many doubts about the UPC persist, even from people who are within this system. To quote this one new comment:

Final thought – is the Baroness’ interpretation of “European patent” (e.g. meaning just an EP(UK), and not the whole bundle) consistent with the prevailing interpretation of the opt-out scheme?

That is, if “European patent” in Article 83(3) UPCA is interpreted to mean the whole bundle, then how on earth is it that the same term is interpreted to mean something different in the context of Article 26 UPCA?

Another comment says: “The U.K. implementation is nonsense on stilts, but that is what is to be expected when you get a politically driven compromise that resulted in a UPC Agreement and UP Regulation that was not understood by those agreeing it. Let’s see what the courts make of it. It will be particular fun when someone is found infringing by the UPC for acts that a national court would not find infringing. This is the inevitable result of how the UK is proposing to implement the UPC and UP. The fundamental tenets are fundamental. The mental implementation will be fun and mental.”

These are the words of people who actually work in this field. Another comment says:

As far as I can figure, implementation of the UPP will mean that, instead of one (national) law applying to one patent in any given country, there will instead be at least three different laws of infringement to choose from.

For cases brought before the UPC, there will be two possible laws of infringement, namely: (1) for EPUEs, the national law applicable to EPUEs in the Contracting Member State identified under Articles 5(3) and 7 of the UP Regulation; and (2) for not opted-out EPs, Articles 24 to 29 of the UPCA, plus (if necessary) provisions from laws specified in Article 24 of the UPCA.

If we accept the view of the Preparatory Committee (as set out in their interpretative note on Article 83 UPCA), the national courts will, for both opted-out and not opted-out EPs, apply a different (third) law of infringement – i.e. the national law applicable to opted-out EPs.

There are plenty of EP applications that, at present, could qualify for unitary effect. For those applications, therefore, the applicable law will depend upon all of the following factors:
- whether a request for unitary effect is filed (possible up to 3 months after grant); and, for non-unitary (parts) of patents in Contracting Member States of the UPCA
- whether an opt-out is filed, whether the patent is effectively opted out via the commencement of a national court action during the transitional period and whether an opt-out, once filed, is later withdrawn.

Thus, for such patents, all three different laws of infringement are current possibilities. Further, there are many situations in which the law that will actually be applied will not be known unless and until a court action is commenced. This could even affect patents for which unitary effect is requested – as there remains a possibility for that unitary effect to be cancelled and for a national court action to commence.

As such, this situation reminds me of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment – as we will not know what the result is (i.e. applicable law of infringement) until we “open the box” (i.e. litigate) and find out what the court decides. For such “Schrödinger’s patents”, the possibilities for clever tactics and forum-shopping abound!

The situation could be particularly confusing for those MSs (such as Germany and France) where there is no distinct national law applicable to EPUEs. Whilst the UK’s implementation clearly has its (arguable) flaws, you have to give the IPO credit for attempting to improve matters by providing specific laws for EPUEs and opted-out EPs.

Nevertheless, I have to laugh when I look at recital 25 of the UP Regulation – which appears to assume that introduction of the UPP will improve legal certainty. Much like what happened with the “Bolar” provision, the Commission clearly underestimated the ability of the Member States to create chaos from order!

Right now, as we pointed out before, the EPO’s foreign PR agency (FTI Consulting with a huge budget) is sponsoring UPC propaganda events.

Based on the following E-mail sent around Brussels a few hours ago, over here in Europe this US-based firm (FTI Consulting) promotes similar agenda using events:

From: “Utta Tuttlies [EACD]” [redacted]
Date: 7 Apr 2016 12:13
Subject: Invitation: EACD meets the EU – Expert panel discussion – 28th April 2016
To: [redacted]
Cc:

Dear [redacted],

The EACD cordially invites you to the second edition of EACD meets the EU which will take place on April 28th from 18.00 to 20.30 at FTI Consulting in Brussels. The expert panel discussion will focus on “How can communication help with boosting investment in Europe?”.

Boosting jobs, growth and investment is the no.1 priority of the Juncker Commission. With the Investment Plan for Europe, concrete steps have been taken at EU level to bridge the investment gap that emerged as a result of the economic crisis. How can communication help these efforts? How can investment projects and investors find each other? What can be done to improve business confidence? How can the role of different stakeholders such as the EU institutions, national and local governments as well as banks, companies and investors be communicated?

We hope to welcome you to this event! We also invite you to stay up-to-date and engage with us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #EACDmeetsEU!

With best regards,

Utta Tuttlies
Board Member
European Association of Communication Directors

Head of Press & Communications
S&D Group, European Parliament

Meet Our Panelists

We are delighted to announce our panelists who will come together to share their thoughts about how to promote investment in Europe. Bela Dajka, Head of Corporate Communication at the European Commission will moderate the session.

Luc Van den Brande, Member of the Committee of the Regions, Adviser to European Commission President Juncker for the outreach towards citizens
Miguel Gil Tertre, Member of the Cabinet of Vice-President Katainen, European Commission
Matteo Maggiore, Director of Communications, European Investment Bank
Ezio Fantuzzi, International Relations and Media, Asset Management and Real Estate, Generali Group

Venue & Registration

The event will take place at FTI Consulting, 23 Avenue Marnix, 1000 Brussels, Belgium and will be free of charge, compliments of the EACD and our partner, FTI Consulting.

To register, please go to:http://www.eacd-online.eu/activities/calendar/eacd-meets-eu-how-can-communication-help-boosting-investment-europe

Should you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email at info@eacd-online.eu.

About Our Partner

FTI Consulting, Inc. is a global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations protect and enhance enterprise value in an increasingly complex legal, regulatory and economic environment. With more than 4,400 employees located in 26 countries, FTI Consulting professionals work closely with clients to anticipate, illuminate and overcome complex business challenges in areas such as investigations, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory issues, reputation management, strategic communications and restructuring. The Company generated .76 billion in revenues during fiscal year 2014. For more information, visit www.fticonsulting.com and connect with us on Twitter (@FTIConsulting), Facebook and LinkedIn.

Your Contact

Dear [redacted],

We hope to welcome you in Brussels for this event. Should you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at info@eacd-online.eu.

With best regards,

Stefanie Schwerdtfeger
EACD Coordination Team
37, Square de Meeûs
B-1000 Brussels
Tel +32 (0)2 219 22 90
stefanie.schwerdtfeger@eacd-online.eu
With more than 2,300 members from 42 countries, the European Association of Communication Directors is the leading European network for in-house communicators. In addition to central events such as the European Communication Summit, the EACD hosts Regional Debates and Coaching Days across the European continent, where participants have the chance to meet with their peers from the region and share communications-related experience and ideas with colleagues who also work on an international level.
If you wish to not receive further information on the EACD please unsubscribe here: http://reply.wm13.de/www.eacd-online.eu/unsubscribe/204617

FTI Consulting only pretends to be European (just like many corporations and lobbyists with offices in Brussels or London); it’s actually based in the US. That's where a lot or European patent law (including, potentially, the UPC if it ever becomes a reality) seems to be discussed these days. Talk about loss of sovereignty.

There are very powerful forces that engaged in law laundering (e.g. secrecy laws to indirectly help hide tax evasion) and UPC is one of those things. ISDS in TPP/TTIP is beyond our scope of coverage. Battistelli’s trip to the UK is a disgrace. It happens to coincide with culmination of anger at his Office. People don’t show up at work. There’s a strike. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/04/07/battistelli-uk-upc-lobbying/feed/ 0 Links 5/11/2015: Framing Linus Torvalds, NetBeans IDE 8.1 http://techrights.org/2015/11/05/framing-linus-torvalds/ http://techrights.org/2015/11/05/framing-linus-torvalds/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2015 23:46:04 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=86006

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Xiaomi Will Start Selling Two Linux Laptops In 2016

      According to a press release by Inventec, their company is currently in collaboration with Xiaomi Corp. to produce two new laptops. Xiaomi will start selling two Linux laptops early next year, according to a report. Both will be introduced under the Xiaomi name brand and are reported for a scheduled release date in the early part of 2016.

    • DDoS, botnet, and fiber cut fail to stop Twitchers crowd-installing Linux

      The Twitch in the Shell project has successfully installed Arch Linux using hundreds of people simultaneously hammering keys in a terminal. One of the organizers has explained to The Reg how it was done.

  • Server

    • Unikernels: The Next Generation of Cloud Technology

      Most technologists have heard about software containers (or simply “containers”) – a technology that became popularized by Docker, which is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications through containers. Containers use shared operating systems to create a capsule, of sorts, to contain your application.

      They are increasingly popular, but are not the panacea able to solve all the new challenges cloud computing presents. Problems mainly pertaining to security tend to hinder this technology. However, a new technology on the rise — unikernels — holds great promise for the next generation of cloud infrastructure.

    • Juniper Goes All in for SDN

      Disaggregated Junos software is part of Juniper’s effort to extract that software value in a more meaningful way, while providing more choice to customers. With the disaggregated model, instead of simply just putting Junos on top of hardware, now there will be a thin Linux kernel with containers into which Junos, services and other third party tools and apps can be deployed.

    • ISG Cloud Comparison Index™: Cost of Public Cloud Linux Highly Competitive with Internal IT

      The October ISG Cloud Comparison Index™ shows configurations that are run on a public cloud version of the Linux operating system can be highly cost competitive with those run on internal information technology. However, when deciding between options, buyers need to consider the significant price differences between cloud providers and the added costs of running enterprise-class operating systems on the public cloud, the report said.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • LXQt 0.10 Release Fixes Over 400 Issues
    • LXQt 0.10 Released!

      This release, we focused on cleanup, polishing and quality-of-life improvements, with over 400 issues fixed and dozens of new translations. We have also gained two new frameworks: Solid, which replaces liblxqt-mount and some custom power management code and libkscreen, which replaces system xrandr calls and is wayland forward-compatible.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • LISA 2015 – Washington DC, November 11 and 12

        KDE will have an exhibit in the Expo at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 8 ‒ 13 in Washington D.C. The Expo is open on the 11th and 12th. There is no charge to attend the Expo.

      • Qt on Android Webinar slides

        It’s hard to believe that more than a year has gone by since BogDan and I did our Qt on Android webinar! Like all good things that come to an end, so has the hosting for the archived version of the webinar. We hate to deprive anyone of still useful content, so here’s a link to the slides from the webinar for anyone who’s looking for them.

      • Tips from the Experts

        We’re looking forward to exposing some gems hidden in the KDAB knowledge base. And we’d love feedback too—tell us if you find these tips useful, or what dramatic results you’ve achieved. We love to help, and we love hearing stories about how we helped. Your feedback helps us know that we’re on the right track.

      • Kubuntu: KDE 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty is now available.

        I have been hard at work to bring to you 4.14.3 Bugfix release for Trusty!

      • A pager for activities

        One of the new useful tiny plasmoids that will be available in Plasma 5.5 is one called Activity Pager: you can find it in the kdeplasma-addons package of the release.

      • Call for new Plasma wallpapers contribution

        We’re all excited for the new release of Plasma coming in less than a month and we at the Visual Design Group want to make it more exciting for our users too.

        Every other release we try to change the extra wallpapers that we’re shipping with Plasma to our users and now it’s time the refresh the collection again.

      • Upgrading libhybris

        One of the most important dependencies for our phone project is libhybris. Libhybris is a neat technology to allow interfacing with Android drivers allowing for example to bring Wayland to a device where all we have are Android drivers.

        Given that KWin provides a hwcomposer backend which uses libhybris to create an OpenGL context. All other applications need libhybris indirectly to have the Wayland OpenGL buffer exchange work automatically.

        [...]

        As we now use upstream libhybris I hope to see distributions to pick up the work and provide a Plasma phone spin. I’d love to see an openSUSE phone or a Fedora phone (or any other distribution).

      • QRegExp + QStringLiteral = crash at exit
      • Latinoware 2015

        Having Six talks on the event, whe managed to talk about beginner stuff to advanced ones without leaving anyone behind.
        Our talks this year
        – KDE Sysadmin: You can help even if you don’t progam (speaker Gomex)
        – KDE and Linus: Living Dangerously – my adventures in Programming (speaker Tomaz Canabrava)
        – KDE: First Steps to Contribute (speaker Icaro (Igor) Jerry Santana)
        – KDE Plasma Mobile (speaker Helio Castro)
        – KDE Plasma 5: Full of Resources (speaker Henrique Sant’Anna)
        – KDE: The structure behind it (speaker Helio Castro)

      • Calligra 2.9.9 Released

        We are happy to announce the release of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active 2.9.9. It is recommended update for the 2.9 series of the applications and underlying development frameworks.

      • Krita 2.9.9 Released

        The ninth semi-monthly bug fix release of Krita is out!

      • Krita 2.9.9 (Open-Source Photo Manipulation Software) Brings A Lot Of Changes

        As you may know, Krita is an open-source image manipulation software, allowing the user to either create pictures from scratch or edit existing images. It is good because it supports most graphics tablets very well.

      • Where have I been?

        And this is the reason behind my disappearance, my job at BlueSystems was not fun anymore and every project I mantained at KDE felt more like a chore than anything else. After a month of not jumping out of the bed to head to work it was time to move on. So I passed maintainership to the people that were actually doing the job (special mention to David) and I quit my job as a full time KDE hacker.

      • Embedding QML: Why, Where, and How

        KDAB believes that it is critical for our business to invest into Qt3D and Qt, in general, to keep pushing the technology forward and to ensure it remains competitive.

      • Winners Selected from Giveaway

        And the giveaway is over! I want to thank everyone for entering and showing your support for Krita.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • MATE 1.12 released

        After 5 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.12. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor and user.

      • Welcome to Alexandre Franke, new board member

        As many of you will be aware, Christian Hergert recently stepped down from the GNOME Foundation Board. As a result, we’ve had a place on the board to fill. In these situations, the bylaws [1] state that the Board of Directors may choose a replacement of their choosing [2].

      • Native file choosers in Gtk+

        Ideally something like this would be completely hidden by the toolkit, and the application would just use the regular file chooser APIs. However, the Gtk+ filechooser APIs expose too much details about the file chooser dialog, which means it has to be a regular in-process widget. Unfortunately this means we can’t replace it by an out-of-process dialog.

  • Distributions

    • CoreOS Debuts Tectonic, a Commercial Kubernetes Distro

      CoreOS has taken the wraps off Tectonic, a commercial distribution of the Kubernetes container manager, one focused for enterprise usage.

      Tectonic can be used to run container-based workloads across a variety of cloud services, or within an organization’s own data center, or it could be used to shuffle containers across these environments.

    • The Decline of Linux Diversity

      Eleven months later, the decline seems to be continuing at about the same rate, with the number of active distributions down to 276, and the decline is starting to seem an actual trend.

      Critics might argue that the apparent trend might not be a trend at all. It could be a reflection of Distrowatch’s criteria for listing a distribution, or how quickly Distrowatch posts new distributions. However, given that the site regularly posts announcements of new releases for both new and established distros, there seems no reason for either to be a factor. Admittedly, Distro Hunt, a newer, similar site, includes listings that Distrowatch does not. But since projects can add their own descriptions to Distro Hunt, it’s possible that some of its entries have never had a release or disappeared without taking down their descriptions. Moreover, unlike Distrowatch, Distro Hunt provides no easy way of counting the total. The best available (if tentative) evidence, then, is that the trend exists.

    • Reviews

      • GALPon MiniNo Makes Kid-Friendly Lightweight Linux

        The GALPon MiniNo distro is akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It will rival any of the leading Linux communities for performance.

        Widespread acceptance in the educational and consumer markets with non-Spanish-speaking users is at risk. The developers have to improve on the language localization issues.

        Critical packages like the system update launchers display in Spanish only. Others software titles have the same problem. Others suffer from bits and pieces of vocabulary crossover

    • New Releases

      • Vinux 5.0 released

        This release features not just the Unity Desktop, but Gnome-shell and the ever popular Gnome 2 fork called Mate, though we primarily will support Unity only.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • SteamOS Is Now Ready for Launch with Updates to Linux Kernel 4.1 and New Drivers

          Valve is getting really close to the launch of the Steam Machines, and the developers are preparing the SteamOS distro. They have just released a new stable update, and it comes with a ton of updates.

        • What happened to Mepis?

          My Linux migration story started in 2009, when I bought a tiny Asus Eee pc netbook pre-installed with Linux, a version of Xandros that I did not like much.

          In trying to replace it, I had my first encounter with Xubuntu (no wi-fi support), Debian (minimal shell), and Mandriva, which I installed because it supported wi-fi out of the box.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Software Centre To Be Replaced in 16.04 LTS

            Users of the Xenial Xerus desktop will find that the familiar (and somewhat cumbersome) Ubuntu Software Centre is no longer available.

            GNOME’s Software application will – according to current plans – take its place as the default and package management utility on the Unity 7-based desktop.

          • Prototype: A GUI-friendly Snappy

            So this is the week of the Ubuntu Online Summit, and many of the sessions are discussing Snappy. As you may know, Snappy is currently pretty geared toward embedded, headless devices. However, it is the successor to Click, and eventually the phones will be based upon it. To drive that effort forward, a few colleagues and I had a session (you can watch the video) where we discussed the path forward for supporting snaps on other devices, specifically the phone and the desktop.

          • The Ubuntu Online Summit Begins Tomorrow For The Xenial Xerus

            The Ubuntu Online Summit for developers and contributors to Ubuntu Linux begins tomorrow and runs through Thursday as planning gets underway for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a.k.a. the Xenial Xerus.

            The Ubuntu Online Summit runs from 3 November to 5 November and can be monitored via summit.ubuntu.com.

          • Mark Shuttleworth Kicks Off Ubuntu 16.04 Development Discussions

            The video is embedded below for those interested in detail what Mark had to say during his nearly hour-long talk. Among the focuses were reiterating that Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, work is ongoing towards the Ubuntu convergence goals and they are making progress, and also talk of Ubuntu in other areas like drones.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Try To Be Python-3-Only, No Python 2 By Default

            For years Ubuntu developers have been working on moving from Python 2 to Python 3 and for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS next April that goal will hopefully be finally realized.

            There were some dreams that the Python 2 to Python 3 migration would happen for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS so that Python 3 would be the default, now two years later, it looks like it might finally happen for the Xenial Xerus. A session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for migrating over to Python 3 by default and to no longer ship Python 2 as part of the default package-set.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Drop Ubuntu Software Center for GNOME Software

            Canonical is looking to make some substantial changes to the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), and the developers are preparing to drop Ubuntu Software Center and replace it with GNOME Software.

          • Firefox 42 Arrives in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

            Canonical just revealed that the latest Firefox 42.0 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Unity 7 to Support Snappy Packages

            Canonical has invested a lot of time and resources in the new Snappy packages, so it’s only natural that the developers want to make sure that people will be able to use it in the regular deb-based Ubuntu system.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 Drops Brasero and Empathy, GNOME Calendar to Be Adopted

            Ubuntu developers have a lot of plans for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and it already seems like it’s going to be a fascinating release. They have just announced that the Brasero and Empathy apps will no longer be included by default, and GNOME Calendar will be implemented.

          • New USB Startup Creator Is Being Made for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

            The application used in Ubuntu systems to write ISOs to USB disks, the Startup Creator, is being redesigned and rebuilt for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

          • Mark Shuttleworth Thinks That Using Ubuntu Touch On More Phones Would Be A Mistake Right Now

            As you may know, Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch is used by default on Meizu MX4, BQ Aquaris E4.5 and BQ Aquaris E5 and officially supported on the LG Nexus 4. While the BQ phones are mid-range, Meizu is among the most popular phone vendors in China, the MX4 being a premium headset.

          • Various Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Decisions From This Week’s Summit

            Aside from trying to make Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Python-3-only, Kubuntu developers planning for Xenial, and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, there’s also been a lot of other interesting sessions to happen over the first two days of this week’s Ubuntu Online Summit.

          • Firefox 42 Has Been Added To The Default Repositories Of All The Supported Ubuntu Systems
          • Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Desktop Screenshots Tour

            Ubuntu 15.10 will be supported for 9 months for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin along with all other flavours.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind blows Helix Cloud, Pulsar Linux, Rocket RTOS toward IoT

      Wind River unveiled a “Helix Cloud” platform for IoT development and management, plus two small-footprint OSes: a “Rocket” RTOS and “Pulsar Linux.”

      Intel subsidiary Wind River has released Wind River Pulsar Linux, an IoT-oriented version of its commercial Wind River Linux distribution, as well as a new Wind River Rocket RTOS. Both of these embedded OSes are designed to work with a newly unveiled Wind River Helix Cloud platform for developing, testing, monitoring, and analyzing cloud-connected IoT applications. Wind River Helix Cloud is available in App, Lab, and Device versions, and is said to provide “anytime, anywhere access to development tools, virtual labs, and deployed devices.” (see farther below).

    • DAQ SBC runs Linux on Zynq, offers FMC expansion

      Innovative Integration’s “Cardsharp” SBC is an XMC form-factor board that runs Linux on a Zynq-Z7045, and provides an FMC slot compatible with FMC modules.

      Innovative Integration has launched a “turnkey embedded instrument” called the Cardsharp designed for embedded and mobile instrumentation, remote autonomous I/O, and distributed data acquisition applications. The Linux-based, 149 x 74mm XMC form-factor single-board computer is also said to be “perfect for portable or vehicle-based data loggers or handheld field equipment use.”

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Move over FireFox OS and BlackBerry, Tizen is now the Fourth Largest Smartphone OS in Q3 2015

          Earlier this year, Tizen overtook the Firefox Operating System (OS) and became the world’s No.5 Smartphone OS in Q2 2015. That was an Important step for the Linux based OS to gain wider recognition. Now, according to a published report, Tizen has overtaken Blackberry to become the Fourth largest OS shipping in Q3 2015. Android saw a slight Increase in market share whilst Apple gained momentum with their new iPhone models and Microsoft, Blackberry and firefox all drilled down.

        • Video: TIZEN – The OS of Everything

          Tizen the OS of Everything. That was the slogan that the Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) 2015 in Shenzhen this year. Tizen was Introduced to devs as a versatile OS that is light on CPU, Battery and Memory. You can develop WebApps using HTML5 / CSS3 / JS and also Native apps using Native – C / EFL. There are also Hybrid Apps, but as the name suggests are a mix between Web and Native apps.

      • Android

        • Android for Work now in more than 19,000 organisations
        • What it’s like to switch to Android after using only iPhones for 6 years
        • Google Android Update Includes Fix for New Stagefright Flaw
        • The best smartwatch for Android

          Smartwatches really only came onto the scene in a major way in the past two years — Google, Apple, and Samsung are all hoping it’ll be the next big computing platform. Since then, we’ve seen lots of manufacturers try different strategies for strapping a computer on your wrist, but they were all pretty bad experiences — until right around now. More importantly, smartwatches have stopped looking like hideous wrist gadgets and more like, well, watches.

        • Is Google spinning a merged Chrome/Android OS for laptops?

          So far, most of the signs for a potential merger have occurred on the Chrome OS side rather than Android. In April of this year Google opened up its App Runtime for Chrome (ARC), enabling the porting of Android apps to Chrome OS. In addition, the Chrome OS Chrome Launcher 2.0 features a more Android-like Material Design, and integrates Android’s Google Now personal assistant.

          There was not much evidence of a Chrome OS infusion in the most recent Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” release. However, Google recently furthered its vision of Android on the desktop with the Pixel C, a keyboard-convertible tablet developed by Google’s Chromebook team.

        • Why an iPhone user switched to Android after six years

          A user switches to Android after six years of iPhones

          There’s been quite a lot of stories in the media about Android users switching to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. But there are also some iPhone users who have gone the other way and switched to Android.

        • An Android Phone After 6 Years of iPhones

          Before I switched to Android I googled like crazy for similar articles. I was interested in the most common experience of former iPhone users on Android phones. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find too much. So I want to share my notes to help fill this gap a little bit.

        • Mossberg: It’s time for Google to make its own hardware

          It’s Nexus time again, the time each year when Google ships its hero devices in the Nexus line. That’s a brand of phones and tablets commissioned by the company starting in 2010 — not to be huge sellers, but to show the world the best of its Android operating system.

          Nexus phones are meant to present the latest versions of Android, in pure form, unadulterated by the software overlays and bloatware apps added by the hundreds of Android phone makers. They also give Google a chance to showcase its own latest apps and services, which are sometimes missing entirely from Android phones, especially in emerging markets. And, unlike most other Android devices, they get updated almost as soon as Google releases patches.

        • Sony Open Device Program Interview: Opening Much More Than Just Software

          At the Big Android Barbecue 2015, we had the honor of interviewing Alin Jerpelea from Sony, after his great talk on Sony’s plans to open up the hardware of their devices as well as future plans for their developer programs. You can find the full, highly recommendable talk here.

        • Google tries to woo enterprises with new Android for Work initiatives

Free Software/Open Source

  • Myth-busting the open-source cloud

    The Linux Foundation report states that in 2013, many cloud projects were still working out their core enterprise features and building in functionality, and companies were still very much in the early stages of planning and testing their public, private or hybrid clouds.

  • Neo Technology Releases openCypher Query Language to Open Source

    openCypher promises to accelerate a quickly expanding graph data space because it offers new benefits for users, tooling providers, organizations and end users.

  • Kustodian goes open-source only after success with BlueScope SOC

    The decision represents a market shift for Kustodian, a multinational provider of penetration-testing and other security services that has worked extensively with commercial SIEM platforms in the past. However, CEO Chris Rock told CSO Australia, it recently became clear that open-source solutions – in particular, the ELK stack from Elasticsearch – offered a significant new opportunity to democratise the delivery of SOCs that often weighed in north of $1m using conventional commercial products and services.

