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07.19.14

Links 19/7/2014: CRUX 3.1 is Out, CyanogenMod Competes With Google Now

Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google Released LiquidFun 1.1, Open-source 2D Physics Engine

    Google announced 1.1 release of LiquidFun, an open-source 2D physics engine including fluid simulation. The engine opens new possibilities to both game developers and UI designers, says Google. LiquidFun now officially supports iOS in addition to Android, Linux, and OS X.

  • Open Source Vs. Open Enough

    So what does this mean for the networking world? Open Daylight (run by the Linux Foundation) enables organizations to download an “open source networking platform” to run their networks. This is the Hydrogen release, which comes in basic, virtualization, and service provider editions. I’m sure there have been a lot of downloads to test the software and to play with it in an IT sandbox, but I have not heard of anyone using it in production (but would be happy to talk to anyone who is).

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • As the Web Grows, Do Browser Makers Wield Too Much Power?

      Do you ever take a step back and look at how central the web is to your life? For some people, it’s an always connected, ever present adjunct to their actual consciousness. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil even predict that we will eventually effectively merge with the web and other technology tools, giving us almost superhuman abilities to instantly access information.

    • Chrome

      • Chromecast Now Lets Users Move Android Content to Their TVs

        Android smartphones and tablets are great devices for many tasks, but sometimes you just wish you had a bigger screen to see the videos and other content that you are viewing. Now you can do just that, using Google’s $35 Chromecast dongle, which has just been upgraded to push Android content from your small devices to your television screen.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Reveals Far Reaching Global Push for Firefox OS

        Firefox OS has “unlocked the mobile ecosystem” and is quickly expanding across a broad range of devices and product categories in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific, according to a new post from Mozilla. There are those who have questioned whether Firefox OS is finding an enthusiastic audience, but many people questioned Android when it first arrived, too.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Musing: Microsoft to offer its software on Linux – A theoretical consideration.

      BREAKING NEWS: MICROSOFT RELEASES ITS OFFICE SUITE FOR LINUX

      Take a few seconds to consider how you would feel, then maybe be kind enough to hear my view.

      So it’s great? Microsoft’s flagship product now available to those who in the past had only LO, Abiword etc to chose from. Now you can run natively on your Linux box that which Windows users have been for years.

      Bad idea? Yes completely, here’s why. Let me just add before someone mentions it, yes I know Microsoft produces code for the Kernel. Have I an issue? No, because in that respect it is as part of a team of developers who all have various quality checks and testing – kernel devs don’t mindlessly accept all code and say “cheers mate” as they paste it in with a text editor. The process I’d suggest is more complex and even if Microsoft wanted to (which I’m sure it wouldn’t) there’s little chance of anything “naughty” going on there. So for me, Microsoft contributions are welcomed, if with a little surprise at myself saying that.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • coreutils-8.23 released [stable]
    • GCC Code Gets Updated For Go 1.3 Language

      Released the middle of last month was Google’s Go 1.3 programming language. Updated Go 1.3 code is now landing within the GNU Compiler Collection.

      Go 1.3 offers many changes and improvements throughout, Godoc static analysis support, GC supports Native Client execution sandbox on 32-bit/64-bit x86 architectures, and experimental support for new operating systems. Those unfamiliar with last month’s release of Go 1.3 can read more via the release notes. There’s also other commentary about the Go 1.3 language update via the Go Blog.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Kerala Legislature moves to open source software; LibreOffice

      The Kerala Legislative Assembly (Niyamsabha) has shifted to free and open software, following the expiry of support period to Windows XP.

      It has also started producing all its documentation, both digital and printed materials, using the free and open source office suite LibreOffice from yesterday (July 17, 2014).

  • Licensing

    • FOSS & the IRS: Now We’re Talking

      We’ve been watching with great interest this week as the travails of FOSS organizations with the US Internal Revenue Service have become a hot topic. When our client, Jim Nelson of Yorba, discussed blogging about the IRS rejection of Yorba’s application for 501c3 status with us, we hoped but did not expect that the situation, to which we had discreetly called community and company attention for years, would finally receive some. We’re very glad that’s now happening. Unfortunately, it’s really too late. Because of the long delays in determination imposed by the IRS in its increasingly anti-FOSS positioning, neither the full consequences of the IRS’s present position nor the state of our legal technology in response can be seen from the materials currently under discussion.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • WFMU Building Open Source “Audience Engine” Web CMS For Radio Stations

      New Jersey’s WFMU.FM is a legendary freeform non-commercial radio station that embodies community from its supportive listeners to its wide-ranging programming. WFMU recently embarked on a new community adventure with their decision to develop an open source version of their currently proprietary CMS (content management system). The new CMS is called Audience Engine and its designed not only to manage content and build community, but to support fundraising.