  • Is open source overtaking Splunk?

    Trying to understand open source adoption is a challenging task. In contrast to public companies, the metrics of open-source projects mostly rely on the number of GitHub stars (which is public) or the number of downloads (which is often unknowable).

    As a co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, I’ve been heavily involved in the open source log analytics domain through working with with the community and focusing on the ELK Stack.

    The background: The ELK Stack is the combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana that is used specifically in log analytics. Logstash ships log data to Elasticsearch, which indexes the information in a searchable datastore. Kibana then takes the datastore and shows the information in graphical format for log analysis.

  • Open Source Initiative launches free webinar series

    As you might expect the Open Source Initiative (OSI) uses quite a few open source tools to support our work in promoting and protecting open source software, development, and communities—things like content management systems (Drupal), wikis (XWiki), issue tracking/bug reporting (Redmine), desktop sharing (BigBlueButton), membership management (CiviCRM), etc.

  • Video: No more open source foundations, please!

    Not every new open source project needs a new foundation. In fact, the rise of all these new foundations could be hurting the open source cause

  • The new collaboration model for open source | #LinuxCon2015

    Cross-community collaboration is developing and thriving inside the walls of this year’s LinuxCon 2015, and people like Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat OpenShift, are leading the charge.

  • Open source software gains depth

    The ability to scale up and stronger security has seen a pervasive proliferation of open source software (OSS) although these don’t have as many competitive features as proprietary software, according to the Ninth Annual Future of Open Source Survey conducted by Black Duck Software, a company that facilitates the adoption of OSS.

  • Logz.io Introduces ELK Apps — a Free App Store for Open Source Log Analytics
  • The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source

    The first step was to find a notebook and a pen and just write down 100 ideas for interesting open source projects. These project ideas ranged across all manner of topics, depth, and quality. I thought of wild language ideas, new features in existing projects, system designs, protocols, missing documentation, interesting forks, golfing code, games, prototypes, implementations of paper ideas, second-systems, whatever.

  • Polishing cars wasn’t in my job description

    My advice for anyone starting out in open source is simple: Be humble, but bold. The great thing about open source is that you can make a great impact, but you have to do it within the confines of a community, and learning how to bring your best while working in sometimes challenging interpersonal situations is a skill that you can only acquire through practice.

  • Proprietary tools for FOSS projects

    My position on free and open source software is somewhere in the spectrum between hard-core FSF/GNU position on Free Software, and the corporate open source pragmatism that looks at open source as being great for some things but really not a goal in and of itself. I don’t eschew all proprietary software, and I’m not going to knock people for using tools and devices that fit their needs rather than sticking only to FOSS.

    At the same time, I think it’s important that we trend towards everything being open, and I find myself troubled by the increasing acceptance of proprietary tools and services by FOSS developers/projects. It shouldn’t be the end of the world for a FOSS developer, advocate, project, or company to use proprietary tools if necessary. Sometimes the FOSS tools aren’t a good fit, and the need for something right now overrides the luxury of choosing a tool just based on licensing preference. And, of course, there’s a big difference between having that discussion for a project like Fedora, or an Apache podling/TLP, or a company that works with open source.

  • OOSMOS goes open source
  • 8 tips for creating cultural change in your organization

    To foster engagement and keep people posted, publish and share both individually and as a team. Setting a schedule is difficult, but you should try to publish at least one reflective post per month (I do one a week). Pre-populate tools like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite during meetings. Utilize tools like IFTTT, Zapier, Buffer, etc. There are easy ways to share ideas around the Web. Use them!

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Metis to Offer Intensive Hadoop, Spark Training
    • How Will the Big Data Craze Play Out?

      I was in the buzz-making business long before I learned how it was done. That happened here, at Linux Journal. Some of it I learned by watching kernel developers make Linux so useful that it became irresponsible for anybody doing serious development not to consider it—and, eventually, not to use it. Some I learned just by doing my job here. But most of it I learned by watching the term “open source” get adopted by the world, and participating as a journalist in the process.

  • Databases

    • Open Source MongoDB Updated with Enterprise Features

      MongoDB Inc. announced a new version of its open source-based NoSQL database with features designed to make it more attractive for enterprise use.

      MongoDB 3.2 can handle a wider range of mission-critical applications, its parent company said, and has been extended to handle new enterprise-oriented tasks “by deeply integrating with the modern CIO’s technology stack.”

  • Oracle/Java

    • NetBeans IDE 8.1 Information

      NetBeans IDE 8.1 provides out-of-the-box code analyzers and editors for working with the latest Java 8 technologies–Java SE 8, Java SE Embedded 8, and Java ME Embedded 8. The IDE also has a range of new tools for HTML5/JavaScript, in particular for Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS; enhancements that further improve its support for Maven and Java EE with PrimeFaces; and improvements to PHP and C/C++ support.

    • NetBeans 8.1 IDE Released With Java Enhancements, HTML5/JS/Node.js Goodies

      The NetBeans 8.1 IDE continues to be focused around the latest Java 8 technologies from Oracle, but there’s also a number of new tools for HTML5, JavaScript, Node.js, KnockoutJS, and AngularJS. NetBeans 8.1 has a number of additions for easing development with Node.js, adds/enhances support for a wide variety of HTML5 and other JavaScript technologies, also advances some PHP and C/C++ language handling, and the NetBeans profiler has been redesigned while adding new features. There’s also better Git support with NetBeans 8.1.

  • CMS

    • OctoberCMS RSS Feed

      October is a content management system (CMS) based on the Laravel framework. Many of my readers will already know that I am a huge fan of Laravel. The framework makes development workflow a breeze and takes care of a lot of the mundane tasks. Linuxphile is, in fact, built on Laravel. I had also developed http://twistedtastes.com using Laravel. After the development of Twisted Tastes my wife and I came across October.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Vanderbilt’s medical capsule robots’ hardware, software goes open-source

      Researchers around the globe who want to customize medical capsule robots won’t have to start from scratch – a team from Vanderbilt University School of Engineering did the preliminary work for them and is ready to share.

      Through a website and a paper revealed at a pair of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) conferences, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Pietro Valdastri, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering Akos Ledeczi and their team made the capsule hardware and software open-source.

      The paper, titled “Systematic Design of Medical Capsule Robots,” ran in a special issue of IEEE Design & Test magazine dedicated to cyber-physical systems for medical applications. Within years, Vanderbilt’s capsule robots, made small enough to be swallowed, could be used for preventative screenings and to diagnose and treat a number of internal diseases.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Not Just Academics Fed Up With Elsevier: Entire Editorial Staff Resigns En Masse To Start Open Access Journal

        It’s really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier’s response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research — sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that’s not even mentioning Elsevier’s history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

      • Open source textbooks not flunking out

        Finally, a bit of good news on the college costs front: A study out of Brigham Young University finds that free open source textbooks do the job pretty darn well.

        The study of nearly 17,000 students at 9 colleges found that open source textbooks (or open educational resources — OERs in academic lingo) found that students learn the same amount or more from the free books across many subjects. (Here’s a sampling of the sorts of texts available, via a University of Minnesota site.)

        What’s more, 85% of students and instructors said open textbooks were actually better than the commercial ones. The research focused its results based on measurements such as course completion, final grade, final grade of C- or higher, enrollment intensity, and enrollment intensity in the following semester.

  • Programming

    • Pyston 0.4 Released With Even Better Performance
    • Pyston 0.4 released

      A lot has happened in the eight months since the 0.3 release: the 0.4 release contains 2000 commits, three times as many commits as either the 0.2 or 0.3 release. Moving forward, our plan is to release every four months, but for now please enjoy a double-sized release.

Leftovers

  • Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

    A US software company has signed on with IBM to release a new native build of Big Blue’s OS/2.

    Arca Noae said its “Blue Lion” build of OS/2 will run on the bare metal of PCs without the need for an emulator or hypervisor.

    Those still using the 28-year-old operating system and its applications typically run the stack in a virtualized environment on modern reliable hardware. The bare-metal OS will be freed from its virtual prison, and released to the world, in the third quarter of next year, we’re told.

  • J-Day: Denmark’s start to the holiday season

    The nation’s bars, pubs and discos will be jam-packed with drunken partiers decked out in Santa hats and elf costumes on Friday. Welcome to the strange Danish ‘holiday’ known as J-Day.

  • Hardware

    • New MCU-like Intel Quarks sip power, but skip the Linux

      Unlike the current, 400MHz Quark X1000, found on the Intel Galileo hacker SBC and numerous IoT gateway products, these new microcontroller-like Quarks run at only 32MHz, and support bare-metal code and real-time operating systems (RTOSes), but not Linux.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Some Use Chalabi’s Death to Lay Blame for Iraq War at His Feet

      Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told 60 Minutes in 2004 that Bush “sought a way to invade Iraq.” Recent emails show Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair planning the Iraq war a whole year before 9/11. Put simply, the Bush administration didn’t need “convincing”—what it needed was fodder to convince the American public (not all of whom, of course, were ever convinced). These are two entirely different readings of history that have, in the past 48 hours, become dangerously conflated by some.

    • Caught On Tape: U.S. Army Jeep Rear-Ends A Nuke

      With helicopters hovering overhead, and surrounded by an army of security forces, this is how America transports its nuclear weapons. However, as this onlooker captures, amid police harrassment for filming, it appears one of the military trucks was just a little too close and rear-ends a truck carrying a nuclear missile.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NASA Scientist Warned Deniers Would Distort His Antarctic Ice Study — That’s Exactly What They Did

      A new NASA study found that there has been a net increase in land ice in Antarctica in recent years, despite a decline in some parts of the continent. The study’s lead author astutely predicted that climate science deniers would distort the study, even though it does nothing to contradict the scientific consensus on climate change or the fact that sea levels will continue to rise.

    • Climate change missing from full Trans-Pacific Partnership text

      The final text of a huge 12-country trade agreement has confirmed the “worst nightmares” of environmental groups, with no mention of climate change in its lone environment chapter and weak enforcement mechanisms, Australian academics say.

      The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement was finally released on Thursday, with Trade Minister Andrew Robb saying the deal will deliver “substantial benefits for Australia” in the rapidly growing Asia Pacific.

      The TPP is the biggest global trade deal in 20 years, involving 12 countries in the Pacific region which collectively represent over 40 per cent of world GDP.

  • Finance

    • Chevron’s Star Witness In $9.5 Billion Corporate Sovereignty Case Admits He Lied

      One of Techdirt’s earliest posts on corporate sovereignty was back in October 2013, when we wrote about the incredible case of Chevron. It used the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism to suspend the enforcement of a historic $18 billion judgment against the oil corporation made by Ecuador’s courts because of the company’s responsibility for mass contamination of the Amazonian rain forest. Given the huge sums involved, it’s no surprise that things didn’t end there.

    • 5 things that wouldn’t be happening if America were a functioning democracy

      We Americans have been deceived by the notion that individual desires preempt the needs of society; by the Ayn-Rand/Reagan/Thatcher aversion to government regulation; by the distorted image of “freedom” as winner-take-all capitalism; by the assurance that the benefits of greed will spread downward to everyone.

      Our current capitalist-driven inequalities will only be rectified when people realize that a strong community makes successful individuals, not the other way around.

      Here are a few of the ways we would benefit with a social democracy.

      [...]

      Nationally, we spend over $1 trillion per year on defense. Not just the half-trillion Pentagon budget, but another half-trillion for veterans affairs, homeland security, “contingency operations,” and a variety of other miscellaneous military “necessities.”

      But that’s not enough for the relative few at the top of our outrageously unequal society. The richest Americans build private fortresses to protect themselves from the rest of us, as they scoff at the notion of a 1950s-like progressive tax structure that would provide infrastructure funding for all of us.

      [...]

      In the extreme capitalist mind, Steve Jobs started with boxes of silicon and wires in a garage and fashioned the first iPhone. The reality is explained by Mariana Mazzucato: “Everything you can do with an iPhone was government-funded. From the Internet that allows you to surf the Web, to GPS that lets you use Google Maps, to touchscreen display and even the SIRI voice activated system— all of these things were funded by Uncle Sam through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA, the Navy, and even the CIA.”

    • “Your little brother is not the ultimate authority”: How Jeb Bush cheated America & helped deliver the presidency to W

      When some of us hear Jeb Bush’s new slogan, “Jeb can fix it,” we don’t think of a mechanic getting under the hood and fixing the nation’s problems. We don’t even think of Jimmy Savile, the notorious British pedophile, whose show was called “Jim’ll fix it,” although some people sure will. No, we think about Election 2000 and the Florida recount, where Jeb proved that his slogan isn’t all hot air. Whatever else he did as Governor of Florida, when it came to that election, Jeb fixed it.

      Anyone old enough to remember that election night, which was 15 years ago today, will remember that the outcome of the electoral college depended on that one state. And what came next is exactly what anyone would have predicted would happen when an election is so close it triggers a recount in a state in which the levers of power and the electoral machinery are run by one of the candidates’ brothers. That candidate was the one who became president.

    • China Regulator Probes Competition Claims Against Alibaba

      China’s commerce regulator will investigate accusations by JD.com Inc. that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is unfairly pressuring merchants to shun competing platforms, JD said, ratcheting up a battle between the nation’s two biggest online retailers.

      The State Administration for Industry & Commerce accepted JD’s request to look into Alibaba’s attempts to lock in merchants ahead of the crucial “Singles’ Day” promotion next week, JD said in an online post Thursday. China’s second-largest Web retailer has accused its larger rival of forcing merchants to choose between the two, which it said hampers competition and violates regulations.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Copyright As Censorship: Sketchy Food Scanning Company Abuses DMCA To Censor Critical Reporting

      Another day, another example of copyright being used to censor. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a sketchy crowdfunded “food scanning device” company called TellSpec, which had ridiculously threatened the online publication Pando Daily with laughably ridiculous defamation claims. The threats were ridiculous for any number of reasons, including the fact that the statute of limitations had expired and the commentary wasn’t even remotely defamatory. There were also some weird (and stupid) threats about suing in the UK, despite TellSpec being based in Toronto and Pando in the US. At some point, TellSpec then denied having made the threats, but that appeared to be pure damage control.

    • Copyright Terms And How Historical Journalism Is Disappearing

      The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last Wednesday the “Chronicling America” contest to create projects out of historical newspaper data. The contest is supposed to showcase the history of the United States through the lens of a popular (and somewhat ephemeral) news format. But looking at the limits of the archival data, another story emerges: the dark cloud of copyright’s legal uncertainty is threatening the ability of amateur and even professional historians to explore the last century as they might explore the ones before it.

      Consider that the National Digital Newspaper Program holds the history of American newspapers only up until 1922. (It originally focused on material from 1900-1910 and gradually expanded outwards to cover material from as early as 1836.) Those years may seem arbitrary—and it makes sense that there would be some cut-off date for a historical archive—but for copyright nerds 1922 rings some bells: it’s the latest date from which people can confidently declare a published work is in the public domain. Thanks to the arcane and byzantine rules created by 11 copyright term extensions in the years between 1962 and 1998, determining whether a work from any later requires consulting a flow chart from hell—the simple version of which, published by the Samuelson Clinic last year, runs to 50 pages.

  • Privacy

    • Surveillance bill: broad support gives way to alarm over detail

      The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge last night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.

      MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by Theresa May – while the home secretary also revealed that since 2001 ministers have issued secret directions to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.

    • ORG’s 10th Birthday Party!
    • Investigatory Powers Bill published and now the fight is on

      The Government’s just published the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. It will decide the surveillance powers that the police and intelligence have for years to come.

    • ORG response to the draft Investigatory Powers Bill

      “This Bill will redefine the relationship between the state and the public for a generation. The government needs to get it right and made sure that the UK’s law enforcement and security agencies can fight serious crime while upholding all of our human rights.”

      “However, at first glance, it appears that this Bill is an attempt to grab even more intrusive surveillance powers and does not do enough to restrain the bulk collection of our personal data by the secret services. It proposes an increase in the blanket retention of our personal communications data, giving the police the power to access web logs. It also gives the state intrusive hacking powers that can carry risks for everyone’s Internet security.”

    • The surveillance bill is as big a threat to state security as to individual liberty

      The past week has seen the most bizarre spinning. The BBC and the Times suddenly “managed to secure” exclusive stories about the wonderful world of secret intelligence, shamelessly pegged to the premiere of the film. The Times offered a gushing prospectus of work inside GCHQ. The BBC’s Frank Gardner sat, obsequious, in a darkened room and asked faceless voices what it was like being “the real James Bond”. It was like a spoof promotion video for the Stasi.

      [...]

      Despite the fearmongers, Britain faces no threat to its territory or political stability, nothing that remotely justifies the massive intrusion into privacy originally sought by GCHQ and the police. Today’s threat is from fanatics and criminals who want to shoot people and explode bombs – extremely dangerous but not a state threat. The question is, does this require Britons to have their every phone call, email and browser record stored, scanned, registered and, inevitably, shared with spies, the police and – whatever anyone says – a wide range of public officials?

    • Surveillance, privacy, and the British press

      So why is the majority of the British press so relaxed about mass surveillance? Why do they not associate this threat with the ‘300 years of press freedom’, which they hold so dear? Have they not read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which explicitly links the death of freedom with the death of privacy? Even the United Nations (not always first off the mark where human rights are concerned) is able to see the danger here, as evidenced by the creation this year of a new special rapporteur on ‘the right to privacy in the digital age’.

    • The Investigatory Powers bill: will it work in practice?

      The intention is that the draft Bill will be the basis of consultation, with a revised Bill being published in 2016. This revised Bill will need to be enacted by the end of next year, as the current Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act expires on 31 December 2016 and one section of it has been quashed by the High Court as from March 2016.

      Publication is therefore the start of what may be a year-long legislative process. On the face of it, the government intends to take the legislative process seriously. The Bill has been published with extensive explanatory materials, fact sheets and impact assessments. The page count of those documents is higher than that of the bill itself — the government wishes to give the impression this process is to be done properly and thoroughly.

      Of course, what the government brings to parliament next year may not correspond to this draft, and it may be that the government pushes measures through at speed next year which are not in this version. So it is too early to say that this draft Bill puts “parliament in charge” as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation said on Wednesday.

    • Interception, Authorisation and Redress in the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill

      The Government has published a draft Bill on Investigatory Powers that it hopes to see through Parliament within a year. If it becomes law, the Investigatory Powers Bill will replace much, but not all, of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, as well as the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014.

      It is the Government’s response to the Edward Snowden revelations, and to three different reports that made almost 200 reform recommendations between them.There will be much debate about the powers set out in the draft Bill. It proposes to give certain powers of the intelligence and security services a (new) legal basis in statute and will consolidate much of the law in this field. While the nature and extent of these powers is open to disputation, if there are to be such powers, it is surely better that there is avowal and regulation, rather than secrecy and denial.

    • Surveillance bill triggers alarm over sweeping powers for spies

      The total redrafting of UK surveillance laws was under growing challenge on Wednesday night after an initially broad political welcome gave way to alarm at the detail of the proposed sweeping powers for spies.

      MPs and privacy groups raised concerns about the proposed judicial oversight regime set out by the home secretary, Theresa May, who made the dramatic admission that ministers had issued secret directions since 2001 to internet and phone companies to hand over the communications data of British citizens in bulk.

    • Wikipedia founder urges Apple to stop selling iPhones in UK if government bans encryption

      Jimmy Wales has suggested that Apple should stop selling iPhones in the UK, if the government passes a new law that would prevent technology firms and service providers from using end-to-end encryption to protect private communications.

    • Encryption ban banished from draft UK surveillance bill

      Britons could soon have their web surfing recorded for later police consultation, but the government has reportedly backed off plans to order companies like Apple to unlock encrypted phones and messages

      A threatened ban on encryption has been banished from a draft bill on surveillance powers in the U.K. — but the government plans to explicitly allow bulk surveillance of Internet traffic by security and intelligence agencies.

      U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May began by listing the things the draft bill did not contain as she introduced it in Parliament on Wednesday.

    • Microsoft Didn’t Know You’d Take OneDrive’s ‘Unlimited’ Storage This Far

      A year after its launch, Microsoft is making some changes to its OneDrive cloud storage plans—including eliminating the unlimited storage offered to Office 365 subscribers, because according to Microsoft, some people got greedy.

      In a post to the OneDrive blog, Microsoft wrote: “Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.”

    • Microsoft confirms Windows 10 is harvesting more data than ever

      MICROSOFT HAS ADMITTED that Windows 10 is collecting more data than any of its predecessors, and there’s not much you can do about it.

      In an interview with PC World, Microsoft corporate vice president Joe Belfiore defended the collection of what the company refers to as “basic telemetry”, explaining that it is a necessary part of improving Windows’ functionality.

      Windows has always collected information like this. Every blue screen of death creates an error report which is uploaded to Microsoft. But so much more is collected now and, yes, this does mean that search terms that you enter into Windows as well as anonymous machine gibberish is going up to the cloud.

    • First take on the Investigatory Powers Bill

      The long-awaited Investigatory Powers Bill has been published at last. The draft Bill is almost 300 pages long so it is going to take us a while to go through the detail but here is our first take on what it contains.

  • Civil Rights

    • US Presidential Candidate Jill Stein: I Want to Be President to Save the World

      The United States is governed at the national level by two major parties: the right-wing Republicans and the center-left Democrats.. It has been 165 years since someone was elected president who did not come from this political duopoly, which does not represent the full range of views held by the U.S. electorate but has worked hard to ensure that the candidates it puts forward are often the only ones from which voters can choose.

    • House Passes DHS ‘Insider Threat’ Program Bill That Could Impact Whistleblowers

      The United States House of Representatives passed legislation to establish an “insider threat” program at the Department of Homeland Security, which would permit the continuous monitoring of credit, criminal, and social media activities of DHS employees and would potentially impact national security whistleblowers.

    • California Cops Are Using These Biometric Gadgets in the Field

      Law enforcement agencies around the country are increasingly embracing biometric technology, which uses intrinsic physical or behavioral characteristics—such as fingerprints, facial features, irises, tattoos, or DNA—to identify people, sometimes even instantly. Just as the technology that powers your cell phone has shrunk both in size and cost, mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

      The text of the TPP was released by TPP Parties on 5 November 2015 and can be accessed by Chapter below. Legal verification of the text will continue in the coming weeks. The Agreement will also be translated into French and Spanish language versions.

    • Statement on the Release of the Trans Pacific Partnership Text

      Instead of combatting the ability to bring cases such as Eli Lilly’s, the TPP’s investment chapter invites them. Any time a national court – including in the U.S. – invalidates a wrongfully granted patent or other intellectual property right, the affected company could appeal that revocation to foreign arbitrators. The new language would also make clear that private companies are empowered by the treaty to challenge limitations and exceptions like the U.S. fair use doctrine, or individual applications of it. Adoption of this set of rules in the largest regional trade agreement of its kind would upset the international intellectual property legal system and should be subject to the most rigorous and open debate in every country where it is being considered.

    • Copyrights

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/11/05/framing-linus-torvalds/feed/ 0 Links 12/3/2015: Two-week Catchup http://techrights.org/2015/03/12/two-week-catchup/ http://techrights.org/2015/03/12/two-week-catchup/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2015 10:21:56 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=81871

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Apple’s watch is just another data-gathering device

    Whether Apple’s watch fails or not — and that is a relative question — it matters not one whit to the company. This is just another device which will help to boost the company’s data gathering.

  • Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch
  • Apple Watch May Be DOA As Cook Admits Battery Life As Low As 3 Hours

    The Apple Watch may be pretty… but you are going to need up to 8 of them to make it through a full day. While Tim Cook proclaimed 18 hours of “all-day battery-life” – itself not particularly impressive compared to competing products, hidden deep in Apple Watch’s product page is a little admission that battery life (in use) could be as low as 3 hours…

  • Apple Watch battery lasts as little as three hours

    Using new device that costs up to £12,000 for phone conversations means it will die after three hours, Apple admits in post buried deep on its product page

  • Pioneering tech blog Gigaom shuts down after running out of money

    Gigaom, the influential technology website founded by Om Malik nearly a decade ago, is no more. Although Monday saw a lot of new content on the site, including a flood of news and analysis from Apple’s event, the site’s management ended the day at 5.57PM PT by posting a message notifying readers that “all operations have ceased” as a result of the company becoming unable to pay its creditors.

  • Gigaom shuts down as it runs out of money

    One of the oldest and most prominent technology blogs Gigaom has shut down after running out of money.

  • Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband

    If you want to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World. Then, reserve a meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest, using the Disney World app to order your food in advance.

  • Noam Chomsky on Life & Love: Still Going at 86, Renowned Dissident is Newly Married

    NOAM CHOMSKY: I’m a very private person. I’ve never talked about my own life much. But, you know, I’ve—personally, I’ve been very fortunate in my life, with—there have been tragedies. There have been wonderful things. And Valeria’s sudden appearance is one of those wonderful things.

    AARON MATÉ: You said, after your first wife, Carol, died, that life without love is empty—something along those lines. Can you talk about that?

    NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I could produce some clichés, which have the merit of being true. Life without love is a pretty empty affair.

    AARON MATÉ: And your own tireless schedule, keeping up with your lectures, writing extensive articles, and still tirelessly answering the emails, from correspondence from people around the world—when I was in college, I remember I wrote you several times and got back these long, detailed answers on complex questions. And there’s people across the globe who could attest to a similar experience. Do you feel a certain obligation to respond to people? Because nobody would fault you, at the age of 86 now, if you took more time for yourself.

    NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t know if it’s an obligation exactly. It’s a privilege, really. These are the important people in the world. I remember a wonderful comment by Howard Zinn about the countless number of unknown people who are the driving force in history and in progress. And that’s people like—I didn’t know you, but people like you writing from college. These are people that deserve respect, encouragement. They’re the hope for the future. They’re an inspiration for me personally.

  • Hardware

    • How Intel and PC makers prevent you from modifying your laptop’s firmware

      Modern UEFI firmware is a closed-source, proprietary blob of software baked into your PC’s hardware. This binary blob even includes remote management and monitoring features, which make it a potential security and privacy threat.

    • Easy Way to Get Coreboot

      Replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware on most computers is a process that often can be frustrating. It’s possible that your computer could be rendered unuseable in the process. Back in 2010 I managed to get coreboot working on the Gigabyte GA-6BCX motherboard and although the process went fairly smoothly it did consume a fair bit of time. Fortunately we now have an inexpensive way of obtaining a ready to go coreboot computer.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Venezuelan Parliament Passes Law to Confront US Aggression

      President Nicolas Maduro said the country’s National Assembly elections must go on “whether the empire wants it or not.”

      The Venezuelan National Asembly passed the enabling law that allows the country’s president to act to protect the peace against recent threats made by the United States government of Barack Obama.

      The bill, which received 99 percent of votes from the Great Patriotic Pole alliance – the largest voting bloc in the assembly, will now move to a second reading for final approval. The move follows a statement by the United States government Monday that declared Venezuela a “threat to the national security” and calling a national emergency.

    • The Possibility of Escape

      During my four stints in U.S. federal prisons, I’ve witnessed long-term inmates’ unconquerably humane response when a newcomer arrives. An unscripted choreography occurs and the new prisoner finds that other women will help her through the trauma of adjustment to being locked up for many months or years. Halfway through a three-month sentence myself, I’m saddened to realize that I’ll very likely adapt to an outside world for which these women, and prisoners throughout the U.S. prison system, are often completely invisible.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Associated Press sues State Dept. over Hillary Clinton’s emails

      “The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.”

      Good for the AP. If only more news organizations would do more of this.

      “The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.’

    • Trade Secrets: We Must Act To Protect Whistleblowers!

      In late April 2015, the “trade secrets” directive will be discussed in the European Parliament. Having already given in to the pressure of journalists to remove the article on trade secrets in the French Macron Bill, La Quadrature du Net, Pila and a number of other organisations now call on president François Hollande and European representatives to defend whistleblowers, to define and protect their status and to ensure the necessary means are provided for judiciary follow-up on the crimes and offences that are revealed. The situation of whistleblowers, such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, is often dramatic and they must be protected and their safety guaranteed in order to safeguard fundamental freedoms.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Romanian spy chief warns of ‘threat for EU from Hungary’

      Eduard Hellvig, currently a conservative MEP who has been chosen by President Klaus Iohannis to be the next chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service, has published an article in which he warns of the “threat for the EU” from the rapprochement of Hungary with Moscow.

    • Can the NSA Break Microsoft’s BitLocker?

      The Intercept has a new story on the CIA’s — yes, the CIA, not the NSA — efforts to break encryption. These are from the Snowden documents, and talk about a conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree. There are some interesting documents associated with the article, but not a lot of hard information.

    • The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple’s Secrets
    • Quebec resident Alain Philippon to fight charge for not giving up phone password at airport

      A Quebec man charged with obstructing border officials by refusing to give up his smartphone password says he will fight the charge.

      The case has raised a new legal question in Canada, a law professor says.

      Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., refused to divulge his cellphone password to Canada Border Services Agency during a customs search Monday night at Halifax Stanfield International Airport.

    • America’s real secret revealed: Clinton, Petraeus & how elites protect their legacies

      That’s one of the conclusions American citizens might draw from two stories that broke this week: that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had conducted official State Department business using emails run through her own server, and that former CIA Director David Petraeus had kept 8 notebooks of unbelievably sensitive secrets in a rucksack in his home and, when she asked, had shared them with his mistress, Paula Broadwell.

    • Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep

      Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents.

    • Snowden Calls for Disobedience Against the U.S. Government
    • DOJ Inspector General Complains About FBI Foot-dragging

      Late last week, the Inspector General (IG) for the Justice Department sent a letter to Congress complaining of the FBI’s refusal to set a timeline for turning over documents related to an IG investigation of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s use of subpoenas to gain access to and use certain bulk data collections.

    • FBI Now Holding Up Michael Horowitz’ Investigation into the DEA

      Man, at some point Congress is going to have to declare the FBI legally contemptuous and throw them in jail.

      They continue to refuse to cooperate with DOJ’s Inspector General, as they have been for basically 5 years. But in Michael Horowitz’ latest complaint to Congress, he adds a new spin: FBI is not only obstructing his investigation of the FBI’s management impaired surveillance, now FBI is obstructing his investigation of DEA’s management impaired surveillance.

    • NZ Prime Minister: ‘I’ll Resign If GCSB Did Mass Surveillance’; GCSB: ‘We Did Mass Surveillance’; NZPM: ‘Uh…’

      Back in the summer of 2013 as the various “Five Eyes” countries were still reeling from the initial Snowden disclosures, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key promised to resign if it was ever proven that the GCSB (New Zealand’s equivalent to the NSA) had engaged in mass surveillance of New Zealanders — but with some caveats. He later said that he meant if it was proven that there was illegal surveillance going on. But of course, what’s legal can vary based on who’s in charge. Either way, late last year there were Snowden documents that proved GCSB regularly scooped up data on New Zealanders, and Key reacted to it by calling Glenn Greenwald “a loser.” Not quite the resignation you might have expected.

    • UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond says it’s time to ‘move on’ from Snowden

      The documents revealed today show how New Zealand’s spy agencies hacked into government-linked mobile phones in Asia to install malicious software to route data to the NSA.

      The disclosure shows how an “Asean target”, or member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was targeted by the GCSB in March 2013.

    • U.K. Parliament says banning Tor is unacceptable and impossible

      Just months after U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said he wants to ban encryption and online anonymity, the country’s parliament today released a briefing saying that the such an act is neither acceptable nor technically feasible.

      The briefing, issued by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, specifically referenced the Tor anonymity network and its notorious ability to slide right around such censorship schemes.

    • Germany pushes for widespread end-to-end email encryption

      The De-Mail initiative dates back to 2011, when the German government decided to push for trusted email both as an e-government tool and as a way to cut down on official and corporate paper mail. De-Mail addresses are provided by the likes of Deutsche Telekom and United Internet’s Web.de, and those signing up for them need to show a form of official identification to do so. Receiving emails on a De-Mail address is free but sending them costs money.

    • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales slams federal government data retention laws

      Wikipedia co-founder and influential technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales has slammed the federal government’s plan to make telcos store the metadata of every phone and internet user as a “human rights violation” and is considering the launch of his new mobile service in Australia.

    • Photo’s from mass surveillance, liberty & activism talk
    • Privacy, digital rights and social equality.

      Something that doesn’t really get aired very often is that dragnet surveillance can – and should – be flagged as a social issue, with serious implications for social mobility. The tools that are available to circumvent this kind of surveillance are overwhelmingly out of reach of poor, marginalised groups; the ability to buy in to specialist encryption like PGP is, sadly, still overwhelmingly out of reach for many people. Reliable encryption remains firmly in the realm of the IT savvy: people with a certain level of education, money and, to use a hot-button word: privilege (sorry).

    • Wikipedia Sues NSA Over Dragnet Internet Surveillance

      The lawsuit argues that this broad surveillance, revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, violates the First Amendment by chilling speech and the open exchange of information, and that it also runs up against Fourth Amendment privacy protections.

    • CIA ‘tried to crack security of Apple devices’

      The CIA led sophisticated intelligence agency efforts to undermine the encryption used in Apple phones, as well as insert secret surveillance back doors into apps, top-secret documents published by the Intercept online news site have revealed.

    • You Can Watch ‘Citizenfour’ Online Right Now For Free
    • THE “SNOWDEN IS READY TO COME HOME!” STORY: A CASE STUDY IN TYPICAL MEDIA DECEIT

      Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”

      Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly said the same exact thing when asked about his returning to the U.S.: I would love to come home, and would do so if I could get a fair trial, but right now, I can’t.

      His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.

      [...]

      CNN’s “expert” is apparently unaware that the DOJ very frequently — almost always, in fact — negotiates with people charged with very serious felonies over plea agreements. He’s also apparently unaware of this thing called “asylum,” which the U.S. routinely grants to people charged by other countries with crimes on the ground that they’d be persecuted with imprisonment if they returned home.

    • Edward Snowden archive aims to ‘piece together the bigger picture’

      A Canadian team has created a searchable database of all the publicly released classified documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in hopes it’ll help citizens better understand the complex files trickling out around the world.

      The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Politics of Surveillance Project at University of Toronto’s faculty of information revealed the archive on Wednesday before hosting a live Q&A with Snowden, the U.S. whistleblower and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour.

      “What we’re hoping this database can do is start to piece together the bigger picture,” said Laura Tribe, CJFE’s national and digital programs lead.

    • EFF, ACLU, Other NGOs Urging U.N. to Create Privacy Watchdog

      A coalition of 63 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world are calling on national governments to support the establishment of a special rapporteur on the right to privacy within the United Nations.

  • Civil Rights

    • Michigan Attorney General Slaps Reporter With Bogus Subpoenas For Doing Her Job

      That makes no sense at all. Defending the state from lawsuits should never involve sending reporters subpoenas demanding all of their notes. It’s a clear intimidation technique that violates all basic concepts of a free and open press.

    • Porn and the patrol car—one cop’s 2 hour-a-day habit

      Pornography, though prevalent in the modern world, still isn’t the sort of thing one expects to see while waiting in traffic behind a cop car. That’s especially true at the busiest downtown intersection of a wealthy Chicago suburb like Wheaton, Illinois, best known for being the home of an evangelical Christian college once attended by Billy Graham.

      But pornography is exactly what an irate Wheaton resident named Robin said he witnessed. On the morning of September 18, 2013, while sitting in his conversion van and waiting for a stoplight to change, Robin found himself directly behind Wheaton Police squad car 359. The height of his seat gave him a perfect view through the rear windshield of the squad car, and he could see the car’s mobile data computer displaying “scrolling pictures of completely naked women.”

    • AG backs off subpoenas over inmates’ allegations

      Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office ordered and then withdrew three subpoenas of journalists reporting on a juvenile prisoner abuse lawsuit against the state, including one seeking a reporter’s notes from interviewing inmates inside two state prisons.

    • Michigan AG withdraws subpoenas against Michigan Radio, Huffington Post

      Michigan’s Attorney General’s office has decided to withdraw subpoenas it served on news media outlets, including Michigan Radio.

    • Man who posed for his driver’s licence with a PASTA STRAINER on his head is told he must have his photo retaken… but he claims it’s just discrimination against the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

      A follower of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster claims he was discriminated against when he was told he may no longer wear a colander on his head in a driver’s licence photo.

      Last year, Preshalin Moodley, 20, was issued a provisional driver’s licence by staff at Service NSW Parramatta, in Sydney’s west.

      He was photographed for the licence wearing the spaghetti strainer on his head after asking staff whether it was OK to wear a religious symbol.

    • Jeff Bezos relies on lowly grunts like me: Life as a cog in the Amazon machine

      In my father’s capitalism, employees were nurtured by their company and encouraged to learn new skills. Today’s major corporations hire disposable temp workers to do the work of a full-time employee, without the obligation of providing benefits. Temp workers are familiar with dead ends: They are hired with a predetermined exit date. The moment they feel comfortable in a role, the contract expires and it’s on to the next job.

    • Tony Robinson Killing Highlights Wisconsin’s Racial Inequities

      Soon after becoming governor in 2011, Scott Walker eliminated funding for the state’s first program to track and remedy Wisconsin’s worst-in-the-country rate of racial disparities. The program, aimed at monitoring racial profiling during traffic stops, had only taken effect one month earlier, and Walker declared that the repeal “allows law enforcement agencies to focus on doing their jobs.”

    • How Thatcher’s Government Covered Up a VIP Pedophile Ring

      A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.

    • Atheist Group Blasts ‘Absurd’ Decision to Censor Its Easter Billboards

      The group American Atheists addressed the controversy surrounding its billboards in Nashville, Tennessee by pointing out that it’s hypocritical of the company to censor the group’s advertising when Christian groups routinely promote antigay, pro-religion messages in their own publicity materials.

      In an interview with Raw Story, American Atheists’ Danielle Muscato said, “This is just absurd. It’s just because we’re atheists. It’s discriminatory.”

    • Ferguson police report: Most shocking parts

      Summer of 2012. A 32-year-old African-American was cooling off in his car after a basketball game in a public park.

      What comes next is a series of civil rights violations described in the Justice Department report that resulted in the man losing his job as a federal contractor.

      A Ferguson police officer demands the man’s Social Security number and identification before accusing him of being a pedophile and ordering the man out of his car.

      When the officer asked to search the man’s car, the 32-year-old refused, invoking his constitutional right.

      The response? The officer arrested the man at gunpoint, slapped him with eight charges, including for not wearing a seat belt, despite the fact that he was sitting in a parked car. The officer also cited him for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as ‘Mike’ instead of ‘Michael.’

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC approves net neutrality rules, reclassifies broadband as a utility

      It’s a good day for proponents of an open internet: The Federal Communications Commission just approved its long-awaited network neutrality plan, which reclassifies broadband internet as a Title II public utility and gives the agency more regulatory power in the process. And unlike the FCC’s last stab at net neutrality in 2010, today’s new rules also apply to mobile broadband. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler laid out the basic gist of the plan earlier this month — it’ll ban things like paid prioritization, a tactic some ISPs used to get additional fees from bandwidth-heavy companies like Netflix, as well as the slowdown of “lawful content.” But now Wheeler’s vision is more than just rhetoric; it’s something the FCC can actively enforce.

    • FCC votes to protect the internet with Title II regulation

      Net neutrality has won at the FCC. In a 3-to-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission today established a new Open Internet Order that implements strict net neutrality rules, including prohibitions on site and app blocking, speed throttling, and paid fast lanes.

    • Net neutrality is only the beginning of an open internet

      Net neutrality is the principle of making sure that your internet service provider doesn’t make it easier for you to access one service over another – the Guardian over the Telegraph, say – or otherwise distorting your use of internet services just because someone dropped a few extra quid in their pocket.

    • Latest Net Neutrality proposal in the EU: a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • How Corporate Sovereignty In Trade Agreements Can Force National Laws To Be Changed

      As we noted recently, one of the most worrying aspects of corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements is the chilling effect that they can have on future legislation. That’s something that the supporters of this investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism never talk about. What they do say, though, is that corporate sovereignty cannot force governments to change existing laws.

    • TTIP Updates – The Glyn Moody blogs

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright In Brussels: Two Reports, More Than Meets the Eye

        Just as the Julia Reda report (GREEN/EFA – DE MEP) on copyright reform was being discussed this week in the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI), another report was examined today by the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT). The latter concerns the reinforcement of the “Intellectual Property” rights, and contains a number of disturbing points regarding repression and enforcement that bring back to mind highly contested provisions from the ACTA agreement, and encourages an extra-legislative approach to fighting “commercial scale counterfeiting”. Citizens should get ready to mobilise on a large scale, both to support the positive evolutions of the Reda report, and to denounce the dangerous proposals pushed by the European Commission and some Member States, among which France.

]]> http://techrights.org/2015/03/12/two-week-catchup/feed/ 0 OpenSUSE ‘Community’ is Crumbling, AttachMSFT Killed SUSE’s Potential (Except as Microsoft Tax) http://techrights.org/2014/07/18/opensuse-community/ http://techrights.org/2014/07/18/opensuse-community/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2014 19:46:28 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=78551 Summary: Not much too see in the land of SUSE and Attachmate, or formerly the company known as Novell

Last week we were asked about Attachmate, which we no longer keep track of because Novell is pretty much dead and SUSE is not doing well. They are going extinct. The Xandros Web site is no longer even accessible and when it comes to SUSE, the community in particular, it is going down the same route. Well, judging by the declining volume of activity in OpenSUSE News, Greg K-H’s move to the Linux Foundation, the fact that community manager left (he works for ownCloud now) and now the departure of the chairman of the OpenSUSE board (more on that here), we think it is safe to treat SUSE as irrelevant, or not relevant enough for us to track. Here is the latest:

The openSUSE Board announced this morning that Vincent Untz has stepped down as the openSUSE Board Chairman.

Several days ago I spent some time looking at years’ worth of Novell news, Attachmate news, and SUSE news (I am still subscribed to dozens of feeds related to all those). This was done after a discussion in IRC. I am reluctant to bother with any of them because 1) there is not much news at all and 2) the news hardly relates to FOSS. Novell will go down the same route as Corel and SUSE will end up like Xandros. As for Xamarin, which was created after Novell/Attachmate had abandoned Mono, it is mostly an extension of Microsoft now (a bit like SUSE, which shows up in Microsoft sites because their goal is to tax GNU/Linux servers).

SUSE and Novell pretty much became what we foresaw and feared. Novell’s patents are in Microsoft’s hands now, SUSE serves no purpose other than taxing GNU/Linux for Microsoft, and Novell was not allowed to truly complete with Microsoft. AttachMSFT ensures that much of Novell’s proprietary portfolio is a dying breed. Mono became more closely tied and entangled with Microsoft. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2014/07/18/opensuse-community/feed/ 0 Links 30/5/2014: GOG GNU/Linux Expansion, LGP Down, Valve Delays http://techrights.org/2014/05/30/gog-expansion/ http://techrights.org/2014/05/30/gog-expansion/#comments Fri, 30 May 2014 08:56:50 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=77819

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Oregon’s GMO Sellout

      Even though the state of Oregon enacted a law to override the ability of localities to regulate their own food systems, local ballot measures to ban GMO crops passed overwhelmingly in Jackson and Josephine Counties on May 20, according to news reports. “We fought the most powerful and influential chemical companies in the world and we won,” Elise Higley, a local farmer with the anti-GMO group Our Family Farms Coalition, told The Oregonian. The Progressive magazine tells the backstory below and reveals that the preemption measure shares language with an ALEC model bill.

    • Cynical? – It’s bad for your health……apparently.

      That’s right. If you don’t buy into everything told you, it’s bad for your health. This is the stuff of dreams for anyone who wants you to buy into everything they say. I’m currently writing about the City of London Police so I’ll pass this link onto them, I’m sure they can use it. The researchers, who amongst the many things they fail to grasp (from the report I read) go on to say:

    • Britain does so much cocaine it’s now in the drinking water

  • Security

    • WordPress Gets Flagged for Insecure Cookie Risk
    • Exim 4.82.1 security release
    • Wednesday’s security advisories
    • Write secure code using Open Web Application Security Project guidelines

      The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a not-for-profit charitable organization focused on improving software security. OWASP works on the principles of open source software, particularly the idea that the community is the force of creation and contribution. The unique aspect here is that OWASP is not software, rather a set of guidelines created by the community to help developers plug security holes in their code.

      Security has become a very important aspect of software development lately, but not everyone is aware of ways to write secure code. You may think, “my team of developers is very experienced/skilled/efficient, they can write 100% secure code,” but if you follow the news you are aware that even bigshot websites are regularly brought down or have their user data compromised. Your website should be well-prepared to avoid such attacks by following these guidelines by OWASP.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • After Safety Concerns Over Its Southern Leg, Keystone XL Is Getting New Regulations

      TransCanada will have to meet two extra safety conditions if it gets the go-ahead to build the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, due to concerns from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) that defects could occur during construction.

      PHMSA slipped in the two conditions towards the end of the appendices of the State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement, released this January. They dictate that TransCanada hires a third-party contractor chosen by PHMSA to monitor Keystone XL’s construction and report any faulty construction techniques back to the agency. In addition, TransCanada will be required to adopt a quality management program to make sure that Keystone XL is “built to the highest standards by both Keystone personnel and its many contractors.”

  • Finance

    • Exceptionalism – The Mind Killer

      It is so deeply embedded, so seamlessly rooted and integrated into what we think of as ‘our self’, that when expressed oftentimes it is (intentionally) mistaken for something else entirely. Our indoctrination begins at birth in tiny little ways, mostly personal in nature, with our parents and care givers the initial delivery system. From day one out of the womb we are conditioned via adoring smiles and Coochie Coochie Coo’s that we are exceptional, one of a kind and King of the house. A few minutes of screaming has everyone running to stem the tears and change the pee pants. And it is all downhill from here.

    • Death of money’: Author Rickards predicts collapse of global monetary system

      The collapse of the monetary system awaits the world in the near future, says financial expert James Rickards. Russia and China’s desire to rid the US dollar of its global reserve currency status is an early sign of the “increasingly inevitable” crisis.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Do you know what information your smart device collects?

      Are you aware that smart devices can collect information about your personal activities? If not, you are one of the 53% of British internet users that were unaware that smart devices such as smart TVs, fitness devices and in car-navigation systems can collect data.

    • Actual Former Government Official Makes Totally Ridiculous Argument That Snowden’s ‘Harms’ Are That Other Countries Are Angry

      Sometimes you have to wonder about people who hold government positions and the absolutely ludicrous statements they make. Following Ed Snowden’s big NBC interview, NBC apparently asked former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, to respond to Snowden’s pretty convincing claims that all the hand-wringing about “harms” he caused have no basis in fact. In the interview, Snowden points out, accurately, that no one has yet been able to show a single individual harmed by the revelations. McFaul then makes what may be the single dumbest statement we’ve heard to date on this whole debate, arguing that the “harm” is that other countries now trust us less — and that this is somehow Snowden’s fault, rather than, you know, the fault of the NSA which is doing the surveillance…

    • Kerry Tells Snowden to “Man Up” and Come Home

      A near-complete failure as Secretary of State (if you are not sure, read this), Kerry is apparently relegated within the Obama administration to the role of mumbling bully-boy statements, faux-machismo rantings whose intended audience and purpose are very, very unclear. Did Kerry think he might persuade Snowden to take up the challenge and fly back to the U.S.? Maybe meet Kerry in the Octagon mano-a-mano? No, Kerry sounded much more like Grandpa Simpson than America’s Senior Diplomat. – See more at: http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2014/05/29/kerry-tells-snowden-to-man-up-and-come-home/#sthash.PUdzNxZj.dpuf

    • How will government share your data?

      The Cabinet Office has started an early pre-consultation process looking at removing barriers to sharing or linking different databases across government departments. The rationale is that this can help Government “design and implement evidence based policy, for example to tackle social mobility, assist economic growth and prevent crime”.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • City of London Police – Getting results or using weasel words?

        iracy is wrong, piracy is theft. That’s that we are told. I personally refuse to watch the trash from Hollywood or your mainstream music et al, mainly because I think its manufactured nonsense aimed at markets either too lazy or too slow witted to find entertainment in more engaging mediums (such as reading, listening to the radio…you heard of those?)

        Now despite Piracy NOT being theft (if applied to Sec 1 of the Theft Act in the UK, which for me clearly defines what theft is), today we are looking at some claims made by the City of London police and finding out exactly what they are doing to combat the threat they claim of “piracy”.

        This is not an article on if you agree with infringement of copyright or not. I support CC and FOSS – I have no care or interest in the industries which make these multi-million pound movies, nor the movies themselves.

        [...]

        City of London Police – Why won’t you name the sites you claim to have closed down? – I believe I know the answer and its because they are not closed at all and just some word play by people who either don’t understand the concepts they are talking about or are intentionally looking to mislead. – Is there any other reason? Are my opinions incorrect? Please by all means give your reasons.

]]> http://techrights.org/2014/05/30/gog-expansion/feed/ 0 Now Might be a Good Time to Give Arch Linux a Try http://techrights.org/2014/02/12/arch-linux-2014/ http://techrights.org/2014/02/12/arch-linux-2014/#comments Wed, 12 Feb 2014 17:40:52 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=75583 Archlinux

Summary: Recent analysis of Arch Linux, a fast-growing distribution of GNU/Linux which is developed by a broad community

Arch Linux 2014.02.01 was very recently released [1], building on top of good tradition of flexibility like Debian’s (MATE is now available in Arch Linux [2,3]). Some Ubuntu (and formerly Xandros) users rave about Arch Linux [4] and some longtime users provide a rather objective, balanced analysis [5]. For some [6], including former Microsoft employees [7], Manjaro Linux is a simpler route to embracing Arch Linux [8]. In any event, now that the first 2014 release of Arch Linux is out [9] the distribution might be worth exploring. The userbase is growing rapidly and the reviews are mostly positive. It offers a wide diversity of desktop environments, very much like Gentoo or Debian. It’s not run by a large company and development is very much decentralised, as it probably ought to be (favouring development, not management). This is a ‘true’ community distribution. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Arch Linux 2014.02.01 Is Now Available for Download

    Additionally, Arch Linux 2014.02.01 includes all the updated packages that were released during the past month, January 2014. As usual, existing Arch Linux users don’t need this new ISO image, as it’s only intended for those of you who want to install Arch Linux on new machines.

  2. MATE Is Now Officially Available In Arch Linux
  3. MATE is officially available in Arch Linux
  4. Ubuntu vs. Rolling Release Distributions

    Here in my office, I have two different desktops running Linux. One is running Arch Linux and the other is running Ubuntu. Both distributions are fully up to date, with Ubuntu running the latest release. Each desktop has its assigned tasks throughout my work day, with the Arch box serving as my daily use PC for most work.