    • Open Data

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

07.18.14

Links 18/7/2014: Slackware Turns 21, Spotify Switches to Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 8:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Storage Bolsters Its Boards With Oracle Alumnus

    Open Source Storage has a bit of a struggle on its hands. Despite having existed (kind of) for well over 10 years, the storage company is relatively unknown compared to incumbent players (NetApp and EMC for example) and newer storage industry disruptors (Inktank and StorSimple for example) alike. The company has had something of an on-again, off-again life as the GFC caused its early investors to back out and the company waited until this year to relaunch.

  • Adobe, Google Develop Open-Source Font for Asian Languages

    Adobe and Google have teamed up to develop a new open source font that supports seven different languages.

  • Open-Source Blu-Ray Now Works For BD-J / Menu Rendering

    For users of libbluray for limited open-source Blu-Ray disc support, there’s some updates worth fetching.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • WebKit’s FTL JavaScript Engine Shows Off Potential For LLVM

      Earlier this year we wrote about Apple working on an LLVM-based JIT compiler for WebKit. This new JIT engine, called “Fourth Tier LLVM” (FTL), is enabled within the latest open-source code for this browser rendering engine and is faster than WebKit’s earlier JavaScript implementations.

    • Breach Browser: an open-source and hackable browser for geeks

      While you are reading this, the chances are you are using Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera or Internet Explorer (IE). That is because these tend to be the only choices on offer. Although each of the big browsers will try to convince you that you have a choice. The simple truth is you do not. You are confined to using these five main choices which generally-speaking are increasingly converging and becoming more alike with each update. That is until now!

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • The Rust Language Is Improving, But Not Yet Ready For 1.0

        Rust, the programming language born at Mozilla for developing a “safe, concurrent, practical language” continues to evolve and experience greater adoption. Rust certainly seems to have a good future ahead of it as shared by the latest status update on the project, but a few more release cycles are needed at least before the Rust developers look toward version 1.0.

      • State of Rust 0.11.0

        Over the past 6 months since the last one of these updates was written, Rust has evolved significantly: the standard library was refactored to make Rust more convenient to use in embedded or bare-metal platforms, the language has been greatly simplified (moving most pointer types into libraries) and the package ecosystem has been thriving under a new package manager.

      • Firefox OS Ecosystem Shows Strong Momentum and Expands Across New Devices, Markets and Categories

        Firefox OS has unlocked the mobile ecosystem and is quickly expanding across a broad range of devices and product categories in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Just one year after the first devices were launched, Firefox OS is now available on seven smartphones offered by five major operators in 15 countries, showing strong signs of ecosystem momentum and widespread industry adoption.

      • Firefox OS lands in Germany – with France, Asia, and more to come

        Mozilla’s Firefox OS continues its slow march across the globe, with carriers set to begin shipping devices running the open source, browser-based smartphone platform in additional developed markets this week.

        Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica has previously sold Firefox OS phones in Spain, but the bulk of its efforts have been focused on its subsidiaries in Spanish-speaking emerging markets, including Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.2 released to the channel

      LibreOffice from Collabora is the enterprise-ready build of the widely used Open Source office suite. The newly announced LibreOffice-from-Collabora 4.2 provides an enterprise-hardened build which can be maintained by patch updates for many years.

  • CMS

  • Funding

    • Open Source Madness

      The Yorba Foundation, a non-profit group that produces open source Linux desktop software, reported last week that it was denied tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status by the IRS. The group had waited nearly five years for a decision. The IRS stated that, because the software Yorba develops can be used commercially, the organization has a substantial non-exempt purpose and is disqualified from tax-exempt status. We think the IRS’ decision rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of open source software.