    [...]

    I’ve relied on Ubuntu for years now. I enjoy the fact that it has a strong support community, access to any Linux software I might want to run, plus it’s very simple to setup. And if you need a recent version of a software in Ubuntu, usually you have the option of adding an Ubuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive) so the new software title can be installed. Because of its ease of use and software availability, Ubuntu users won’t find themselves wanting for a Linux software title enjoyed on other distributions.

  5. Opinion: Arch Linux and Stability

    Arch Linux, the popular rolling release Linux distribution, seemingly has a reputation as bleeding edge, elitist and sometimes unstable. Bleeding edge? Most seem to agree it is. Elitist? I’ll leave that to you to decide. Unstable? Perhaps, perhaps not, which is what I will now try to give my take on it as a full time Arch Linux user.

  6. Manjaro Smooths Out Arch’s Rough Edges

    The difficulties I encountered installing and running Manjaro would normally have pushed me to part company with this distro — I must assume that the rather rapid development cycles and the number of different desktop environments in the fray caused some quality control issues. To my pleasure, however, all of the editions that ran on my laptops found the wireless connection without any trouble.

  7. Manjaro, Arch, and Debian
  8. The Rising Light Desktop

    You don’t necessarily have to run Manjaro Linux to get the same effect here, but Dobbie03 does note that he’s had a great experience with it—it’s been rock solid, according to him, so if you’re looking for a new distro to try, it might be worth a look.

  9. Arch Linux’s First Release of 2014 Is Available for Download
]]> http://techrights.org/2014/02/12/arch-linux-2014/feed/ 0 ‘Microsoft Linux’ (aka SUSE) No Longer a Threat to Red Hat http://techrights.org/2013/10/03/ballnux-demoted/ http://techrights.org/2013/10/03/ballnux-demoted/#comments Thu, 03 Oct 2013 16:12:30 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=72196 “We believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

–Steve Ballmer

“That’s extortion and we should call it what it is. To say, as Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that’s just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game.”

–Mark Shuttleworth

Summary: The threat of Novell/SUSE has been diminished somewhat based on Red Hat’s perspective

MICROSOFT subsidised Novell in an effort to tax GNU/Linux everywhere. Red Hat in particular was put under pressure and through despicable partners like Amazon Microsoft is now extorting RHEL users, passing a tax through Amazon hosting. For the most part, Microsoft now uses SUSE as its main attack vector on free GNU/Linux (Turbolinux, Linspire and Xandros are defunct). Microsoft is subsidising SUSE to do this.

According to [1], Red Hat no longer views SUSE as a threat. That’s a considerable change as several years ago Red Hat did express some concerns and Novell was a top-priority risk, more so than software patents.

Red Hat is now relying on some new programs [2,3] and old releases [4] for its momentum that is growing [5,6], perhaps ensuring that the biggest GNU/Linux backer remains strong enough to avoid surrendering to Microsoft the same way Novell did (and to a lesser degree Canonical). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Red Hat Doesn’t See SUSE Linux as a Major Competitive Threat

    Growth for Red Hat is coming at a time when the market remains competitive across multiple sectors. For enterprise workloads, Red Hat’s CEO sees it now as a battle between Linux and Microsoft Windows.

  2. Red Hat leads way to certify OpenStack pros

    Everyone needs cloud-savvy administrators, but there aren’t enough to go around. Worse still, if someone does come to you and they say they know OpenStack like the back of their hand, how do you know they do? Or, flipping it around, if you’re a smart system administrator who wants to pick up mad OpenStack cloud skills, how do you do that?

  3. Red Hat offers storage test drives for enterprise customers

    Don’t you want to test drive before you buy a service? Test drives always give customers better experience as they can see what they will get. Red Hat is offering free (as in beer) Storage Test Drives through Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give customers a hands-on experience.

  4. Red Hat releases upgrade to older Red Hat Enterprise Linux: RHEL 5.10

    The latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL 5, 5.10, is now available to subscribers.

  5. The New #182 Most Shorted S&P 500 Component: Red Hat
  6. Buyers bet on momentum in Red Hat

    Red Hat has been breaking out this week, and traders are hoping the upward momentum will continue through next month.

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/10/03/ballnux-demoted/feed/ 0 Copying Apple’s Graphics, Not Apple’s Business and User Experience http://techrights.org/2013/09/23/copying-apple/ http://techrights.org/2013/09/23/copying-apple/#comments Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:31:37 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=72023 Linux Mint 15

Summary: What we can copy from Apple and what we oughtn’t ever copy, only abolish

IMITATING Apple’s business practices in order to advance GNU/Linux is not a good idea. Imitating Apple’s presentation, however, may be acceptable (Apple’s patent aggression aside because it’s trigger-happy w.r.t. lawsuits). One thing which Apple is undoubtedly good at is marketing, unless or until it gets caught. Years ago we covered examples where Apple essentially bribed or influenced some bloggers to help manufacture some hype for the hypePad and days ago Apple got caught paying homeless people to pretend to want Apple gadgets rather than a home [1]. That’s just utterly rogue. Think different. Think Apple.

Anyway, there are several Ubuntu-based distributions which try to imitate the appearance (and sometimes behaviour) of Apple’s platforms. Pear OS [2] and Elementary OS [3] are just two of them and they are likely to meet just limited success because they aim at converting Apple fan, who would probably be disappointed as GNU/Linux can’t meet the expectation of being Apple. The many efforts to sell GNU/Linux as a “cheap Windows” (see Xandros, Linspire and several other defunct companies) were never successful because even with Wine GNU/Linux was unable to imitate Windows reliably enough. GNU/Linux is not Windows. And it’s not supposed to be.

“Nobody deserves Apple-branded products as a gift; it’s not a gift, it’s a digital jail in shrink-wrapped boxes.”One distribution which uses some Apple-like graphics but does not go too far in imitating Apple is Linux Mint and right now it tries Apple’s method of selling hardware tied to the operating system [4-6]. Linux Mint is currently the distribution I install for GNU/Linux converts because it gives them the polish of Mac OSuX while not pretending to be Mac OSuX. It is easy to use (good out-of-the-box experience) and it removes the need to be technical for those who are not.

On the technical side, Apple fails on the basics [7], copies Android/Linux [8], and uses technical tricks to punish and restrict customers [9]. Nobody deserves Apple-branded products as a gift; it’s not a gift, it’s a digital jail in shrink-wrapped boxes. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. L.A. homeless hired to buy latest iPhones

    A businessman scheming to get his profit-minded hands on dozens of new iPhones allegedly recruited about 100 homeless people from Skid Row in Los Angeles to wait in line overnight at the Pasadena Apple Store, but many were left unpaid and stranded after his plan was exposed, local media reported Friday.

  2. Pear OS 8 Linux Distribution Will Be Inspired by iOS 7

    David Tavares, the father of the Pear OS distribution, has just shared a screenshot on Google+, teasing Linux users with the iOS 7-inspired look of his upcoming Pear OS 8 operating system.

  3. If I had to leave the Mac? I’d switch to Elementary OS

    Perhaps it’s a holdover from the Apple Depression of the 1990s, but I sometimes wonder where I would go if I ever needed to leave the Mac.

  4. The MintBox 2 is available!

    The MintBox 2 is now available and can be ordered from CompuLab at http://fit-pc.com/web/products/mintbox/

  5. MintBox 2 Computer Officially Unveiled, Powered by Linux Mint 15

    Clement Lefebvre, the founding father of the extremely popular Linux Mint operating system, had the pleasure of announcing today, September 13, that the next-gen MintBox mini PC is available for purchase.

  6. MintBox 2 ships with Linux Mint 15 and Core i5 processors

    Linux Gizmos reports that the MintBox mini-PC is shipping with Linux Mint 15 and Core i5 processors. This is a neat little computer, and I particularly like the fact that Linux Mint is the default distro on it.

  7. Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
  8. Did Apple copy Android in iOS 7?

    Today in Open Source: Did iOS 7 borrow ideas from Android? Plus: Linux Defenders and dangerous patents, and the launch date of Ubuntu Touch 1.0

  9. Free Software Foundation statement on new iPhone models from Apple

    The Free Software Foundation encourages users to avoid all Apple products, in the interest of their own freedom and the freedom of those around them.

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/09/23/copying-apple/feed/ 0 Canonical’s Grave Strategic Errors Can Make Ubuntu the Next Linspire (Circa 2007) http://techrights.org/2013/06/01/canonical-acts-like-linspire/ http://techrights.org/2013/06/01/canonical-acts-like-linspire/#comments Sat, 01 Jun 2013 14:58:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=69131 Mark Shuttleworth wants us to think Microsoft has changed

Shuttleworth and Mono

Summary: Canonical’s founder is making controversial moves which are helping Microsoft’s PR, such as the nonsense constantly heard from full-time PR staff and moles like Rebellino

UBUNTU used to be a nice project when it was portrayed as “all community” (with branding done accordingly) and some humanitarian cause, as implied by the literal name, “Ubuntu”. I loved Ubuntu when I became an early adopter. I had been told by a colleague (another Ph.D. student called Patrick) that Ubuntu was Debian-based and funded by a man who had visited space. Another colleague of mine, the man who created the first GNU/Linux distribution (MCC) helped me find a copy of Ubuntu 4.10, the first release. Back then it was just an easy-to-install Debian with GNOME loaded by default. It was long before Ubuntu became a branding venture of Mark and his ego trip (not the trip he made to space). I don’t approach this post from a position of hate, only sheer disappointment and a sense of being back-stabbed (betrayal) after sacrificing a lot of my personal life to Ubuntu. I am not alone. Follow reporters privately say the exact same thing.

“The other day Mark crossed out one of his recruitment tools — the promise he would try to make GNU/Linux ubiquitous on the desktop.”The other day Mark crossed out one of his recruitment tools — the promise he would try to make GNU/Linux ubiquitous on the desktop. Many followed his lead, contingent on this philosophical view or implicit promise. But he let us all down. Do not trust opportunist billionaires saying they’re out to get other billionaires. You would be fodder in their Turf Wars. I should have known this even a decade ago.

At the moment, Mr. Shuttleworth seems to be part of that "dick-sucking" contest/competition which Torvalds alluded to. He had been saying a lot of positive things about Microsoft recently, so he turned from pretending to be “against Microsoft” to “working with Microsoft”. What a sellout, what a weak compass of principles. Jono Bacon and his flattery to Microsoft as of late (Microsoft is now a partner) has also been noteworthy. This is like Linspire all over again.

Canonical wants us to think Microsoft monopoly is over, but it is not. Cisco is now complaining about Microsoft monopoly in yet another area. To quote: “The Cisco Systems (CSCO) Jabber vs. Microsoft (MSFT) Skype video conferencing war has pushed beyond product features and functions, and now includes a new word: Monopoly.”

Ubuntu.com was promoting Skype in its front page even after Microsoft had bought it. Skype is insidious spyware after Microsoft changed the infrastructure and put it in the land of the NSA. Here is more on the monopoly allegation; “Last year, Cisco took its case against the Microsoft-Cisco merger to court in Europe. While it didn’t oppose the merger, the networking giant wanted EU regulators to impose rules about “standards-based interoperability.” In a blog post, Cisco VP Marthin De Beer said the very future of video communications was at risk.”

“Canonical wants us to think Microsoft monopoly is over, but it is not.”Never mind other monopolies, eh? The Italian press prints some Microsoft lies from Rebellino, a sort of Microsoft mole whose purpose seems to be seeding puff pieces like this one, printing Microsoft’s lies to portray its actions as ‘open’. Canonical does the same thing now. iophk called it “Microsoft appeasement” and cited this discussion about it. There are many comments there, almost exclusively hostile towards Canonical. Adrian Lopez wrote: “Microsoft is losing market share to tablets and smartphones, but these are shut tighter than the PC platform ever was. I’m not sure that’s something to celebrate.”

With leadership from Microsoft inside Ubuntu, this should not be totally shocking. It is almost like Ubuntu got abducted. The Microsoft booster says Shuttlewoth gave up and in Ubuntu Forums an interesting comment says: “This seems like kind of a missed opportunity. I would have liked to see this bug closed with some fanfare, maybe in conjunction with the announcement of a big OEM deal or somesuch. As it is, it sounds like Mark just sort of said, “oh, yeah, that bug. I guess we can close that now or something.” If anything, the closing and his comments about it reflect less on Ubuntu’s success and more on Canonical’s waning interest in the PC platform.”

The Shuttleworth position can be summarised as follows:

  • 2004: come join me, we’ll beat an illegal monopoly together.
  • 2013: I’m friends with Microsoft now, never mind that monopoly.

The news got covered even by NPR and some big channels, not just technology sites that offer no criticism. A few years back, Shuttleworth was comparing Microsoft criticism to racism (false and derogatory analogy, akin to him calling his critics "trolls"), showing he was starting to treat Microsoft disdain as the problems An article on this subject by John C. Dvorak, who told me he was exploring Ubuntu, is actually expressing unease at IDG. Dvorak says: “Ubuntu’s maker says Linux will never achieve the goal of overtaking Windows. This because computers—and users—are dumber than ever.”

“If you were tasked with destroying Ubuntu as quickly as possible, you would do more or less what Mark Shuttleworth is doing right now.”This is sarcasm. iophk says “Dvorak is always a bit flamebaitish, but he brings up good points from time to time. In this case his points hit home. However, he forgets about the OEM lock-in.. no-one has gotten past that yet. It could happen but restricted boot makes it harder even at the OEM level.”

If you were tasked with destroying Ubuntu as quickly as possible, you would do more or less what Mark Shuttleworth is doing right now. Pro-Linux sites covered this and Linux expert Sean Michael Kerner chose the headline “Shuttleworth Fixes Ubuntu Linux Bug #1 – But It’s Not Really Fixed Is It?”

As put by Kevin Granade in his reply to me, “setting aside portable devices (irrelevant) and MS being nice now (bullshit), Ubuntu bug #1 isn’t “fixed”, it’s “wontfix”.”

On the closing of bug #1, one person sent me this photo by E-mail. “Microsoft still has a lock on the desktop and via restricted boot is trying to complete it and make it permanent,” he said.

“Is Microsoft extorting Android? Yes, and even Mark cannot deny this.”Recently, Shuttleworth has been aiding criminals rather than fighting them. “The closure comment reads like something agreed to as part of a deal with Microsoft,” iophk told me, thinking whether it is “deal or entryism?”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a leading GNU/Linux pundit, says “Shuttleworth, a top business Linux leader, praised Microsoft for its support of Linux.”

Carmony #2.

“Of course, I disagree,” Pogson writes. “No thanks, Mark. I will continue the fight as long as I can whether it is convenient to continue or not. Wintel survives on ignorance.”

Here is some more coverage of interest:

  1. Angst and Anxiety Over Ubuntu’s Chosen Path

    Of course, “people and distributions do evolve,” Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. pointed out. “Definitively, Ubuntu is no more than just a ‘friendly Debian.’ But in their quest to become a successful ‘Linux for human beings,’ they (specially guided by Mark Shuttleworth) took a very particular path.”

    Specifically, “they have made some concessions, they have sort of imposed some changes to become ‘a huge (commercial) success,’ and we can see where they got,” he added. “Many users (especially the more GNU/Linux FLOSS, community oriented) have left, and many new users seeking something that works and is easy to use have come. C’est la vie.”

  2. Ubuntu’s number 1 bug is fixed: Microsoft is no longer the enemy

    It’s really worth reminding ourselves of how, in many ways, open source won. True, it’s still hard to walk into a store and buy a PC that doesn’t have Windows preinstalled – one of the key complaints in that original bug report – but, in a way, that doesn’t matter anymore. Microsoft may still dominate the PC market, but what we traditionally think of as a PC is no longer the default personal computer. Heck, these days we even have a market-leading and (largely) open-source browser, in the shape of Chrome, that has become a significant operating system of sorts in its own right.

That’s hogwash.

Let’s recall, putting aside whether GNU/Linux ‘won’ or not, how Shuttleworth used to speak about Microsoft. Two quotes from half a decade ago:

  1. “That’s extortion and we should call it what it is. To say, as Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that’s just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game.” –Mark Shuttleworth
  2. “Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.” –Mark Shuttleworth

Has any of this extortion stopped? No.

Is Microsoft extorting Android? Yes, and even Mark cannot deny this.

So, Mr. Shuttleworth, why have you befriended the Mafia? You are rapidly becoming an advocacy tool for that Mafia. You became what you hated and those who point it out are anything but “trolls” (a term he recurrently uses to describe critics). █

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/06/01/canonical-acts-like-linspire/feed/ 7 Links 6/4/2013: Alienware Gaming PC With GNU/Linux, OpenStack ‘Grizzly’, Sailfish OS SDK http://techrights.org/2013/04/06/sailfish-os-sdk/ http://techrights.org/2013/04/06/sailfish-os-sdk/#comments Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:29:29 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=67568

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy Source Code Released
  • Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast Source Code Now Available To The Public
  • After LucasArts closure, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy go open source

    We’re all still reeling from Disney’s shuttering of LucasArts yesterday, and tributes to the once-indomitable game studio are sprouting up all over the Web. One such tribute sure to bring a smile to programmer geeks everywhere comes from development house Raven, which has this morning released the source code for its two Star Wars titles: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy. The two FPS titles were released in 2002 and 2003 and continued the story of Kyle Katarn, the bounty hunter and Jedi first introduced in 1995′s Dark Forces.

  • Apache OpenMeetings hits first Open Source Top Level Project Release
  • Have spare time, dev skills? See what open-source projects need your help with this flowchart

    Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

  • Web Browsers

    • Web browser war: The early 2013 report

      The latest NetMarketShare browser numbers are in for March 2013. They reveal a three-way battle for the hearts and minds of PC web browser users, but on tablets and smartphones, Safari is leading by a wide margin. StatCounter, however, has Chrome and the Android native browser leading respectively.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Introduces Promising Payments API

        When it comes to making payments, lots of us still turn to credit cards, checks and other longstanding ways to get the job done, but the race is on to have most payments made via “digital wallets.” You can already make electronic payments via your smartphone using PayPal, Square, Google payments and other solutions, although the number of places you can do so is limited. Now, Mozilla is taking a big step forward in the digital wallet space by developing a mobile electronic payment platform that is likely to be standard in the company’s Firefox OS.

      • Open payment system for Firefox OS

        Mozilla has released an early draft version of a payment service API, enabling Firefox OS app developers to process purchases. The API design is in part based on Google Wallet, but the WebPayment API will remain open to being used for a wide range of payment service providers.

      • Firefox 20 Officially Lands in Ubuntu

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack Grizzly Open Source Cloud Platform Debuts
    • There’s a new bear in the clouds: OpenStack releases Grizzly

      If you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation hIf you like open source in your cloud, you have to be happy that the OpenStack Foundation has just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

      OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors. as just released the latest version of its popular open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, Grizzly.

      OpenStack, the so-called Linux of cloud computing, was founded by NASA and Rackspace software developers. Today, it’s supported by numerous companies and organizations. With Grizzly, Rackspace no longer dominates code changes. Red Hat, IBM, Nebula, and HP are also now major contributors.

    • OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features

      Roughly six months after the launch of its “Folsom” release last fall, OpenStack on Thursday unveiled version 2013.1 “Grizzly,” the seventh and latest release of the open source software for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

    • OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ Debuts with More Than 200 New Features
    • Gartner Analyst Surprised That Developers Love FLOSS Clouds

      I have news for him. Folks who have choices and know they have choices do open their eyes and look at what’s available. Further, they like FLOSS because is does allow the flexibility people want. Non-Free software is advantageous to some. Free Software works for everyone else.

      I guess it takes time. Only a few years ago Gartner gave FLOSS no chance at all. Some of Gartner’s staff are still in denial but they will surely evolve faced with such overwhelming popularity of FLOSS with Gartner’s customers.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • Mulesoft Raises $37 Million for App Integration

      Getting data out of one app and into another is big business. It’s a business that enterprise integration firm Mulesoft is now growing with new funding and products.

      Mulesoft announced this week $37 million in new funding, bringing total investment in the company to $81 million.

      Mulesoft is not a new company, having started out under the name Mulesource in 2003.The company originated as a commercial effort around the open source Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) created by Mulesoft founder Ross Mason.

  • BSD

    • AMD Kernel Mode-Setting Progresses For FreeBSD

      More of the Radeon kernel mode-setting (KMS) driver stack being ported to FreeBSD from Linux is beginning to function.

      For the past few months, the open-source Linux Radeon KMS driver has been ported to Linux. It’s shown signs of life but still isn’t fully working or in a state where it will be merged to the mainline code-base in the near future.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • MATE 1.6 Released

      The latest version of the GNOME 2 fork, MATE, is now out. MATE 1.6 includes updates to Caja, the panel and the control center

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Academia and Programming Language Preferences

      For years now, RedMonk has argued that programming language usage and overall diversity is growing rapidly. With developers increasingly empowered to select the best tool for the job rather than having to content themselves with the one they are given, the fragmentation of runtimes in use has unsurprisingly been heavy. Where enterprises used to be at least superficially built on a small number of approved programming languages, today’s enterprise is far more heterogeneous than in years past, with traditional compiled languages (C/C++) coexisting along with managed alternatives (C#/Java) as well as a host of dynamic options (JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby).

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OASIS Breaks the Traditional Standards Accreditation Barrier

      On Tuesday, OASIS made an extremely rare announcement for an information technology consortium: that it has successfully completed the process of becoming accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a result, it is now able to submit its standards to ANSI for recognition as American National Standards (ANS). And also to directly submit its standards for adoption by ISO and IEC. This is a milestone that’s worthy of note, despite the fact that over 200 standards setting organizations (SSOs) have achieved a similar status in the past.

Leftovers

  • British Library to begin web harvest

    It aims to ”harvest” the entire UK web domain to document current events and record the country’s burgeoning collection of online cultural and intellectual works.
    Billions of web pages, blogs and e-books will now be amassed along with the books, magazines and newspapers which have been stored for several centuries.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Occupy Medical: ‘If you need help – you get help’

      Every Sunday from noon to 4pm, volunteers gather at their “mobile clinic” to make a difference, and offer free healthcare in downtown Eugene, Ore. What started as a temporary first aid tent along the Occupy Eugene movement in October 2011 became the Occupy Medical clinic in February 2012.

    • One of Us

      These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

    • Garbage Patch, the newest country

      It is made of trash, is as large as maybe even Texas and is in the middle of the ocean. Oh, and it’s severely under-populated. Actually, no one lives in Garbage Patch, no man, no animal.

      Okay, Garbage Patch is not really a country but to focus on monumental examples of man-made pollution, the United Nations’ cultural and science agency UNESCO will designate the conglomerations of rubbish a veritable territory of its own.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Engineering the Bitcoin Gold Rush: An Interview with Yifu Guo, Creator of the First ASIC-Based Miner

      A month after it reached a new all-time high, the rollercoaster ride that is bitcoin continues to thrill and confound after a series of events helped propel the virtual currency to stratospheric new heights, more than doubling its market value with the digital currency now trading at over $70.

      Over in Europe, the threat of financial Armageddon gave citizens new reason to consider the viability of cyberpunk alt-money. As Cypriot officials put 100 euro limits on withdrawals, the tiny Mediterranean island will soon welcome its first bitcoin ATM.

    • Why Bitcoin Is Poised To Change Society Much More Than The Internet Did
    • Company profits depend on the ‘welfare payments’ they get from society

      The free market is a myth. From drug patents to quantitative easing, businesses make money because of state help

    • Obama picks Goldman Sachs exec for ambassador to Canada

      U.S. President Barack Obama has selected a partner at the investment firm of Goldman Sachs in Chicago to be the new U.S. ambassador to Canada, CBC News has learned.

      Sources tell CBC News Network’s Power & Politics that Bruce Heyman has accepted the job but still has to pass a vetting process in order to be be formally nominated. His confirmation will be up to the U.S. Congress.

      If he is approved, Heyman would replace David Jacobson, who has held the position since 2009. Jacobson is also from Chicago.

    • Wall St Burdens the Public Debt

      As the effects of the sequester agreement ripple through the American economy–massive cuts, that is, to social programs, and the military to some extent–one thing is clear: both sides–President Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party–seem to think that public debt is the biggest challenge facing the American economy. Well, our next guest begs to differ.

      Now joining us in the studio is Michael Hudson. He was a Wall Street financial analyst, is now a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His recent books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.

    • Laiki Bank: The Cyprus bank staff hit worst of all
    • Exposed: A Global Offshore Money Matrix of Up to $32 Trillion

      The covert handling of huge amounts of money away from public accountability has fueled the global austerity crisis by shifting tax burdens onto average citizens…

    • Ex-Goldman trader charged in $7.6 billion rogue trade

      A former trader at Goldman Sachs pleaded guilty Wednesday to fraud linked to a scheme to hide an unauthorised $US8 billion ($7.6 billion) futures bet he made at the US banking giant.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • AP Ditches ‘Illegal’ Label

      The Associated Press announced a change in their style guide: The wire service will no longer refer to “illegal immigrants,” except in direct quotes. The term “illegal,” AP’s new rules state, refers only to actions, and not to people.

      Though they say it’s just the result of an ongoing in-house effort to rid the Stylebook of “labels,” the change is undoubtedly a victory for activists, who have called for years for journalists to stop using the term. Not only because it’s dehumanizing. As AP’s executive editor Kathleen Carroll points out, it’s also bad reporting, a “lazy device” that obscures meaningful distinctions.

    • New Report Exposes Extreme ALEC Agenda in Arizona

      Seventeen bills introduced in the Arizona legislature in 2013 can be tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and every member of the Republican leadership in the state are current or recent ALEC members, according to a new report from the Center for Media and Democracy and its allies “ALEC in Arizona: The Voice Of Corporate Special Interests In The Halls Of Arizona’s Legislature.”

      “ALEC is a secretive but powerful force in Arizona politics,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director. “This report exposes how corporations and Arizona legislators, have worked together to keep citizens in the dark about ALEC’s extreme agenda.”

  • Censorship

    • New Evidence: Homeland Security Spied On Peaceful Protestors; Worried About Protests Getting News Coverage

      We just recently had a post on the head of one of Homeland Security’s “Fusion Centers” (the same Fusion Centers found by a Congressional investigation to be a near total waste of time and money, finding no terrorists, but violating the public’s civil liberties) who claimed that the DHS centers did not spy on Americans, and then immediately admitted that they spied on “anti-government” Americans.

      The definition of “anti-government” was mostly left as an exercise to the reader. However, in a bout of good timing, the Partnership for Civil Justice has released some new DHS documents it received via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showing that DHS regularly spied on peaceful demonstrators and activists.

    • ‘Strong Lack of Instinct’: Turkish Paper Threatens to Sue over Trial Access
    • Turkish media to challenge exclusion from neo-Nazi trial

      Eight of the 10 victims of the neo-Nazi NSU underground organisation killed between 2000 and 2007 were Turkish citizens but no Turkish media organisation has been granted guaranteed seats for this month’s trial of suspected NSU member Beate Zschäpe.

      Yesterday Sabah said it was going to the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe to demand a seat reservation. The mass-market Hürriyet is considering joining the complaint.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • 6-y.o. Who Walked Alone to Post Office May be Removed from Her Home

      Dear Free-Range Kids: A few days ago CPS served my wife and me with a complaint alleging that we are neglectful. They want to take custody. Here is the chain of events that has led to this:

    • Azerbaijan Government Worried by Facebook Activism
    • Symbols of Bush-era Lawlessness Flourish Under Obama

      Guantanamo Bay prison plans expansion, while CIA official linked to torture cover-up gets promoted

    • Liberty Preservation: The states say ‘NO’ to NDAA

      Just days ago, an anniversary passed which should never be forgotten. On April 1, 1942, an order was issued by Lt. General J.L. DeWitt which began the forced evacuation and “internment” of people of Japanese descent.

    • Opponents Label Nullification “Nuts” and a “Bizarre Fad”

      Nullification is not the right of states to nullify any federal act. Rather, it is the right to choose to not enforce any federal act that fails to conform to the constitutionally established limits on its authority. Nullification presupposes that there are myriad (albeit limited) areas over which the Constitution has given purview to the federal government: defense, naturalization, foreign relations, interstate commerce, etc.

    • Bush Redux?

      Not only has the president ignored his promised platform planks, he’s actually reinforced and strengthened some of the most egregious portions of Bush-era abuses of power.

    • Abortion debate leads to comparisons with Nazi infanticide

      THE murder of infants with a disability in Nazi Germany was recalled during a highly charged debate on abortion, as doctors voted to reject radical calls for changes in the law.

    • Google Challenges U.S. National Security Letter in Court

      Google is fighting a National Security Letter (NSL) issued by the U.S. government, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acknowledging it is one of the first firms to do so.

      Google took the unusual step last month of revealing, albeit in vague terms, the number of NSLs it received from the US government. At the time the company said it was working with the authorities to improve transparency around the subject, but according to court filings it is also fighting against handing over users’ data.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Opinion: £53 and the Problem With UK Politics

        No-one forced, or compelled, Duncan Smith to make that statement. The assertion that it’s possible is one that rankles many people, however. Of course not everyone is feeling the pinch of recession and csuts, and that includes the former Conservative Party leader. While he may have been on unemployment benefits in the ’80s, he’s had steady employment for the last twenty years, all on public funds. Now asking him to try living on the same solutions he’s proposing for others isn’t really that big a stretch. In fact, given his experiences being a ward of the welfare state, and his military service, it shouldn’t be that difficult for him to survive, adapt, and overcome.

        However, the speed with which he’s back-pedalled and tried to move away from his initial position shows how promises trip lightly off the tongue when you’re a politician defending your party base. It’s ‘a stunt’ he claimed, ignoring the simple fact that after 20+ years as an MP, one currently earning significantly more (£134,565/year) than the average wage (£28,700 for UK males, according to the BBC in November) he may be a bit out of touch, and a bit clueless about the realities of his policies. Sure it looks good on paper, but without experiencing it first-hand, he’s not going to understand why it doesn’t work. At the time of writing, over 400,000 people have already said they’d like him to re-acquaint himself with that area of his job, to help him perform better.

      • YouTube Won’t Put Your Video Back Up, Even If It’s Fair Use, If It Contains Content From Universal Music
      • Film studios request removal of takedown notices

        Two film studios have asked Google to take down links to messages sent by them requesting the removal of links connected to film piracy.

        Google receives 20 million “takedown” requests, officially known as DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, a month. They are all published online.

      • Icelandic Píratar On Final Approach To Election Victory

        A new poll today places the Icelandic Pirate Party in parliament, with their election three weeks out. This follows a continuous and rapid ascent for the Icelandic Pirate Party. The poll will probably have the additional effect of putting the media spotlights on the party, further accelerating its growth.

]]> http://techrights.org/2013/04/06/sailfish-os-sdk/feed/ 0 Links 9/7/2012: Linux 3.5 RC 6, Ex-Nokia Staff Resurrects MeeGo http://techrights.org/2012/07/09/nokia-staff-resurrects-meego/ http://techrights.org/2012/07/09/nokia-staff-resurrects-meego/#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:42:49 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=61437

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 207
  • How to move from Windows to Linux?

    Some background: I have 10+ years of programming experience on Windows (almost exclusively C/C++, but some .NET as well), I was a user of FreeBSD at home for about 3 years or so (then had to go back to Windows), and I’ve never had much luck with Linux. And now I have to develop software for Linux. I need a plan.

    On Windows, you can get away with just knowing a programming language, an API you’re coding against, your IDE (VisualStudio) and some very basic tools for troubleshooting (Depends, ProcessExplorer, DebugView, WinDbg). Everything else comes naturally.

    On Linux, it’s a very different story. How the hell would I know what DLL (sorry, Shared Object) would load, if I link to it from Firefox plugin? What’s the Linux equivalent of inserting __asm int 3/DebugBreak() in the source and running the program, and then letting the OS call a debugger? Why do release builds use something, called appLoader, while debug builds work somehow different? Worst of all: How to provision Linux development environment?

  • A Linux computer for grandpa and grandma

    Tired of playing tech support for your older, less computer savvy relatives? Then you may want to consider getting them a Linux-powered WOW! Computer.

  • Desktop

    • Dell seeks Linux fans to try cut-price Ubuntu Ultrabook

      Dell is tempting Linux developers with the promise of a cut-price XPS 13 Ultrabook running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

    • How to Get One Of Dell’s Linux-Based Developer Laptops And Become A Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut

      Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Dubbed “Project Sputnik,” the effort has started to gain some traction.

      As part of its development, Dell has launched a beta program called the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program. Selected participants will receive the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04LTS pre-loaded at a discounted price.

      Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions.

  • Kernel Space

    • ARM Delivers 64-bit ARMv8 Linux Kernel Support (AArch64)

      ARM has today posted their set of patches that implements core Linux kernel support for AArch64, the ARM 64-bit architecture.

    • Intel Implements CMS MSAA For Ivy Bridge Driver

      The latest noteworthy patch-set coming out of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center is Mesa support for CMS MSAA for Ivy Bridge hardware.

    • Valve Software Finds Bugs With Linux Kernel

      As Valve Software’s Linux efforts continue to advance, they uncover Linux bugs. Fortunately, at least one Valve-spotted Linux kernel bug has now been corrected by NVIDIA.

      As mentioned back in March, Valve’s encountered OpenGL Linux performance problems. Those problems haven’t been for the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers that are riddled with issues and incomplete functionality, but with the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers. I haven’t checked recently but I hope those performance issues are now worked out with the latest upstream binary blobs. I would assume those OpenGL performance problems have been worked out with Valve Software showing their Linux client to partners. Aside from Linux OpenGL, Valve is now evidently uncovering non-graphics related problems.

    • Proposal: A DRM SoC Framework
    • Linux 3.5-rc6
    • Download Linux Kernel 3.5 Release Candidate 6

      Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, July 7th, that the sixth Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.5 kernel is now available for download and testing.

    • Linux leap second issues being fixed: developer

      Fixes are being readied to fix the problem in Linux that caused problems when an extra second was added to clocks at the end of June, according to a senior kernel developer.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • E17 heading towards a Stable Release – No Really!

      I’ve been pushing the Enlightenment desktop for some time now and for as long as I’ve been promoting it I’ve also been warning folks that it is under heavy development. Well folks – Duke Nuke’em Forever might have beat them to a release, but E team is prepping for a major (stable!) release themselves.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Akademy 2012 Impressions

        Almost all communication between KDE community members happens online, and includes people from all around the world. At Akademy, KDE people meet each other and work together in person. Virtual communication is necessary and valuable for day-to-day work; working face-to-face is much more effective. And Akademy provides much more than that.

      • Calling on the KDE Community to Celebrate: 4.9 Release Parties

        The date for the release of the next milestone in KDE’s 4.x series is quickly approaching. Developers, testers and bug chasers have been busy putting the final touches on the latest version of our software, so it is once again time to get together and celebrate our community’s accomplishment.

      • KDE: Rely on Qt, protect Qt’s freedom, contribute to it

        The KDE community is one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Most of the software written by KDE is based on the Qt toolkit. With the recent strategy changes within Nokia—the largest contributor to Qt, there is uncertainty about the future of Qt that concerns KDE. This is the position of the KDE community regarding the future of Qt…

      • Pandora: Managing Your Season of KDE Participation

        If, unfortunately, you did not get selected for GsoC, SoK offers a great opportunity to started and work on an open source project and win yourself a KDE t-shirt and certificate.

        What if there is a tool which makes it easier to manage and organize your participation on SoK? Sayak Banaerjee, a KDE developer, has created an app called “KDE Students Program”, code named Pandora, which does exactly that. The app will be soon available on season.kde.org.

      • Dolphin 2.1 and beyond

        You have probably heard last week that Peter stepped down as Dolphin maintainer. I would like to thank him for the good collaboration that we had during the last years. It was a great pleasure to work with him, and I think that his departure is a big loss for KDE.

        He entrusted the future maintenance of Dolphin to me, so I will do my best to keep it in good shape. I think that ease of use and stability are what users appreciate most about Dolphin, and I want to make sure that it stays that way.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Archbang 2012.07.02 Screenshots (07/05/2012)
    • Zorin 6 Review

      It’s been a long while since Linux distros have tried to emulate the look and feel of Windows. Most distributions thought it would be the best way to get Windows users who are fed up with the constant virus and malware threats to switch to Linux and it has not been a successful run back in the day with Linspire and Xandros closing up shop a long time ago.

    • Doudou 1.2: A Linux 4 Kids | Review

      Doudou is a French Debian based distro for kids 2-12 years old and a quite popular actually. Few days ago they released version 1.2 and I thought to have a quick look at it.

      I’ll be totally honest. Doudou looks very promising and is really useful distro, but.. but it suffers from old school Linux developing attitude. What’s that? It’s handy made.

      Developers just packed lots of software in a poor environment and the only modern thing here is the GCompris platform. They say that target up to 12 years old kids. Oh well, my opinion, do not gift this to a 12 years old kid, he will hate you. You better buy him a barbie ;)

    • Zorin OS 6 Multimedia Edition Released

      The Zorin Group has released the latest version of Zorin OS which is optimized for multimedia consumption, creation and editing. The team recently released Zorin OS for Home and Business users.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Gears up for 2013 Release

        RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.

        Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.

      • Red Hat moves app development to the cloud

        Open-source software developer Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed to help enterprises and their developers decrease speed application delivery.

        Red Hat’s new platform lets enterprises move application development and deployment to the cloud without the need to diverge from open industry standards, according to the company. It can be deployed in on-premise, private and public clouds to suit the needs of enterprises in various stages of cloud migration.

      • 2012 Red Hat Summit: RHEL Roadmap, Intel, Etc

        2012 Red Hat Summit: RHEL Roadmap, Intel, Etc
        This news is a few days tardy, but the videos from the 2012 Red Hat Summit are now available.

      • Red Hat Introduces Comprehensive Open Hybrid Cloud Solutions Portfolio
      • Red Hat’s journey through the “land of the giants”

        Open source provider Red Hat claims it is gaining traction in the New Zealand market.
        Red Hat credits this in part to the establishment of a presence here with the opening of an office in Auckland in April, 2011.

        But with last month’s global rollouts of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, and upgrades to its JBoss Data Grid and Enterprise Business Rules Management System, the company sees itself in a better position to compete for business with middleware ISVs, systems integrators and resellers.

        “Traditionally, organisations have looked to IBM and Oracle for this, and we’ve struggled to gain legitimacy because we lacked a presence and a track record,” says Max McLaren, Red Hat’s MD for Australia and New Zealand.

    • Debian Family

      • DebConf Managua 2012 Begins Tomorrow

        DebConf 2012, this year’s Debian event, will begin on Sunday and run through next week.

        DebConf 2012 is being hosted in Managua, Nicaragua at the Universidad Centroamericana.

      • Debian Working On Inclusion In FSF Recommended Distributions List

        Debian project leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, has announced his plans to get Debian added to the list of FSF approved free software distributions.

        Zacchiroli explains the reason Debian is not listed in the FSF approved list, “Historically, one of the main argument to exclude Debian from the free-distro list (argument we have share with essentially all other popular distros) has been non-free firmware in main. This argument has become moot since the early days of Squeeze development (early 2010).”

      • Derivatives

        • 3 Things You’ll Love in the New Knoppix Live Linux Distro

          Experienced Linux users would know that when a Linux system initializes, it starts a lot of services, some of which are either unnecessary or not needed immediately (printing, for instance). So unless you know how to turn them off, it can be very frustrating to wait for the Linux desktop to fully load and become usable.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Still Aims For Wayland System Compositor

            While there’s still more than one month until the Ubuntu 12.10 feature freeze, Canonical/Ubuntu developers continue to work towards their concept of having Wayland serve as a system compositor for this next Ubuntu Linux release due out in October, but will they make it?

          • The Good And Bad Lessons Ubuntu Taught Me About Linux And Windows

            A long-time Windows user and an avid gamer, I never felt the need to install Linux on any of my systems. That was until I required a server box to handle automated build compilation, source control and backups for my programming work. The idea of buying another copy of Windows for a machine I’d never be in front of seemed ludicrous and so a copy of Ubuntu was installed instead. Having used Windows and Linux side-by-side for almost a year has given me an entirely new perspective on both operating systems.

          • Ubuntu Cloud Mirrors Now Globally Available

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Scrappy doo. Lucid has puppy powers

              For those who have been following you will know that I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux. For those who haven’t been following, I have recently embarked on a three part review of Puppy Linux.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi Modded To Play Super Nintendo Games

      PetRockBlog founder Florian has found a cool way to play with his new credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi PC: turn it into a universal gaming console.

    • Phones

      • Ex-Nokia staff to build MeeGo-based smartphones

        A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for “dinghy”), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of “directors and core professionals from Nokia’s MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.”

      • Startup Brings Nokia MeeGo Back to Life

        Nokia’s MeeGo software, which was dropped by the company in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, is to live again after a group of former Nokia employees have set up a company to use the Linux-based mobile operating system.

      • MeeGo Resurrected: Linux Mobile Makes Comeback

        Just last week, it was announced that Nokia’s MeeGo team—the same team responsible for the revered OS used on the N9—walked away from the company. Although everyone has stayed hush on the matter, it is believed Nokia’s 10,000 job cuts had something to do with it.

        But it’s not that easy walking away from a labour of love. Those unfamiliar with MeeGo should know it’s built upon Linux, a programming language that is free and can be used by anyone with the skillset, ultimately promoting innovation before financial gain. That’s why most of the Nokia team have gone into business for themselves, creating a company called Jolla to continue bringing MeeGo powered devices to the market.

      • Ex-Nokia guys start mystery company to build Linux-based phones

        A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system.

      • Android

        • Amazon Said to Plan Smartphone to Vie With Apple IPhone

          Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is developing a smartphone that would vie with Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone and handheld devices that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

        • Hooray! Google Now Gets Ported From Jelly Bean To Ice Cream Sandwich

          Good news, Android fans. A developer over on the forever awesome XDA Developers forums has figured out how to extract Google Now from Android Jelly Bean and port it over to devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. The process for doing so requires a slightly geeky skill set, of course. You have to have a rooted device and you’ll need to be comfortable navigating through the Android file system, for starters. But assuming that’s you, then you can be among the first to try Google Now in (nearly) all its glory.

          In case you’re wondering what the big fuss is about, Google Now is only the most innovative, futuristic, and even downright creepy updates to Google’s search service ever to come. Instead of presenting a blank box where you type in text and hit enter, Google Now flips the search paradigm on its head. It alerts you to things you’ll want to know about before you search for them. Yes, really. Billed as a smart personal assistant to rival Apple’s Siri, Google Now comes pre-loaded on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean devices (the most recent version of Android, introduced at Google I/O), and proactively alerts you to things like weather changes, flight times and delays, sports scores, interesting places near you where you might like to eat, shop or visit, and more.

        • Friday Poll: Will you buy Android now or wait for iPhone 5?
        • Samsung Releases Source Code For Sprint Galaxy S III

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Archos Launches $250 9-Inch Elements Tablet

        Archos is creating some stiff competition for Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The company has announced its 9-inch tablet for US$250 to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

        If compared with Amazon Kindle Fire, Archos has an edge in almost every department:

        - It allows users to access the Google Play Store which has more than 600,000 apps compared to Amazon’s smaller profile. Amazon blocks access to Google Play Store.
        - Amazon Kindle Fire has only 8GB internal storage with only 6GB for content. On the contrary Archos Carbon has 16GB of internal memory with SD card support so you can keep all your music, movies and games without worry.
        - 9-inch (1280×786) display as compared to 7-inch screen of Kindle Fire.

      • Nexus 7 review
      • Multiple Kindle Fire successors due, including a 4G LTE model

Free Software/Open Source

  • Essential Open Source Tools for Web Developers
  • Beliefs and Misbeliefs about Open Source Software

    What does “open source” mean? With open source software being so prevalent in our lives (Android, WordPress, Mozilla Firefox are almost fixtures), you would think that it would be simple enough to find somebody who can explain the term around here. A quick survey around the office turned out dismal results, however. A fellow intern told me “open source software” simply meant that the source code is open for view; another insisted that it means the software is free to use. I personally had the impression that it meant the code was crowd sourced and created by volunteer developers–the idea was immediately shot down by the other two. So what, really, does “open source” mean?

  • Colectica Releases Open Source Blaise to DDI Metadata Converter
  • Rethinking the social network: 3 open-source alternatives to Facebook

    Despite being still in the testing stages, Diaspora* is arguably the most well-known distributed social network at the moment. The brainchild of four NYU students, Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the project was able to fundraise over $200, 000 in 2010 through Kickstarter (Mark Zuckerberg was a donor). The code is open-source and hosted on Github, where it is worked on by volunteer developers. In Diaspora*, users set up a personalized server, termed “pods”, using the Diaspora* software. This server can then be used to port content from

  • NASA needs open source framework

    Despite some well-known open source projects undertaken by NASA, the space agency lacks a framework for understanding the use and production of open source software at the agency level, say a clutch of computer programmers and technologists.

    In an article published earlier this spring by IT Professional, information technology professionals led by Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, say that when they tried to open source a JPL project, they “entered uncharted territory.”

  • TEDGlobal 2012: ‘The more you give away the more you get back’

    First there was “open” – open source, open tech, open journalism. And now? Prepare yourself for “radical openness”.

  • Open Source Awards open for entries

    Sponsored by companies in the local open source community, the awards have been running since 2007. They “work to raise awareness of the free and open source advantage for New Zealand by telling powerful success stories based on real achievements that are already making a difference for our country,” say organisers on the awards website.

    Award categories recognise outstanding use of free open-source software in the public sector, the private sector, education, the arts and social services – including charities and community organisations.

  • In defence of open source

    he Internet world changes quickly. Open source, the practice of promoting free redistribution and access to an end product’s implementation, was little known and often unpopular.

  • Lockheed Upgrades Joint ISR System With Free Open-Source Software
  • How important is the source in Open Source

    The use of open source in trading systems is at an interesting stage. Financial markets participants are now starting to look at open technologies for financial markets, particularly those targeted at trading, to supplement the general open source systems they are already using, such as Linux, Apache and MQ systems.

  • Open source middleware protects and maintains CERN collider

  • Events

    • The Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon, CloudOpen Conferences are Approaching

      If you’re looking for a good way to close out the summer on a high note, keep in mind that the LinuxCon and CloudOpen conferences are taking place together in San Diego, Calif., August 29-31. And, The Linux Foundation has finalized the complete programs and keynote confirmations for the events. Here are the details on what looks like a good time if you’re into Linux and the cloud.

    • Open Source: OSS Leads new Software Innovation

      Open Source software continues to grow in terms of acceptance. In fact, it has become the leader in software segments like cloud computing, mobile applications and enterprise mobility. That’s based on a survey sponsored by North Bridge Venture partners and conducted by Black Duck Software and the 451 Group.

    • Linux.conf.au 2013 Extends Deadline For Papers

      The deadline for submitting paper proposals for Linux.conf.au 2013 in Canberra was originally supposed to be last Friday, but has now been extended by a fortnight. Am I bitter that I set aside time to make sure I submitted my proposal before the deadline? No. (Grinds teeth.)

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Essential Firefox Extensions
      • Extensions…? Here’s a few some missed.

        Recently, LXer carried a story that highlighted several Firefox extensions that are a “must have” for any browsing experience. While there were a few in that list that I find newly-useful, it was lacking in some basic extensions that make life ever-so-much-easier for computer commandos.

        There is a set of extensions we add to every Reglue computer we place and I have trouble understanding why they didn’t make this list. Here are a few of them that should have made the cut. I’m sure that you are aware of most of them but I put them here to be passed along to your less savvy friends,

      • Mozilla To Shaft Thunderbird Next Week

        Mozilla will be announcing Monday that they will be basically stripping away their resources towards the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client.

      • So, That’s It For Thunderbird

        Mozilla is not “stopping” Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals.” And it’s pulling people off the project. But it’s not stopping? Right.

        This, according to a letter shared with “Mozillians” ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn’t agree with that plan.

      • Mozilla Foundation and EFF join hunt for Syrian open source developer

        The open source community and human rights organizations have joined forces to find a software developer who has been missing for months following the recent civil unrest in Syria.

        Bassel Khartabil, a 31-year-old computer engineer, was the project leader of Aiki Framework, an open source tool for building web applications. He also contributed to various community-based online projects, including Creative Commons, Fabricatorz, Mozilla Firefox, Open Clip Art Library, Sharism, and Wikipedia.

      • Mozilla To Stop Innovation On Thunderbird
      • Evolution of Thunderbird e-mail Client

        Mozilla has decided to freeze the features and concentrate on web/cloud stuff. That annoys some who have grown to depend on Thunderbird, particularly those with many e-mail accounts. Thunderbird makes sense for its ability to concentrate those accounts in one application.

      • Thunderbird development to be stalled by Mozilla

        An email leaked on Friday forced Mozilla to reveal its decision to reduce resources for the Thunderbird email client ahead of a planned announcement next Monday. The early announcement from Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker explained that the organisation felt that, as an open source, cross-platform email client, Thunderbird was unlikely to be a “source of innovation” and future leadership. Mozilla’s officials say they have concluded that what is important for Thunderbird is ongoing stability and that “continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla’s product efforts”.

      • Mozilla to halt further development of open-source email client Thunderbird

  • SaaS

    • Rackspace president: Cloud needs open alternative to Amazon
    • Open Source, the Fuel for Cloud Disruption
    • 5 Ways Cloud Computing Is Like Open Source

      You may not remember the angst of the early- to mid-2000s, when the open source debate raged hot and heavy. Many times I witnessed IT professionals vociferously denigrate open source in favor of established proprietary vendors. I heard endless arguments about the quality disadvantages of open source, the lack of “professional ability” among open-source developers, the absolute requirement that a large company stand behind a software component used in a corporate system, the dangers of lack of indemnification, and on and on. According to large numbers of IT organization staff, open source was a toy, fine for unimportant hobby systems, but woefully inadequate for “real” corporate IT applications.

    • Increasingly, Clouds Are Built the Open Source Way

      Today’s cloud computing landscape has no clear leading vendor; but rather is a mosaic of services. While the commercial opportunities are enormous, open source clouds are beginning to dominate the private cloud side of the market.

    • Open source powers big data index

  • Education

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Features Coming For FreeBSD 10

      Here’s a look at some of the planned features that are being worked on for the FreeBSD 10 release.

      The FreeBSD 10 features that have already been talked about on Phoronix include:

      - FreeBSD 10.0 will deprecate GCC and switch to the LLVM/Clang compiler by default. GCC will likely remain within FreeBSD ports, but LLVM/Clang is the future for FreeBSD rather than using the GPLv3-licensed GCC. Other BSD distributions are also working towards migrating from GCC to LLVM/Clang.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Game of the day: GNU Backgammon

      It’s almost a cliche in Western culture. For some reason, those swanky-looking leather-bound backgammon sets became either the mark of tasteful distinction or the default Christmas gift when you don’t know what else to get. I see them in households everywhere. Unopened. Unplayed. Checkers still in the little sealed plastic baggies. Unloved. I don’t know, I guess backgammon sets got advertised in the back pages of Playboy during the ’70s or something; it has that kind of aura.

  • Project Releases

    • Etherpad Lite 1.1.1 Released

      The Etherpad Foundation has released a new version of their collaborative web based editor, Etherpad Lite. This release features a lot of bug fixes along with support for node 0.8, new hooks and API endpoints, resolution of various security issues, Postgres support and better Microsoft Windows support out of box.

    • Transmission 2.60 Released

      The version 2.60 comes with all tickets closed, which means all the open bugs and requests have been resolved. Some of the key changes in this release include better support for magnet links, better scraping behavior for various trackers, notifications for seeding and downloading completion on the web client and various other small bug fixes.

    • Transmission 2.60 Has Been Officially Released

      Transmission 2.60, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, has been released last evening, July 5th.

    • Pidgin 2.10.6 Released

      Pidgin, a popular cross-platform IM client, has got a new release. This version fixes a major bug that required users to triple click on the buddy list to open the messaging window.

    • PacketFence 3.4 supports up to 100 custom VLANs

  • Public Services/Government

    • VA awards $4.9M contract to support open source tech

      The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded Ray Group International of Tampa, Fla., a $4.9 million contract to support the open source community that is contributing software code to the VA and Defense Department integrated electronic health record system.

    • France awards €2 million open source support tender

      The central IT department for the French government has granted a €2 million contract to support 350 different open source tools throughout fifteen different ministries. The three to four year contract, which was officially tendered last year, was awarded to consulting companies Alter Way, Capgemini and Java specialist Zenika.

    • Government departments snub open source storage
    • Vietnam considers drastic measures to encourage open source software use

      Forty three out of the 63 provinces and cities have installed and used open source software. It is estimated that 7300 officers have been trained in the plan to build up the labor force to support the open source software application.

      In many localities, open source solutions have been developed and utilized by the local budget. Quang Nam province, for example, has 90 percent of electronic information websites of the local state agencies developed onJoomla open source. Meanwhile, two districts and three departments in the province are using the one-stop-shop software based on Drupal open source.

      Tuyen said that Vietnam encourages organizations and agencies to use open source software because of its outstanding advantages. It is clearly more economical to use open source software than close sourced software which is always very expensive.

  • Licensing

    • Open source incest: GPL forked by its coauthor

      One of the principal authors of version 3 of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) has spun off his own version of the license without the participation of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), in a move that could ruffle feathers in the often-cantankerous free software community.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • From Tech to Toilet Paper, Berliner Tries to Live Completely Open Source for One Year

      Open source computer, open source mobile phone, open source toothbrush, open source jeans, open source video codec, open source camera, open source beer and even open source toilet paper: these are just a few things you need if you decide to make every aspect of your life open source for a year. A 28-year-old filmmaker from New Zealand living in Berlin is going to try just that.

Leftovers

  • Country Most in Love with M$ Gets the Most Machines Knocked off the Internet Monday

    USA has about 10% of the world’s infected machines. China which has about the same number of on-line users has 1/7 as many infected PCs as USA. India which has four times the population of USA has 1/3 as many infected PCs. To keep the problem at home in USA, the world should just stop using that other OS. It’s not needed and not worth the trouble it cause

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs Loses $20.6 Million Award Appeal

      On Tuesday, the Goldman Sachs group lost an appeal against a $20.6 million award won by creditors of Bayou Group, the now bankrupt hedge fund. Goldman’s argument was rejected by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which found Goldman’s assertion without merit in claiming that the arbitrators making the award had disregarded the law. The three-judge panel appeals court observed, “The manifest disregard standard is, by design, exceedingly difficult to satisfy, and Goldman has not satisfied it in this case.”

    • Goldman Sachs facing £250m lawsuit
    • Wall Street Confidence Trick: How Interest Rate Swaps Are Bankrupting Local Governments

      The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

    • Full Show: How Big Banks Victimize Our Democracy

      PMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice?

      On this week’s Moyers & Company, Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith, creator of the finance and economics blog Naked Capitalism, join Bill to discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government, and how that tag-team leaves deep wounds in our democracy. Taibbi’s latest piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia.” Smith is the author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

  • Privacy

    • Maple Seed Drones Will Swarm The Future

      Imagine a cheap, tiny, hovering aerial drone capable of being launched with the flick of a person’s wrist and able to provide manipulable 360-degree surveillance views.

      It’s real, it’s inspired by maple seeds, and the company behind it, Lockheed Martin, envisions a future in which swarms of the new drones can be deployed at a fraction of the cost and with greater capabilities than drones being used today by the military and other agencies.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • U.N. Affirms Internet Freedom as a Basic Right

      Will Internet companies help or hinder government authorities that try to restrict their citizens from using the Web freely? And will their customers, investors or shareholders care enough to do something about it?

      That debate was freshly stirred on Thursday as the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution supporting freedom of expression on the Internet. Even China, which filters online content through a firewall, backed the resolution. It affirmed that “the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice.”

    • Civil liberties organisations advocating for a free internet

      Several international civil liberties organisations have put their weight behind a Declaration of Internet Freedom. The first signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Digital Democracy, and Mozilla. Both individuals and organisations can sign the declaration which reads, in full:

    • Verizon: net neutrality violates our free speech rights

      Verizon pressed its argument against the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules on Monday; filing a legal brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. The company argued the FCC’s rules not only exceeded the agency’s regulatory authority, but also violated network owners’ constitutional rights. Specifically, Verizon believes that the FCC is threatening its First Amendment right to freedom of speech and its property rights under the Fifth Amendment.

  • DRM

    • Recent iOS, Mac app crashes linked to botched FairPlay DRM

      iOS and OS X users are experiencing crashes due to corrupted binaries pushed out by Apple’s servers over the Fourth of July holiday, according to Instapaper developer Marco Arment. The problem appears to be linked to Apple’s FairPlay DRM scheme, which is added to apps downloaded via the iOS App Store or Mac App Store. While Apple appears to be working to correct the issue, the problem is ongoing as of Thursday.

      Arment discovered the problem late Tuesday night after pushing an update to his Instapaper app to the App Store. “I was deluged by support e-mail and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install,” Arment wrote on his blog.

]]> http://techrights.org/2012/07/09/nokia-staff-resurrects-meego/feed/ 0 SUSE Community Acknowledges Stagnation http://techrights.org/2012/06/24/suse-brand-falling/ http://techrights.org/2012/06/24/suse-brand-falling/#comments Sun, 24 Jun 2012 14:16:34 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=61004 Confederate ship CSS Alabama

Summary: Concerns and advice from SUSE/OpenSUSE supporters highlight the present difficulties

THOSE who used to post OpenSUSE news no longer do so; there’s still some activity, but it’s minor. Muktware wonders what the future of OpenSUSE might hold. To quote:

openSUSE has been going through troubled waters. Being an openSUSE user myself, I have often been affected by the inconsistent infrastructure. In the past two-three months openSUSE servers have been facing one or the other problem. The last thing I would want is to not able to update, install of maintain my production machine. So, this inconsistency was bothering me. The good thing is openSUSE teams are not only aware of this problem, but also have started to find a permanent fix for it.

Unlike derivatives which don’t have to develop anything from scratch as they get all of their code ready-made from projects like Debian, distros like Fedora, which are ‘creating’ the technologies used by the rest of the GNU/Linux world, have to build everything from scratch. openSUSE also falls in the same category. So, they don’t get their stuff ready-made by someone else. This fact makes it hard for openSUSE to push two releases a year. So, one possibility to deal with the problem is longer release cycles so there is more time for developers to fix things.

We recently wrote about the meltdown, which caused delays despite a belated milestone.

One must remember that SUSE is advancing Microsoft tax, e.g. on SAP applications. Microsoft’s investment in SUSE was money well spent as it pays Microsoft in return. We call SUSE “Microsoft Linux” not purely as a joke. The project/product generally lacks identity and some in the community discuss the matter:

These changes raise a question from our own group of contributors. Is openSUSE at the height of this weave of stylistic changes? This question is not about code or software integration, but exclusively about the end user experience. Reasoning carefully, the answer would be “partially.” openSUSE has not taken full advantage of the branding capabilities provided by both KDE 4 and Gnome 3. This trend is more so surprising considering that openSUSE is the first to integrate and use many new Linux technologies through its unique OBS service, yet brand-wise we remain stagnant. Early adoption and fast integration in our distribution makes it harder to work on and maintain distribution specific styling.

The brand is stagnant in part because people recognise what SUSE means to GNU/Linux. It’s what Xandros and Linspire used to mean to it, but it’s actually worse. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2012/06/24/suse-brand-falling/feed/ 0 Links 29/4/2012: Linux Steam Client, CISPA Backlash http://techrights.org/2012/04/29/cispa-backlash/ http://techrights.org/2012/04/29/cispa-backlash/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:00:18 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=60139

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote

      The vote followed the debate on amendments, several of which were passed. Among them was an absolutely terrible change (pdf and embedded below—scroll to amendment #6) to the definition of what the government can do with shared information, put forth by Rep. Quayle. Astonishingly, it was described as limiting the government’s power, even though it in fact expands it by adding more items to the list of acceptable purposes for which shared information can be used. Even more astonishingly, it passed with a near-unanimous vote. The CISPA that was just approved by the House is much worse than the CISPA being discussed as recently as this morning.

    • How SOPA protests were used to push CISPA

      CISPA authors and supporters have tried everything they can to avoid another SOPA protest – except tell the truth about their bill.

]]> http://techrights.org/2012/04/29/cispa-backlash/feed/ 0 Links 5/1/2012: Nginx Beats Microsoft, Alpine 2.3.3, and Hadoop 1.0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/05/hadoop-1-0/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/05/hadoop-1-0/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:19:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=57095

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux 2012: 5 Things to Watch

    As we begin 2012, Linux is 25 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. 2012 should be another solid year for Linux growth and expansion in a number of areas with new development in the kernel, distros and on architectures big and small.

  • How Much Do You Linux?

    My journey with Linux began in 2009, one week before the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I was a long-time Windows user who knew of nothing else, but what Microsoft had to offer for my computer. Years of frustration culminated with me clicking away on Google to look for an alternative, if there was even one. Boy, did my eyes fill with wonder as I found out about Linux, in general, and more specifically Ubuntu. I read and read about it and came to find out that I could test drive it right from the cd itself. It works! It really works! I was ecstatic. I was free from the shackles of Microsoft Windows.

  • Download Linux From Your Desktop With Get Linux

    How do I download Linux? That’s a question that I hear fairly often. It usually leads to follow-up questions, like what is a distribution, which distribution should I download or how do I install Linux on my PC.

  • Linux emerges as a reliable option in 2012

    Linux has been into the market since the late 1990s and is open to anyone who wants to use it. Linux is free and moreover there is no paying for a cd or a product key. Yet many consumers are very skeptical to switch operating systems or download another. Because of various reasons, windows popularity could be one of them and adding to it is the extra work and time needed to install a new operating system.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Nginx Passes Microsoft for Active Web Server Share

      New web servers continued to come online at the end of 2011. According to web server stats vendor Netcraft’s January 2012 survey, there are now nearly 583 million sites on the Internet. The January survey figure represents an increase of 27.2 million sites over the December 2011 figures, for a 4.9 percent gain.

    • BT provisions IT faster with Database-as-a-Service

      BT has revealed how automation has enabled it to reduce the time it takes to deliver a new database from weeks to minutes.

      To do this, the telecoms company created a pre-provisioned, six-node rack cluster, which heavily uses automation to create databases for IT projects that require them. This means that new databases can be created on this Database-as-a-Service cluster in just 19 minutes.

      [...]

      BT has built its entire DaaS on Oracle, except for the hardware. It uses Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM).

    • Nginx overtakes Microsoft as No. 2 Web server

      With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What’s more, according to Netcraft’s January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • LinuxCon 2011 Europe keynote videos now available

      Keynote videos from the September 2011 LinuxCon Europe conference are now available for on-demand viewing. Keynote presenters and participants included such Linux luminaries as Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, Dirk Hohndel, Nils Brauckman, Tim Burk, Jon Corbet, and more.

    • Linux Foundation sites back in action

      The damage from the September 2011 cracking of several Linux Foundation web sites seems to have been repaired, though one site won’t be coming back: the Linux Developer Network.

    • What’s new in Linux 3.2

      Improvements to the Ext4 filesystem, network code optimisations and thin provisioning support in the Device Mapper are some of the major improvements in Linux 3.2. Further additions include new and improved drivers – for example, for graphics hardware by Intel and NVIDIA, as well as Wi-Fi components by Atheros and Broadcom.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Akademy-es 2012 – Call for Host

        KDE España has started planning Akademy-es 2012—the most important KDE-related event in Spain. The conference is an opportunity for Spanish KDE users and developers to meet, share experiences, catch up on KDE news, and plan for the future. Akademy-es includes a range of presentations, workshops, hacking sessions, informal get-togethers and an assembly of KDE España members. KDE members and supporters will be coming from other countries to enjoy famous Spanish hospitality and meet up with KDE friends. The date for Akademy-es depends on what location is chosen and the availability of suitable facilities.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 11th December 2011

    • GNOME Desktop

      • What does Cinnamon bring to the desktop?

        Cinnamon is another attempt to make the GNOME 3 desktop acceptable to those in the community who have so far refused to have an unpalatable substance rammed down their throats. While MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3 Shell. And though better than the other attempts, it does not really represent a sharp break from GNOME 3 + MGSE. Imagine GNOME 3 + MGSE without the Applications view or menu, and you have Cinnamon. The last two updates added some much needed configurations options to the menu, but much still needs to be done.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Alpine 2.3.3 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce immediate availability of version 2.3.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • New aptosid Fork, siduction 11.1 Released

        A few day ago a new distribution forked from aptosid announced their first stable release. On the last day of 2011, Ferdinand Thommes announced the release of siduction 11.1. siduction is based on Debian Unstable and ships in versions featuring KDE, LXDE, or Xfce.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical at CES, Las Vegas, 10th – 13th January

            Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.

          • Last Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for Microsoft, First for Canonical

            We have decided that this coming January will be our last keynote presentation and booth at CES. We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.

          • Will an Ubuntu Gadget Debut at CES?

            The start of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is rapidly approaching, and speculation is running rampant as to what shiny new wares will make their debut there.

          • Ubuntu hoists skirt, flashes ‘concept’ gadget at CES

            Ubuntu shop Canonical has promised to make a splash at the annual gadget jamboree, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, next week.

          • Precise Quality, not just for Precise

            I upgraded my primary laptop to Precise yesterday. Very smoooooth! Kudos to the Ubuntu team for the way they are running this cycle; their commitment to keeping the Precise Pangolin usable from opening to release as 12.04 LTS is very evident.

          • Canonical Seeking Designer for ‘Core Apps’, ‘HIG’

            A recent job posting from Canonical appears to hint at Ubuntu’s continued commitment to first-class user experience.

          • Canonical Will Present Exclusive Ubuntu Concept Design at CES

            Canonical announced last night, January 3rd, that it will present the latest in Desktop, Cloud and Ubuntu One demonstrations, as well as an exclusive Ubuntu concept design, at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) event, in Las Vegas, US.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Comparison Test: Pear OS 3.0 “Panther” vs. Zorin OS 5.2 Core

              There’s been a new distribution making small waves lately called Pear OS. It aims to replicate the experience of Apple’s Mac OS X, and upon first appearances, it seems to do so pretty well. I’m comparing it to Zorin OS, which similarly tries to replicate the experience of Microsoft Windows, to see which one does its job better.

            • Review: Meet ‘Lisa,’ Linux Mint 12

              For someone who has never before tried out a Linux desktop, consider telling them to make Linux Mint 12 their initial exploration.

              This version of the Linux distro, which launched late last year, is code-named “Lisa” and runs the relatively new Gnome 3 desktop graphical user interface. It is based on Ubuntu 11.10.

            • Linux Mint launches Cinnamon desktop

              Not content with its Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE), nor with GNOME 2 replacement MATE, Linux Mint has decided to launch a new GNOME 3-based desktop dubbed Cinnamon.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Cortex-A9 hardware/software dev platform supports Android 4.0

      Intrinsyc announced a hardware/software development platform for Freescale’s Cortex-A9-based, dual-core i.MX 6 processor, offering support for Android 4.0 and Windows Mobile 6.5. The Open-6 Design and Production Platform combines a development kit, a wireless telephony stack, and a reference platform with a capacitive multitouch display, cameras, sensors, and wireless radios.

    • 13-Year Software Veteran Learns New Tricks with Embedded Linux Course

      Derald Woods is a 13-year engineering veteran who today works in software development, designing and supporting electronic vehicle controls for heavy equipment and trucks. Lately, his time is being used to work on an ARM9-based embedded Linux solution that involves NTSC/PAL video CSI input, V4L2 overlay, and graphics provided by an SDL implementation.

    • Roku media player shrinks again — to an HDMI dongle

      Roku announced a tiny dongle version of its Linux-based streaming player device, designed to plug directly into a TV’s HDMI port. Due to ship in the fall, the “Roku Streaming Stick” will send its signals to — and accept power from — Mobile High Definition Link-enabled televisions, including some of Best Buy’s Insignia models.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • The 10 Rookie Mistakes Every Android Developer Should Avoid

          As veteran mobile application developers with experience in most of the popular platforms of the past decade, we feel that the Android platform is one of the most accessible platforms for new developers. With cheap tools, a friendly development community, and a well-known programming language (Java), developing Android apps has never been easier. That said, we still see a number of mistakes that developers who are new to Android make over and over again. Here are the 10 most insidious gaffes.

        • Android Market tops 400,000 apps, climbing fast

          Google’s Android Market now has over 400,000 apps, and the pace of new code additions is accelerating.

        • Android Market hits 400,000 available apps, says analytics firm
        • Brits got Kindles for Christmas

          Ask punters what they got for Christmas and a rather large number of them say they got a Kindle.

        • Kindle Fire burned up some holiday iPad sales
        • Best Japanese Role-Playing Games (JRPGs) for Android

          Since the late 1980s, Japanese role-playing games or JRPGs have managed to enthrall a wide range of audiences. From Wizardry to Final Fantasy, this genre has garnered a huge fan following not just among the Japanese, but also among Western gamers. Furthermore, since JRPGs have been made for almost every platform that’s out there, our very own Android, which is also a fledgling gaming platform, has seen some great titles in this genre. So, if you’re hankering for a visit to mystical realms and dragon-infested lands, here’s a list of some of the best JRPGs for Android.

        • Quad-core SoC supports Android 4.0, 3840 x 1080 video resolution

          ZiiLabs says it is sampling a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC (system-on-chip) designed for Android 4.0 tablets. Clocked at 1.5GHz, the ZMS-40 processor is equipped with 96 “StemCell” media processing cores supporting 3840 x 1080 resolution for 1080p 3D stereo video, features 200-megapixel/sec image processing, and supports the new HEVC (H.265) video compression standard, the company says.

        • Android phones need to give root access. Now!

          I wanted to make an impression with my title. I hope I managed. I am writing this article as Gingerbreak’s wheel spins aimlessly runs on my Galaxy S phone. I have little hope that I will actually be root on my phone. Here I am: I intended to write an article about Busybox, in order to turn an Android phone into something that really resembled a GNU/Linux system. I failed, twice: as a user, I failed gaining control of my own phone. As a free software advocate, I failed warning people about what could have happened — and indeed I let it happen.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • MusOpen.org is Commissioning the Prague Symphony Orchestra this January

    It looks like 2012 is going to be a great year for free culture. Possibly my favorite development is that MusOpen has organized its planned symphony recordings for this January. In September, 2010, the free culture organization raised over $68,000 (several times their $11,000 goal) through a Kickstarter campaign, with the intent of commissioning a “internationally renowned orchestra” to perform the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

  • The Jeff Gauthier Goatette: Open Source

    Musicians tend to make pretty decent label bosses. When I saw Adrian Legg perform several years ago, he extolled his new label, Favored Nations, because it was “run by a guitar player.” Violinist Jeff Gauthier is a triple-threat in this regard; he runs the Cryptogramophone label, produces some pretty happening names such as Jenny Scheinman and Erik Friedlander, and he’s one terrific bandleader. On top of all of that, he plays jazz violin like a bat out of hell, swinging the instrument by its tail and knocking over jars in the jazz, classical, and rock fusion departments in the process. Last time out, Gauthier’s modern jazz combo, The Goatette, was greeted with a year-end approving nod from Slate’s Fred Kaplan. Indeed, House of Return was a highpoint for music on the fringes in 2008, and its follow-up Open Source is just as good.

  • # NASA Promotes Open Source With New Website
  • All in the name

    One Debian/Ubuntu-based distro I’ve always liked — Qimo — seems innocent enough, especially since it is kid-oriented. Of course, when you try to pronounce it phonetically, it comes out “chemo,” as in “chemotherapy.” Actually, that’s not the correct pronunciation for Qimo — it’s really “kim-o,” as in “eskimo,” which is the basis for the name of the this distro. I’m not making this up: The lead developer has a toddler son named Quinn, named in part because the developer Dad is a Bob Dylan fan, and hence the “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” reference is not lost on the Dylanistas among us.

    Or so I was told.

    Then there’s the ongoing debate about the acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, more commonly known as GIMP. My friend Ken Starks of HeliOS fame — not exactly a paragon in the defense of politically correctness (to his credit) — has a good point when he says that GIMP is insensitive to those with movement disabilities. While I hope a name change is being considered, I would like to think they’re not doing so at the moment because they’re still working on the single-window thing.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chromegate? Google Will Penalize Itself For Sponsored Posts

        Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall.

    • Mozilla

      • Can Firefox be a Web browser contender again? Firefox 9.01 Review

        The newest Firefox is faster, better, and its parent group is well financed, but is it this version, Firefox 9.01, good enough to win back fickle Web browser users?

      • Mozilla persuades Firefox 3.6 users to dump old browser

        Mozilla’s upgrade call last month pushed more Firefox 3.6 users to grab a newer edition than any month since June 2011, a Web metrics company said over the weekend.

      • Mozilla Updates License – Does it Matter?

        The Mozilla Public License is one of the most influential software licenses in recent memory. In many respects, it is the basis for alot of modern idea about open source, as opposed to just Free Software and the GPL.

        This week, the Mozilla Public License 2.0 was officially released – and to be honest, I was caught a little off guard. I’ve known that work was in progress since at least 2008. In 2010, Mozilla Chief Mitchell Baker let us know that the new MPL 2.0 would remove references to Netscape in the license.

      • Mozilla Releases Version 2.0 of Its License
      • Firefox Aurora for Android gets native UI

        Mozilla has published a new version of Firefox for Android to its Aurora development channel; the version 11 branch was previously only available as a Nightly build. The open source mobile web browser now uses a native Android UI. Traditionally, Firefox implementations have used XUL, an XML-based language that is interpreted by the Gecko rendering engine. According to its developers, the new native UI should provide improved start-up and page load times, while also using less memory. The new native UI also brings a completely re-designed interface and start page.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice: Is the Open Source Software Suite Here to Stay?

      For those who don’t know the back story: In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun, which owned the OpenOffice.org project at the time. Concerned that Oracle might restrict or close the OpenOffice code, or sell the product for money, several groups formed the Document Foundation and forked OO into LibreOffice, an independent endeavor. Since then, most leading desktop Linux distributions have replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice as their default office productivity suite.

      Meanwhile, the fears of open source advocates were allayed in June 2011, when Oracle handed the OO code over to the Apache Foundation, ensuring that it would not, in fact, become proprietary. Now, Apache is in the process of regrouping and reorganizing the project, but for now development is kind of dormant and there has not been a new release in almost a year.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • WebOS Gets Surprise Second Life in Healthcare

      Andrew B. Holbrook, a Stanford University Department of Radiology research associate, developed a WebOS application that operates an MRI scanner and allows radiologists and other medical personnel to view images captured by the MRI machine on a TouchPad tablet.

      Holbrook designed an app allowing HP’s TouchPad to operate an MRI machine from inside the scanning room, then interface with a PC server located elsewhere. The computers traditionally used to control MRI scanners are cumbersome and costly because they need special modification to reduce metal parts, which react to the MRI machine’s magnetic field and pose safety risks.

    • VA Details Plans to Replace Medical-Scheduling Platform

      The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to overhaul its medical-scheduling software, which is integrated into its VistA electronic health record system.

  • Project Releases

    • Aeon Nox 2.0 XBMC Theme Released, Looks Fantastic!

      Many consider XBMC as one the finest, if not the best, media center application out there, which is also open source. Starting from the previous XBMC 10 ‘Dharma’ release, XBMC started supporting add-ons officially which made it super easy to install third-party developed skins and apps for XBMC. Aeon Nox 2.0 was one such long awaited theme for XBMC and it is now available with the default XBMC 11 repositories.

    • Apache’s Hadoop cloud computing framework achieves 1.0 status

      The Apache Software Foundation’s formal 1.0 release of Hadoop will give enterprises and SMBs a cost effective, open source cloud computing software framework that is mature, stable and features state-of-the-art technologies

    • gnutls 3.0.10
    • FreeIPMI 1.1.1 Released

      Major Updates:

      o Support new tool ipmi-pet, tool to parse/interpret platform event traps.
      o Support new –sdr-cache-file option specify specific SDR cache file in all SDR related tools (ipmi-sensors, ipmi-sel, ipmi-fru, etc.).
      o Support Quanta QSSC-S4R/Appro GB812X-CN OEM SDRs, sensors, and SEL events.
      o Update libfreeipmi for DCMI 1.5 additions.
      o Add petalert.pl contribution.

    • For years in development, is Scribus 1.4.0 worth the wait?

      Open-source, cross-platform desktop publishing package Scribus 1.4.0 has been given a final, stable release, four years after the first developmental version saw the light of day. Over 2,000 feature requests and bugs have been resolved in this new release, which, despite the relatively minor version number jump from 1.3.3.x, is a major new release.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Of Open Source and the European Commission

      At the end of last year I reported on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its support for truly open standards. At least it’s relatively straightforward to keep tabs on what’s happening in Blighty; Europe is another matter – I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the following page, entitled “Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC”.

    • DISA revises software guideline clarifying open source rules

      The Defense Information Systems Agency has updated the Application Security & Development Security Technical Implementation Guide, clarifying a commonly-misunderstood Defense Department policy that many saw as a hurdle to open source software use at DoD.

  • Licensing

    • The economic incentive to violate the GPL

      My post yesterday on how Google gains financial benefit from vendor GPL violations contained an assertion that some people have questioned – namely, “unscrupulous hardware vendors save money by ignoring their GPL obligations”. And, to be fair, as written it’s true but not entirely convincing. So instead, let’s consider “unscrupulous hardware vendors have economic incentives to ignore their GPL obligations”.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • C development on Linux – Pointers and Arrays – VI.

      We have come to a crucial point in our series of articles regarding C development. It’s also, not coincidentally, that part of C that gives lots of headaches to beginners. This is where we come in, and this article’s purpose (one of them, anyway), is to debunk the myths about pointers and about C as a language hard/impossible to learn and read. Nonetheless, we recommend increased attention and a wee bit of patience and you’ll see that pointers are not as mind-boggling as the legends say.

    • 10 programming languages that could shake up IT

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open document standards mandatory in Hungary government

      Hungary’s public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary’s government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.

Leftovers

  • Boneheaded Stunts

    Don Reisinger has a list of M$’s mistakes in 2011:

    1. Where were the tablets?
    2. Let Google cement its lead online
    3. Failing to acquire a handset maker
    4. Let Android get away
    5. An odd Nokia partnership
    6. Failing to wrap up the living room
    7. Retaining Steve Ballmer as CEO
    8. Let Google cement its lead online
    9. Overpaid for Skype
    10. Tipped its Windows 8 hand too early
    11. Failing to make the mobile space about security

  • M$ and One of its Partners are at War

    This is great fun for me. One of the last barriers to the desktop space for GNU/Linux is the retail shelf space GNU/Linux gets. Now, M$ is actually suing one of its partners, Comet, a retailer of electronics. I don’t have details but according to Ars Technica, Comet sold recovery CDs to customers against M$’s wishes.

  • The Commodore 64 is 30 this year

    I used to have a paperweight sitting on my desk that read something like “Robert H. Lane, appointed President of Commodore Computers….” It was the sort of thing that they gave to executives. A brass plaque of their appointment as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the Globe and Mail.

  • IBM Buys Cloud-Based Software Testing Platform Green Hat

    In its first acquisition of 2012, IBM has announced the purchase of cloud-based software testing platform Green Hat. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • MF Global sold assets to Goldman before collapse: sources

      (Reuters) – MF Global unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of securities to Goldman Sachs in the days leading up to its collapse, according to two former MF Global employees with direct knowledge of the transactions. But it did not immediately receive payment from its clearing firm and lender, JPMorgan Chase & Co , one of the sources said.

      The sale of securities to Goldman occurred on October 27, just days before MF Global Holdings Ltd filed for bankruptcy on October 31, the ex-employees said. One of the employees said the transaction was cleared with JPMorgan Chase.

  • Civil Rights

]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/05/hadoop-1-0/feed/ 0 Updates on Novell and Other FOSS Taxers http://techrights.org/2011/12/18/foss-taxers/ http://techrights.org/2011/12/18/foss-taxers/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:32:59 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=56484 Summary: Bits of news about Microsoft helpers who put a patent tax on Free software

THE state of Novell continues to be tracked and will be caught up with later this month.

One of Novell’s products, Vibe/Pulse, was declared dead earlier this year, but Novell keeps uploading videos about it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It is probably not a marketing spillover because there are signs that Novell refuses to let this project go. Mixed messages for sure.

Disdain of Novell is a defence of the interests of FOSS because Novell forms a bridge for Microsoft to charge a tax/toll on FOSS. There is this new product coming from another company that does this. It is called Tuxera and it helps Microsoft tax file systems in Linux (and Android). We sometimes aptly call it “taxera”.

There is not much news from Novell, but those who try to keep abreast of things scrape some material that we will cover later this month. Novell won’t be named for much longer because it was bought. Then there is the story of Linspire/Xandros and Turbolinux, whose staff we find in new places:

Prior to Lyris, Luis oversaw global business development and sales at Turbolinux, where he led the launch of international subsidiaries in Argentina, Australia, Germany and the UK. Rivera also led international sales at IMSI, a publicly traded software publishing company, and business development at @Road, a mobile resource management solution provider.

In other news that we shall cover more thoroughly later this month, OpenSUSE (Attachmate) plans to have presence at FOSDEM despite the fact that SUSE is a bit of a pariah. To quote:

FOSDEM is the biggest event organized by and for the Free and Open Source (FOSS) community. Its goal is to provide developers a place to meet, come together and share and discuss ideas. The event happens 4-5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium. And there will again be a cross-distribution mini conference at FOSDEM this year. By organizing a mini conference where all distributions participate in we foster collaboration and cross pollination. You are hereby invited to hold a session.

This is actually quite harmless because it does not involve any of Microsoft’s trojan horses that Novell/SUSE is used for (e.g. Mono, Microsoft kernel drivers, OOXML). Let us know of any Novell news we might have missed (in comments/IRC). █

]]> http://techrights.org/2011/12/18/foss-taxers/feed/ 0 Links 15/11/2011: Linux still Rules HPC http://techrights.org/2011/11/15/ruling-hpc/ http://techrights.org/2011/11/15/ruling-hpc/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:17:58 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=55700

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • Where Linux crushes Windows like a bug: Supercomputers

      The faster a computer goes, the more likely is to have Linux at its heart. The most recent Top500 list of supercomputers shows that, if anything, Linux is becoming even more popular at computing’s high end.

      In the latest Top500 Supercomputer list, you’ll find when you dig into the supercomputer statistics that Linux runs 457 of the world’s fastest computers. That’s 91.4%. Linux is followed by Unix, with 30 or 6%; mixed operating systems with 11 supercomputers, 2.2%. In the back of the line, you’ll find OpenSolaris and BSD with 1 computer and–oh me, oh my–Windows also with just 1 supercomputer to its credit. That’s a drop from 4 in the last supercomputer round up in June.

    • NetGear Expands Entry-Level Network Attached Storage

      Storage boxes that deliver content sit at the very heart of the cloud. When it comes to building out your own personal or small business cloud, having enough storage performance is a critical component. That’s where networking vendor NetGear aims to help, with a new generation of its home and small business network attached storage (NAS) devices.

  • Kernel Space

    • The Linux Foundation Announces Program for Automotive Linux Summit

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its program for the first-ever Automotive Linux Summit taking place November 28, 2011 in Yokohama, Japan.

      The Automotive Linux Summit will bring together the brightest minds from the automotive industry, the Linux developer community and the mobility ecosystem. As the premier vendor-neutral business and technical conference focused on Linux and automotive technologies, attendees can expect to learn about how to use Linux and open source software in automotive applications, ranging from in-vehicle on-board systems to cloud solutions for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

    • Evolution of kernel size

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • New Desktop Interface Flops

        If you follow my work, you won’t be surprised to know that I really dislike Windows 8’s proposed new interface, Metro. That’s not because I hate everything from Microsoft. It’s because I hate anything that’s a bad design, and it’s not just Microsoft that’s guilty of that. So are open-source groups such as GNOME.

        Unlike my colleague Ken Hess who hates just about all the newest interfaces, I do like some of the new ones… in their place.

  • Distributions

    • ArchBang 2011 Review

      Here is another light, fast, and fun distribution for everyone to try, ArchBang leaves a long-lasting impression. ArchBang delivers a useful Live CD, the OpenBox window manager, and all the basic applications you might need, all on top of the powerful and robust Arch Linux core. OpenBox will allow users to experiment with a highly customizable interface that remains relatively simple. And of course everyone will be impressed by the blazing speed this distribution will bring to your system. Get the most out of your system with this great operating system, ArchBang is another excellent choice for laptops and desktops alike.

    • Five new distros you should not miss

      As one becomes familiar with the rich wealth of distros available, the developer’s and the community’s user experience too grows helping it the drive the resourceful open source platform to achieve greater heights.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia wiki finally online

        We wanted to replace that by some really nice wiki since then but there always was something with a higher priority, so it had to wait.

        Now, a few weeks ago, we already had a working MediaWiki instance and the teams were working under quite some pressure to import all the contents that has grown over the months in the temporary wiki, cleaning it up and giving it some structure while doing that.

    • Gentoo Family

      • The Linux Setup – Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon Linux

        Fabio Erculiani is the man behind Sabayon Linux, a fantastic, rolling distribution based upon Gentoo (but much easier to manage). My thoughts on Sabayon are here. Fabio does a lot of different things on Sabayon, from the desktop to the server level. You have to appreciate a person that eats his own cooking.

      • Sabayon Linux developers split the Portage sabayon overlay into two new overlays

        If you are a Gentoo Linux user who added the sabayon overlay, or if you are a Sabayon Linux user who already uses Portage, note that the developers of Sabayon Linux have just split the overlay into two overlays. One of the overlays (sabayon-distro) contains ebuilds that are specific to the Sabayon Linux distribution and unlikely to be of interest to users of other distributions that use the Portage package manager. The other overlay (sabayon) contains ebuilds that could be of interest to Portage users of other distributions.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Is Ubuntu’s Dominance on Personal Desktops Slipping?

            For at least five years, Ubuntu has been the pre-eminent Linux distribution for desktop users. None of the other polished distros, such as Fedora or Debian, came close to capturing Canonical’s market share or mind share in the open source world. But writing on the wall is beginning to suggest that the Age of Ubuntu could be coming to an end, at least on the desktop. Here’s why.

            Lest I come off as too sensationalist, let me point out that neither Ubuntu nor Canonical is going to disappear anytime soon. Even if Ubuntu ceases to be the most popular Linux for personal desktops, we can expect it to remain important as a second or third choice for years to come.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Will Not Support Old CPUs
          • Ubuntu’s Tablet Ambition: Doomed to Fail

            For several years now, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have worked to make their Linux releases available as a pre-installed option whenever possible. Some of the most famous examples are the Linspire and Xandros offerings that were once found at Sears and Walmart.

            A few years after these flopped, Dell introduced PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu. However, each of these pre-installed efforts met with an untimely demise. The PC sellers blamed the lack of demand, while others such as myself blamed the worst PC marketing attempts in history.

            The pre-installed Linux PC failure in big box stores coincides with the inability to clearly identity the target of who would want the Linux PC. I feel confident in saying this, because other vendors that sell Linux PCs exclusively have done very well for themselves. Even when targeting non-Linux enthusiasts, the target message was always clearly spelled out.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 241
          • Will 12.04 changes bring Ubuntu back to prominence?
          • What Changes Will Ubuntu 12.04 Bring?
          • HealthCheck Ubuntu – The search for unity

            Ubuntu has over 20 million users around the world and is by far the most popular Linux distribution on the planet, but for the first time since the release of Warty Warthog in October 2004, an Ubuntu release is not being greeted with universal acclaim and there are mutterings of discord among the Ubuntu community.

          • The best Ubuntu backup tools

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Download Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate

              Right after our first look aticle of Linux Mint 12, Clement Lefebvre proudly announced on his blog that the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 operating system is available for download and testing.

            • Pinguy OS 11.10 (Final, Yet Beta) Released

              Pinguy OS 11.10 has been released today and comes with GNOME Shell (on top of GNOME 3.2.1) as default. Even though this is most probably the final version, it’s called “beta”…

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Piracy bill could waylay FLOSS projects

    If you’re at all tuned into the Internet, then it’s very likely that you have heard about two bills currently making their way through the two houses of the US Congress that several organizations have said will “break the Internet.”

    The bills, PROTECT IP (S. 968) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (HR. 3261), are two pieces of legislation with essentially the same theme: give private copyright holders more tools to pull down pirated copy from the Internet. That sounds good on paper, but delving down into the details of each bill reveals some potentially serious problems for free and open source software (FLOSS) developers.

    Each bill has the same basic approach: if a copyright holder finds content on a website that they believe infringes on their copyright, then they can go to any vendor who helps provide revenue to that site and request that the vendor cease working with the site. For instance, the request could go to any ad providers for the allegedly infringing site, and under the new law the ad provider would have five days to cut their ads from the site. Or, if the site uses credit cards or an online payment system like PayPal, the copyright holder can also get those organizations to stop supporting the website.

  • Making an open source software can be more profitable in the long term

    Imagine what would happen if Coca Cola shared its secret formula, or a popular restaurant shared its secret sauce recipe. When source codes of software are shared beyond the secret society of their proprietors, a whole new world with unimaginable technical possibilities is opened. Contrary to popular belief that the proprietors of the secret sauce would lose their pie, they actually get a slice of a much, much larger pie, which makes better business sense.

    After all, many of today’s tech rock stars like Google and Facebook follow the open source paradigm. These firms had implemented their ideas using open source technologies when they had started. And today, they allow free distribution of software developed by them for their internal use. Such open-sourcing enables newer startups to take advantage, yet again.

  • Introducing the ColorHug open source colorimeter

    For the past 3 weeks I’ve been working long nights on an open source colorimeter called the ColorHug. This is hardware that measures the colors shown on the screen and creates a color profile. Existing hardware is proprietary and 100% closed, and my hardware is open source. It has a GPL bootloader, GPL firmware image and GPL hardware schematics and PCBs. It’s faster than the proprietary hardware, and more importantly a lot cheaper.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 10, What’s New?

        After having some initial troubles getting my add-ons to work under Firefox 10 Aurora I had time to look at the changes and new features of this release. Firefox 10 will be the next but one stable release of the web browser which means that stable channel users will have to wait about 12 weeks before they can upgrade their browser to this version.

      • Firefox 10: Can Mozilla Afford To Miss Silent Updates?

        Mozilla released the downloads of Firefox 9 Beta, which will be released just before Christmas as final, as well as Firefox 10 Aurora, the developer version of Firefox. But even with six new versions within one year, Mozilla may not have accomplished what the rapid release process promised: Most notably, Mozilla released substantial memory improvements this year, but it will miss some features it so desperately needs to compete with Chrome.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice.org: Five Months of Incubation at ASF

      At Apache, they have 75 developers and they are still reviewing the code to check licensing to ASL.

      “Before we can produce an Apache release, we must complete the code clearance step, ensuring that the license headers include License and Notification files for all artifacts in the build be done to the satisfaction of the PPMC and the Incubator PMC which governs the Apache OpenOffice podling. This will clear the way forward to develop a realistic target date for issuing our first ‘Apache OpenOffice.org’ release “

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Swedish activist receives Nordic Free Software Award 2011

      Erik Josefsson is the winner of the Nordic Free Software Award 2011. With the award, the Swedish Foundation for Free Culture and Free Software (FFKP) honours Josefsson for his achievements as a campaigner for freedom in the information society.

      “We are proud to honour Erik for the tremendously important work he has done over the past ten years”, says FFKP Executive Director Jonas Öberg. “Erik has an exceptional ability to understand and explain the link between policy and technology. We are hugely grateful for his work. He is an inspiration to all of us.”

  • Project Releases

    • QEMU 1.0 Is Coming Quite Soon

      Version 1.0 of QEMU will be released next month in time for the holidays with several interesting advancements. QEMU is the popular open-source machine emulator and virtualizer that also plays a role in the Linux KVM virtualization stack.

      QEMU 1.0 is expected to be tagged on the first of December. New features to QEMU 1.0 will be a new memory API, support for the Tensilica Xtensa, SCSI improvements, and a Tiny Code Interpreter (TCI).

  • Licensing

    • Copyright in Open Source Software – Understanding the Boundaries

      Copyright ownership tends not to be an issue in closed-source, software development. In that model an individual or business owns – or in-licenses – the copyright in all of the code used in the software application, licenses it to end-users under a binary-only license, and relies on a combination of copyright and trade secret law to enforce contractual rights in the code. By contrast, when software is developed in an open source model, copyright issues abound, and many of these copyright issues are not well understood by software developers. This lack of understanding can undermine the intent of the developers and can potentially lead to unattractive outcomes. As early as the launch of conceptual design in open source software, issues can arise as to ownership of the work and its progeny. When a wide range of hands can touch the open source code, ownership and rights in the code can become blurred. Moreover, not all code contributions to an open source project will be protected by copyright. This paper seeks to explore the application of U.S. copyright law to software, and particularly software that is developed and licensed under an open source model. We address the boundaries of copyright protection and ownership, the importance of intent, timing and creative expression in determining these boundaries, and provide guidance to those looking to launch open source projects.

    • German courts say embedded open source firmware open to modification

      A major challenge to the principles of free software was thrown out of a German district court last week.

      German DSL router vendor AVM had attempted to stop Cybits, which produces children’s web filtering software, from modifying any part of the firmware used in its routers, including a key piece of Linux-based free software.

  • Programming

    • Five years of open-source Java: Freedom isn’t (quite) free

      Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it?

      Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so – although he didn’t seem entirely open to the idea in the early days.

Leftovers

  • Google flings Bing into search engine bin

    According to ComScore, Bing is struggling to add users – despite Microsoft’s expensive efforts to make the search engine a serious contender against the Chocolate Factory.

  • Security

    • Search Engines Can Expose Open Source Holes

      Tools such as Google Code Search can provide hackers with a wealth of information hidden in open source code, writes Eric Doyle

      The downside of open source is its very openness. Hackers are using Open Source Intelligence (OSint) to find personal information and even passwords and usernames to plan their exploits.

      Organisations like Anonymous and LulzSec have been using Google Code Search – a public beta in which Google let users search for open source code on the Internet – according to Stach & Lui, a penetration testing firm. In Code Search, they can unearth information to assist them in their exploits, for instance finding passwords for cloud services which have been embedded in code, or configuration data for virtual private networks, or just vulnerabilities that lay the system open to other hacking ploys, such as SQL injection.

  • Finance

  • Spam

    • South Korea proposes restricting all e-mail sending to official e-mail servers

      According to the BBC, South Korea’s Internet and Security Agency is asking all ISPs to block all e-mail sent from anything but “official” e-mail servers. The idea is to block spam, but will it really accomplish this goal?

      It’s not like this is a new idea. The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance proposed it as a best e-mail practice for ISPs in 2004. It’s a simple idea. If an ISP blocks the default Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) port, Port 25, from sending e-mail messages, users will be forced to use their ISP’s mail servers. This, in turn, the theory, goes will magically stop spam.

  • Civil Rights

  • Copyrights

    • Keystone XL and the Future of Bill C-11

      In 2005, the then-Liberal government introduced Bill C-60, the first attempt at digital copyright reform in Canada. The bill included digital lock provisions that linked circumvention to copyright infringement (as supported today by dozens of Canadian organizations) and did not create a ban on the tools that can be used to circumvent. The approach was consistent with the WIPO Internet treaties, but left the U.S. very unhappy.

]]> http://techrights.org/2011/11/15/ruling-hpc/feed/ 0 Links 5/11/2011: LinuxCon Europe Photos, Plasma Workspaces 4.8 http://techrights.org/2011/11/05/plasma-workspaces-4-8/ http://techrights.org/2011/11/05/plasma-workspaces-4-8/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:21:55 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=55439

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • The Future is Now

      So, again, the premise is wrong, that GNU/Linux is at the 1% level. Reality is very different in other parts of the world. GNU/Linux is being promoted/advertised/pushed/sold. Check out Dell’s site in China. Dell has no problem selling GNU/Linux there. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is just unaware of that…

  • Server

    • Calxeda EnergyCore ARMs the Server Market

      To date, ARM-based microprocessors have been used mostly in consumer electronics. Thanks to a new push from ARM vendor Calxeda, ARM will soon find a home in data center servers, too.

    • Infoblox Accelerates DNS

      “ISP infrastructure is increasingly being stressed by the advent of smartphones, driving bandwidth requirements higher while also stressing the DNS infrastructure, where even a single smartphone wake-up requires 36 DNS lookups,” Kevin Dickson, vice president of product management at Infoblox told InternetNews.com.

      Inside the Infoblox 4010 is a an Intel Xeon 5650 running at 2.66 GHz with 6 Cores and 4 x 300 GB hard drives and 24 GB of DDR3 RAM. The base operating system is the Infoblox NIOS (network infrastructure operating system) which is built on top off a Linux kernel. For the DNS features, the Infoblox system is based on the open source BIND DNS server, including what Dickson referred to as, “extensive enhancements to add management functionality.”

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Plasma Workspaces 4.8

        Having returned from two weeks away in Morocco, things have been hectic and Busy-with-a-capital-B. I’ve been working on some exciting new possibilities for Plasma Active which are not quite at the point that I can speak openly about them, but it’s been taking a fair amount of my time and energy .. and I think it will pay off next year.

      • Nokia to let go Qt ownership

        Nokia would abnegate the ownership of Qt, a cross-platform C++ application framework, shortly. Nokia would comply byopen-governance and would remain as ‘Maintainers of Qt’, said Kalle Karkas, head of Operator Marketing, Nokia, Finland at the third edition of the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 held in Bangalore today. Nokia would continue to invest in Qt and it has been recruiting people in this arena. He added that Nokia is not porting Qt to other platform but the company intends to focus on the developers community.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Shell Now Works With Software Rendering!

        There’s some great news today: it’s now possible to run the GNOME Shell with Mutter but not having to rely upon any GPU hardware driver! Software rendering is now working with GNOME Shell rather than any fall-back thanks to improvements with Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe.

        Adam Jackson of Red Hat has announced to the world that it’s now possible for everyone to use GNOME Shell, regardless of whether you have a proper 3D hardware driver loaded. Adam says that as of tomorrow, LLVMpipe will no longer be treated as an unsupported driver for Fedora’s Rawhide, which is what will eventually be Fedora 17.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • GParted Live CD 0.10.0-3 Can Detect exFAT

        Clonezilla Live CD maker, Steven Shiau, proudly announced on November 2nd a new stable version of his GParted Live CD operating system for partitioning tasks.

        Being based on the latest build (11-02-2011) of Debian Sid, the new GParted Live CD 0.10.0-3 distribution brings the amazing and improved GParted 0.10.0 application, and a handful of improvements.

      • GParted Live update supports Btrfs resizing

        Version 0.10.0-3 of GParted Live, a small bootable Linux distribution that contains the GParted utility, has been released. GParted, which stands for Gnome PARTition EDitor, is a partition editor application that can be used to create, organise and delete disk partitions via a graphical user interface (GUI). Supported file systems include Btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT16 and FAT32, HFS and HFS+, NTFS and others.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Sales Team and Channel Partners: Getting Cozier?

        Red Hat wrapped up a major channel partner conference last week. But the channel chatter continues within the Linux and open source specialist. Indeed, Red Hat is mulling potential ways to make sure the company’s internal sales team works even more closely with channel partners, according to North America Channel Chief Roger Egan. Here’s the update, and a look at how Red Hat plans to accelerate Linux, virtualization, Jboss middleware, cloud and storage sales through the channel.

        First, the sales chatter. Red Hat is exploring ways to ensure the company’s internal sales team has a “neutral” approach to revenue generation — potentially getting rewarded the same fee whether a deal is sold direct or indirect. As that internal chatter continues, Red Hat is making quantifiable progress with its partner program. The company expects to become the world’s first $1 billion open source company this fiscal year. Generally speaking, roughly 50 to 60 percent of Red Hat’s revenues come from partners. And more than 400 people — including 300 channel partners — attended a Red Hat partner conference in Florida last week.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Keynote: The Biggest Enemy Is Yourself

          While the Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening right now in the United States, over in India there is FUDCon, the Fedora conference.

          Kicking off today and running through the start of next week (6 November) is FUDCon India 2011. This conference for users and developers of Fedora is happening in Pune, India. Details on this year’s Fedora India conference can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki.

        • Fedora 16 is gold, but more importantly…

          EDIT: A previous version of this post listed the release as 2011-11-10, it’s actually 2011-11-08, my error! We did not delay two days or anything.

        • Fedora 16 Final Release Declared GOLD!
        • F17 heads up: gnome-shell for everyone!
        • GNOME Shell To Work Without 3D Acceleration In Fedora 17

          That means GNOME Shell will be available for everyone and GNOME Fallback will no longer be required, but this raises a question: will GNOME Fallback still be available (since GNOME Shell will work without 3D acceleration, GNOME Fallback – which exists because until now GNOME Shell didn’t run without 3D acceleration -, doesn’t have a purpose anymore)?

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Hacking the Unity Shell – An Alternative Apps Lens

            (fret not, this is not only a wall of text, there’s a juicy screencast at the end if you make it all the way)

            Me being the maintainer of the applications lens in Unity you might wonder why I am now blogging about an alternative apps lens – let alone why I actually wrote the alternative myself! :-)

          • Put me on a highway and show me a sign

            My favorite quote in the whole thing, and there are many, comes from Ubuntu SABDFL* Mark Shuttleworth: “I fully accept that Unity may not be for you. Then don’t use it. On Ubuntu you can choose Unity, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and many others.”

            And there you are, folks — certainly a unique concept of “community” in three words: My way or highway. Go ahead and use one of the other ‘buntus if you so desire, since we’re not changing the flagship for anyone or anything.

          • Ubuntu Community mourns the loss of André Gondim
          • Ubuntu 11.10 Review

            Once upon a time, I used to be a Gentoo user and made it a hobby to tweak my computer’s operating system to be as minimalist and high performance as possible. It was great fun and I learned a lot about what was going on with my computer. I knew what each file on my system did because I had directly or indirectly chosen for it to be there. At one point I had five Gentoo machines compiling away.

          • Finally! Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Will Recommend 64-bit

            There’s some good news coming out of the last day of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS developer summit. During a session that’s going on right now, it was decided that the 64-bit version of Ubuntu (beginning with 12.04 Precise) will finally be the recommended version over the 32-bit Ubuntu.

            While Linux was the first operating system to have strong x86_64/AMD64 support, there’s been Ubuntu 64-bit images from the start, and most hardware for several years has supported 64-bit software, Canonical / Ubuntu have always recommended the 32-bit version of Ubuntu over 64-bit (in terms of when going to the download area of Ubuntu.com, etc). With Ubuntu 12.04 next April, this will finally change so that U

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 12 Preview

              In Linux Mint 11 we made the decision to keep Gnome 2.32. The traditional Gnome desktop, although it’s not actively developed by the Gnome development team anymore, is still by far the most popular desktop within the Linux community. As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Rugged in-vehicle panel PC bristles with wireless options
    • Industrial Embedded Computer supports Linux OS, dual CAN.

      Powered by 400 MHz ARM9 CPU, Matrix-522 comes with built-in 64 MB SDRAM, 128 MB NAND Flash, and 2 MB Data Flash for optimal performance in automotive, factory automation, and industrial control system applications. I/O includes 2 LANs, 2 RS-232/422/485 serial ports, 2 USB hosts, and 21 GPIO. Also, dual isolated CAN (Control Area Network) bus 2.0-compliant ports support CANSocket and CANOpen APIs. Fail-proof capabilities for system backup and recovery are also included.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android/Linux Smart Phones Blow Past the Competition

          That’s what we should be seeing in the market for PCs generally but competition is stifled by lock-in of OEMs, retailers and businesses. It’s about time that changed. In Q2, the world shipped 91 million notebook/desktop PCs. Change will come but it’s too slow for me. While FLOSS is taking over the mobile space, it will penetrate the monopoly more slowly, one purchase or installation at a time. In Q2 50 million PCs shipped with “7″.

        • How Andy Rubin kept Android open-source at its heart

          A year ago at Google HQ in Mountain View, Andy Rubin built a mechanical robot arm. “I put a hammer in its hand and connected it to a big Chinese gong. Whenever Android sells 10,000 units, the gong sounds and you can hear it through the whole building. When I designed it, it sounded three times a day: now it does it every three minutes. I really have to reprogram it…”

          Rubin is Google’s head of mobile and the creator of the Android operating system. He’s also a DIY robotics fanatic, in case you hadn’t guessed. At home, he has several remote-controlled helicopters, a retina-scanning entry system (“a great way of managing relations with ex-girlfriends — no problem giving keys back, just an update to the database”), a laser-controlled Segway, and a home cinema where the lights dim when the titles run — all designed and built by him. So naturally, he built another robot to celebrate the success of his most famous creation, Android.

          It’s an unusual way to boast, but Rubin is allowed some bombast. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this spring, the most important trade show worldwide for tablets and smartphones, 90 per cent of the devices unveiled ran Android. In August this year, tech analysis firm Canalys reported that 48 per cent of all smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2011 were Android devices. The nearest competitor was Apple, on 19 per cent. Android overtook Apple’s iOS in 2010 — according to Google, 500,000 Android devices are currently activated every day.

        • Hacking the Google TV Box Without Rooting It, Part 2

      • Ballnux

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire

        Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon’s recently announced “Kindle Fire.” B&N’s “Nook Tablet” is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon’s tablet, among other differences.

Free Software/Open Source

  • M$ Contributes to Samba

    Chuckle. You know you’re winning when the enemy has to keep you alive… M$’s “partners” using FLOSS prevents M$ from using all its anti-competitive tactics.

  • Member Spotlight: KeyPoint CTO Explains Bridge Between Text Input and Open Source

    Motaparti: At KeyPoint Technologies, we are a team that is passionate about combining linguistics and computing to deliver new experiences for consumers. Our initial focus lies in improving the current text input experiences across all types of connected devices like smart phones, feature phones, tablets, connected TVs and IVI systems. We are a trusted partner for OEMs, platform providers and developers looking to innovate and deliver an enhanced user experience in this area. We are privately owned, with our headquarters in Scotland and offices in India and the US.

  • The end of (Apache) Harmony

    Apache Harmony, the project to produce an open source cleanroom implementation of Java, has been now been dispatched to the Apache Attic where projects are placed when they are discontinued. A vote was taken within the project management committee (PMC), which saw a 20 to 2 majority send the project’s codebase into the loft for storage. The code will reside in the Attic where other developers may continue to view and use it.

  • The Internet of Things comes to Eclipse

    According to a study by Ericsson, by 2020 the world will contain some 50 billion network-enabled devices. Of these, many will be temporary or with low network bandwidth, or restricted in some other manner. RFID tags are a one such example of a restricted device.

  • Eurotech and IBM Contribute Software to Connect Next Generation of Wireless and Mobile Devices

  • Events

    • Registration for SCALE 10X opens

      LOS ANGELES – The SCALE 10X team announces that registration has opened for the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America To register for SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org and click on the Registration tab. Admission for SCALE 10X ranges from $10 for an Expo Only Ticket to $60 for a Full Access Pass. The Linux Beginner’s Training Class, a separate admission, is $25.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Forward button to become optional in Firefox
      • Firefox 8 Release Candidate Published for Download

        Mozilla has elevated the most recent Firefox 8 Beta to release candidate status.

      • A walk down Firefox memory lane

        The Principal Designer of Firefox, Alex Faaborg, the man behind almost every icon, button, and visual flourish in Firefox 3, 4, and beyond, is leaving Mozilla. Before departing, though, he has treated us to a list of his proudest UX achievements — including the Awesome Bar and the new Firefox logo — and also his department’s weirdest and most wonderful failures. Have you ever heard of the fluffy pie menu, or the stealth theme for private browsing? I thought not.

      • Knight-Mozilla Announces 2011 News Technology Fellows

        This week I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the “thinking out loud” stops, and the “making it happen” begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows.

      • Call for Ireland to take a lead in the Mozilla and open source communities

        Ireland is well placed to become a leader in the Mozilla and open source communities, according to the inaugural meet up of a Mozilla Ireland group in Dublin’s Odeon on Wednesday.

  • SaaS

    • In the Open Source Cloud Race, Support Will Differentiate the Players

      Open source cloud computing solutions are proliferating, as businesses and organizations demand flexible solutions for deploying public and private cloud applications. Among these solutions, OpenStack remains one of the highest profile examples, with vendors ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Dell to Citrix supporting it. Increasingly, OpenStack will face off with Eucalyptus Systems, which we’ve covered since its inception here at OStatic. In a piece for InfoWorld, Savio Rodrigues makes some good points about why Eucalyptus Systems may win organizations over and outpace OpenStack in the long run.

    • OpenNebula profile : Open source Government Cloud Computing
    • Why OpenStack will falter

      After reading a recent interview with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, I’m beginning to reconsider my views on the contest between Eucalyptus and OpenStack becoming the dominant open source cloud platform.

      The vendor attention around OpenStack of late has been nothing short of amazing. Once a project controlled by Rackspace, vendors such as Dell, Citrix Systms, and Hewlett-Packard have joined the OpenStack open source community. Rackspace has given control of the project to the OpenStack foundation, apparently at the behest of large vendors contributing to the project. However, as Mickos states, OpenStack is still a work in progress and not production-ready — yet.

    • Cloudera founder’s new project shows Hadoop’s future

      Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice4Kids (OOo4Kids) – What has changed?

      I liked OOo4Kids then and I like it now. You get small, incremental improvements, which is a good thing. But like I wrote earlier, the journey is still long. There’s huge potential here, and it must be tapped. This require larger, bigger, more drastic, and faster changes to make the software the ultimate educational weapon.

      I would recommend completely overhauling the interface in non-Writer utilities and maybe even ditching them altogether, especially if children are not likely to use them. Then, focus most of the effort on making the program as safe and smart to use, with intelligent hints toward efficiency, separation of content and automated tasks.

      Version 1.2 is better than its half-number sibling, but there’s more to be done. I’m pleased overall and still quite optimistic, so I shall surely follow its progress into puberty. With some luck and lots of hard work, this could be the best office suite yet, for all the unintended reasons.

      Thanks to Alexandros for the recommendation!

    • VMware out, Twitter in at Java executive committee election

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Blog » jQuery 1.7 Released

      Thanks to your help in testing and reporting bugs during the beta period, we believe we have a solid, stable release. If you do find problems, file a bug and be sure to choose jQuery 1.7 in the version selection. Also be sure to provide a jsFiddle test case so we can quickly analyze the problem.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Four ways open source principles can improve your business

      More than ever, companies are embracing the principles of open source to make major improvements, both internally and externally. Openness, transparency, democratization, and collaboration can be used to make your business a better place to work and create a better culture.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Hardware Journal – First Edition

        Although I Programmer is first and foremost a programming magazine, we can’t ignore the hardware. Open source software has been a well known idea, and something of a success, for decades, open source hardware is relatively new. You can say that open source hardware was born out the of the “maker” movement, but for such an obvious idea it has been slow to take off. The one big notable exception being the Arduino.

        In an effort to popularize the open hardware movement we now have the Open Hardware Journal starting with November 1, 2011 Issue 1. As it says on the cover page you are free to read it, copy it and redistribute it – as long as you don’t charge a fee, of course..

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • The Microsoft way… or the Highway

    I finally have to bring this up, as it’s been bothering me for years. At one location, I’m forced to use Microsoft Outlook 2010 for email, because it is all that is supported. Being in IT, I can adjust to various programs, even ones I don’t like. Except that there’s one thing with Outlook 2010 that I cannot stand. When replying to an HTML message, I cannot insert line breaks within the reply text from other users, that is indented to show previous correspondence, while keeping the original text marked so that it is together. In Outlook 2003 I could do this by right-clicking and decreasing the indent as many times as needed which would eventually put in a true line break where I could insert my comments within the reply text from other users. In Outlook 2010, this option is mysteriously gone. I can press the “Decrease Indent” button a million times and the cursor just sits there. Ah, this must be a “new feature” of Outlook 2010. Unfortunately, it is extremely counterproductive. When replying to somebody’s message, I find it very convenient to insert my reply lines within their original message text. This functionality has been around since the early days of email in every email program I’ve used. This way, when the recipient sees my reply, they can see exactly what my reply comments relate to, and their original text is grouped together. This also makes back and forth correspondence much more visible and easier to follow when both the sender and recipient do this. I am not a big fan of including all of my message text in one area, either in the very top or bottom of the message, because it is more work for the me and the recipient to try and figure out what each section of it applies to. It gets messier with the more back and forth correspondences, because there’s reply text above and below the original text from multiple sends back and forth.

  • Science

    • The Emergence of Cognitive Computing

      Exascale computing is also expected to advance by three orders of magnitude over the next decade or so. Having broken the petascale barrier a few years ago, the supercomputing community has its sights set on exascale systems. There are many challenges involved in developing such systems, foremost among them being power consumption.

      Today’s most powerful supercomputers consume roughly between 1 and 3 megawatts per petaflop. It is generally agreed that an exascale-class system must consume no more than 10-20 megawatts, otherwise you would need a whole power plant alongside each such system, and their operating costs would be prohibitively expensive. Thus, the 1000-fold increase in performance from petascale to exascale must be achieved with no more than a 10-fold increase in overall power consumption. This means that just about all components of the system, – including its processor, memory, communications and software, – must be redesigned to achieve the required two order of magnitude improvements in power consumption.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Lessons from the Original Occupation: Gina Ray, Wisconsin State Capitol Police

      As Occupy Wall Street protesters and police face off in large cities and small towns across America, it is worth revisiting the positive policing relationship that was developed between protesters and law enforcement during the “original occupation” of the Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011.

      On February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, require 100% voter participation in union recertification and end the state’s practice of withholding and reimbursing union dues. The bill was perceived as a death blow to public employee unions and prompted massive, sustained and peaceful protests inside and outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in the winter of 2011.

    • Remember, Remember the 5th of November! Bank Transfer Day

      November 5th is Bank Transfer Day, a hopping Facebook campaign urging Americans to move their money out of big national banks and into local banks or credit unions.

    • Jean Quan angers Occupy camp’s supporters, rivals

      Hundreds of jobs are being lost, police are being diverted from violent parts of town, some businesses are closing, and others are choosing not to locate in downtown Oakland at all, she said at Thursday’s special City Council meeting.

      Yet at the same meeting, three of Quan’s staunchest supporters urged the council to support the Occupy Oakland encampment. One of them, Don Link, told The Chronicle that they spoke at the meeting on behalf of a group that emerged from Quan’s mayoral campaign and is led by Quan’s husband, Floyd Huen.

  • Privacy

    • Apple demands importer’s customer data

      In its quest to make sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 never sees the light of day in Australia, Apple has levelled a legal threat against an Australian tablet importer in an attempt to destroy the devices and obtain the names of those who have purchased one. Unfortunately for Apple, the tablet importer in question has no intention of playing ball.

      Gadget importer Dmavo had been capitalising on the injunction slapped on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in October until last week, when Apple’s high-powered legal team at Freehills hand-delivered a 21-page cease and desist order designed to choke off the supply of the Samsung tablet to Australia.

      The document (PDF) ordered Dmavo to return an undertaking to Freehills, stating first and foremost that the importer would stop selling, importing and disposing of all variations of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple and its lawyers also sought to obtain all of Dmavo’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 units for immediate destruction, as well as the names, addresses and other details of anyone who bought one of the devices from Dmavo. Apple also wanted to find out from which company Dmavo was importing the devices.

    • AP Exclusive: CIA tracks revolt by Tweet, Facebook

      In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

      The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

    • CIA Following Twitter And Facebook To Analyze Public Opinion, Predict Major Events

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Consultation: LQDN Denounces Failed Wait-and-See Approach

      Paris, 2nd of November 2011 — La Quadrature du Net publishes today its response1 to the BEREC consultation2 on “transparency and Net Neutrality”. BEREC and the European Commission must move past the failed “wait-and-see” approach championed by Commissioner Neelie Kroes by adopting EU-wide Net neutrality regulation. Citizens can help protect the Internet by responding to the consultation3 and refusing “transparency” as a solution to Net Neutrality violations.

  • DRM

    • The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music

      There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn’t work is to put it in terms he understands: “What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?” It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it’s a historical one. Rhapsody just had the next in a line of DRM music services to go–this week the company told its users than anyone with RAX files has unil November 7 to back them up in another format or lose them the next time they upgrade their systems.

  • ACTA

    • Over 1 Million Views for “NO to ACTA!” Video! Now, take Action!

      “NO to ACTA!”, the video published by La Quadrature du Net last week, has been viewed more than one million times. It has become the top rated and most viewed this week in Youtube’s “News & Politics” section. Such an impressive welcome illustrates how crucial of a responsibility lies between the hands of the Members of the European Parliament with their upcoming vote on ACTA. It is also an encouraging step towards defeating this dangerous agreement —an effort requiring a broad mobilization among citizens.

]]> http://techrights.org/2011/11/05/plasma-workspaces-4-8/feed/ 0 ‘Linux’ Patent Deals Might be FAT, an Abuse Through FUD http://techrights.org/2011/09/21/fat-deals-vs-linux/ http://techrights.org/2011/09/21/fat-deals-vs-linux/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:52:56 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=53862 Fat walrus

Summary: Further discussion about the Casio extortion and what it might really be about

YESTERDAY we alluded to the 'deal' with Casio and unfortunately it’s mostly Microsoft boosters who cover it, so they do it in a shallow way that is not critical at all. Articles like this one do a disservice to justice. They are more like PR and not investigative journalism. This other coverage makes it seem like Casio is on equal footing and the most trollish article (article at The Register) plays along with Linux FUD, stating: “In the last four years, the software giant has been quietly threatening legal action for any Linux-using company that refuses to sign patent deals with it. Amazon, Novell, Linspire, TurboLinux and Xandros have all put their X on the dotted line. Others, like satnav maker TomTom, ended up in court, but eventually settled.”

And what exactly was TomTom sued over? That’s right, FAT. That’s hardly Linux at all and recently we learned from the OIN that some of those deals Microsoft called “Linux deal” are in fact just FAT deals. So caution is required, Microsoft is lying.

On USENET, the distinction between FAT and Linux is already being brought up. More people ought to start pressuring Microsoft to disclose what patents it claims to be involved. How many of them actually relate to Linux (if any at all)?

“More people ought to start pressuring Microsoft to disclose what patents it claims to be involved.”It is not just companies that need to be concerned about the lack of disclosure of patents. Customers are all paying the price for these extortions (cascading down to price tags and ending up in bank accounts of Microsoft billionaires), so antitrust regulators must really wake up and do their work on behalf of those customers. “Microsoft faces fresh antitrust probes in Ireland and Spain” according to another headline from The Register and this relates to what we mentioned yesterday. Both are about “licensing” and illegal tactics that somehow escape scrutiny.

“Microsoft is facing more antitrust scrutiny as Spanish competition authorities announced an 18-month review of Redmond’s licensing practices in Spain and Ireland,” says the article.

A translation from the complaint goes as follows: “This case originated in a complaint filed by Elegant Business SC for a possible breach of competition law.”

What are the European laws that may apply to Microsoft’s secret extortion racket? There would probably be a RICO Act equivalent and someone really needs to look into it. US regulators fail to do their job. █

]]> http://techrights.org/2011/09/21/fat-deals-vs-linux/feed/ 0 Microsoft’s Embrace of Linux is Deceitful, Malicious, a Likely Antitrust Violation http://techrights.org/2011/09/04/discussion-about-swpats-abuse/ http://techrights.org/2011/09/04/discussion-about-swpats-abuse/#comments Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:00:09 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=52860 Lamb to the slaughter

Summary: Summation of discussions with two Keiths, one from Open Invention Network (OIN) and another who is a former Fedora member/packager

TECHRIGHTS certainly strives to accumulate new information, if not by researching written documents then by asking people who are familiar with what happens behind the scenes (where no documents are being produced). A long conversation with OIN’s CEO, for example, helped improve our understanding of the patents situation. Many of these issues are passed around verbally, but we basically wanted a clearer separation between FAT deals and Linux deals. From what I recall (I didn’t take any notes), Microsoft bundles some of those deals under meta-packages of sorts. One would be the file systems thing, another would probably be the Samba thing, and for Android we are told it’s really just ActiveSync, which is interesting because it’s easy to dodge this one dependency. We had it implicitly confirmed that $5 is the price tag on HTC phones (Microsoft tax). This number originally came from some banker/analyst in some report last year.

It’s all very vague to an outsider, so we are still trying to get all the numbers right. We wish this was public knowledge, but Microsoft prefers for it to be secret as that would intimidate potential Android distributors and prospective buyers. We already know that patent assurance from Xandros (DistroWatch declared it “discontinued” 5 weeks ago) is valued at $50, so we assume more or less the same for SUSE. We don’t know if Xandros still has that Web page with the $50 figure online, but we took screenshots at the time and Debian developers got notified by a reader of ours who is also a Debian Developer (DD). The same Xandros page now says “$149.99… Purchase Xandros Desktop without Microsoft patent assurance [which leads to a similar page with the $99 price tag].” (Update see Jose’s remark in the comments below)

There are serious issues regarding the legality of what Microsoft is doing. It not only deceives for FUD but it also extorts its competition under secret terms. As for FAT patents, Tridge wrote a patch for that within weeks. If one is aware of the patents (no secrecy), then they become simple to work around much of the time. Keith (not of OIN but Slated) asked:”So if there’s a non-infringing implementation then why aren’t companies using it? Does any Linux distributor still have to pay Microsoft for FAT patents or not? If not, then what are they (e.g. HTC) paying for?”

We reckon it might be ActiveSync. But it’s hard to be sure. Microsoft didn’t say and the OIN seems to suggest that it’s ActiveSync. The secrecy is not coincidental. It’s intentional. It’s for FUD.

Moreover, notes Keith (an opinionated GNU/Linux advocate), “I thought the EU Commission ruled Microsoft had to open the SMB spec and allow royalty-free implementations. Is Microsoft violating that ruling?

“So again, does any Linux distributor currently pay Microsoft for SMB licensing or not, and if not then what are they paying for? It’s not SMB, it’s not FAT, so what is it?”

The TomTom case says FAT, the Motorola case says a little more (but Motorola did not lose the case), and we generally don’t quite know for sure. There was some article around 2007 about Microsoft Licensing (external) and some entity they set up to manage SMB “licences”. Jeremy Allison complained about it. Maybe that prelades the Samba EU decision, but we suspect not. It was in December of this year that the EU Commission had a breakthrough and Easter of that same year when Novell submitted the redacted deal document, which then exposed some of what Novell had done with Microsoft in secret.

The OIN is trying to collect key patents that act as shield/deterrence. I have negotiated with someone who has key patents on tablets (Microsoft troll proxies tried to snatch these off his hands), who after speaking to me for weeks decided to donate them to “Linux and FOSS”. I directed him to the OIN and we’re still working on it quite privately.

The OIN is concerned about what Microsoft did to MeeGo and Nokia, which is now handing over its parents to a patent troll, MOSAID (which sued Red Hat last month), to sue Android. I told OIN’s Keith about apparent entryism at HP amid the news about WebOS. What shocks me personally is that many journalists went to sleep or vanished, so nobody seems to be covering this huge antitrust violations.

“It’s a big mystery,” continued Keith. “HTC pays Microsoft $5 per handset for “patents” Linux “violates”, but nobody seems to know what “patents” they are, and nobody wants to talk about it. Indeed, for some equally mysterious reason, they seem to need to sign NDAs before making those agreements, even though patents are required by law to be a matter of public record. So why would Microsoft need companies to sign NDAs if these are perfectly legitimate deals, and what are those deals, exactly? If companies are not paying for FAT patents, as they clearly no longer need to, and they’re not paying for SMB patents, since Microsoft is prohibited from charging royalties for it, then what exactly are they paying for, and why does it need to be a big secret?”

B&N did not sign the NDA and in fact it 'leaked' evidence of the extortion. Groklaw then published or republished the PDF and there was some press coverage that did not name patent numbers.

“Surely it should be up to Microsoft to provide that at the application level, and sell it on Apple’s app store / Android Market, not make boiler-room deals with smartphone manufacturers.”
      –Keith (Slated)“An even more important question,” continued Keith, “is why do governments tolerate this blatantly obvious racketeering? Surely the Microsoft deceptions exposed by Barnes and Noble should have been enough to alert antitrust investigators to this corruption. So what is being done about it?”

The government — although taxpayers fund it — is an extension of Microsoft. Right now Techrights is going through Cablagate and publishing relevant cables that show the government acting as merely a lobbyist and marketer for Microsoft. Only if people stand up and demand action will something be done about Microsoft. See how the SEC systematically ignored bankers’ crimes (Taibi wrote articles about it) and a whistleblower explained that the SEC also destroyed evidence. That was last month. Microsoft and FTC/US DOJ are similar. The latter did not even investigate the CPTN debacle before it received several formal complaints. Government kowtowing is not unique to Microsoft, but that is irrelevant. It’s a systemic problem.

“Screw ActiveSync,” ranted Keith. “Let Office users sync through Google’s Cloud like everyone else. Surely it should be up to Microsoft to provide that at the application level, and sell it on Apple’s app store / Android Market, not make boiler-room deals with smartphone manufacturers.

“It’s bizarre. Android handset distributors are basically paying Microsoft for the “privilege” of bundling something that Microsoft could simply provide itself after-market, and would most likely do so for free anyway, for those few who actually need it. It’d be like paying Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer. It’s just incredibly strange.

“Somebody needs to write a long, detailed exposé of this whole “Microsoft licensing” mystery, and I get the feeling the OIN knows more about it than most. Most importantly, we need to establish whether or not anything that’s being “paid” for genuinely has anything to do with Linux, because from what I’ve seen so far it certainly doesn’t. Mostly though, I’d like to get to the bottom of why Microsoft refuses to tell anyone what patents they’re actually charging “license fees” for. Why won’t they talk about it, and what do bodies like the FTC think about Microsoft’s refusal to talk about it? Am I the only person who thinks this is gangster-like behaviour?”

This problem is sadly enough spreading outside the United States too. The “EPO says Tetris computer game has technical features, thus the exclusion of computer program can be bypassed,” claims the FFII’s President. This fight just never ends, does it? █

“[The EPO] can’t distinguish between hardware and software so the patents get issued anyway.”

–Marshall Phelps, Microsoft

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