    • PredictionIO’s $2.5M money bag suggests open-source is right for machine learning

      PredictionIO, a startup that has crafted an open-source program to let developers add machine-learning smarts to their applications, might just be setting the tone for the next wave in data technology.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.9.1 Released, Adds OpenMP 4.0 To Fortran

      Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat announced this morning the GCC 4.9.1 release that has many bug-fixes and other minor improvements to GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 that was released in April with many improvements and features. More than 88 regressions and serious bugs were fixed in GCC 4.9.1 while a new feature now supported is OpenMP 4.0 support for Fortran, to complement the GCC 4.9.0 OMP 4.0 support for the C and C++ languages.

    • First steps with Liberty-Eiffel

      The first thing I notice is a different terminology. An executable is called system and a set of classes is refereed as universe. The classes can be grouped in clusters into the universe. And the routines (operations) of a class, and its attributes, are called features. The routines are divided in functions or queries (which return a value) and procedures (which do not return a value). As opposed to C language, where we need a function named main, on Eiffel we can designate any procedure to start the execution.

    • Denemo – Release 1.1.8 is imminent

  • Public Services/Government

    • OFE: ‘Continued discrimination in IT procurement’

      Public administrations across Europe continue to discriminate in their IT calls for tender by asking for specific brands and products, concludes OpenForum Europe, and organisation advocating for an open, competitive ICT market. “Thousands of small IT firms are excluded from competing in the public procurement process by restrictions such as the naming of trademarks in calls for tender”, said Graham Taylor, OFE’s CEO, in a press statement.

    • A juggernaut like the NHS won’t find it easy to drop Windows for open source – but it should

      Microsoft is a commercial venture so it is reasonable for them to sell their products, which they do via licensing per unit. The NHS has about 100,000 computers, so it pays a considerable amount and also has a lot of work to do each time there’s a required update for any of their server technologies or desktop computers. While it needs some technical tweaking, Windows is sold as something that comes out of the box and should work. Designed to work with a wide range of different types of systems, the one size that fits (almost) all computers is a bonus for many technical managers.

      But it hasn’t been problem-free. Most hospitals still have thousands of PCs running Windows XP which stopped being supported earlier this year.

    • Kerala Legislature announces smooth transition to free software

      The Kerala Legislative Assembly has made a significant transition to the free software platform for recording its voluminous business.

      The Speaker’s announcement to this effect a couple of days ago represented a milestone not just for the IT Department of the Niyama Sabha, but also for the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) based here, the larger free software community, and free software enterprises in Kerala.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • AllSeen IoT Group Adds 8 New Members

      The AllSeen Alliance, which is one of several open-source consortiums working to develop standards for the Internet of things, is adding eight new members to a lineup that includes such tech heavyweights as Microsoft, Qualcomm, Cisco Systems and Symantec.

    • Community Blog Series: Red Bend Software

      Red Bend Software is a community member of the AllSeen Alliance and a leader in mobile software management. More than 2 billion Red Bend-enabled devices use the company’s software and services for firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updating, application management, device management, device analytics and mobile virtualization. Customers include more than 100 leading manufacturers, mobile operators, semiconductor vendors and automotive companies worldwide.

    • New wireless mesh standard hatches from Google’s Nest

Leftovers

07.16.14

Links 16/7/2014: Manjaro 0.8.10 Third Update, SIA Migrates to Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 7:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Can the FOSS community save 197 endangered languages?

    In India, the situation is not different. I searched the Language Atlas of UNESCO and found out that 197 Indian languages are endangered. One of these endangered languages is from the region from where I originally belong: Bihar, a state of India. I work in the free and open source software (FOSS) field, focused on localization. The language I do my work in is Hindi. I’ve also worked in Maithili, an Indian language, mentoring the community and help develop several applications in it, including Fedora, GNOME, KDE , and Firefox.

  • Adobe Partners With Google To Release Open-Source Font For Chinese, Japanese And Korean Languages
  • Portland company unveils new tool as open source community converges on Rose City

    Local startup GraphAlchemist is hoping to tap into some of that excitement. The data visualization company has tools for corporate customers to visualize data sets and map connections, and now it is releasing a version called Alchemy.js that will allow people to get a taste of the product.

  • How open source can solve Silicon Valley’s engineering crisis

    Silicon Valley may think itself the center of the universe, but when it comes to open source, it can only muster a third-place finish. According to an analysis of top GitHub contributors, both Europe and the rest of the United States develop more open-source software than Silicon Valley. While this may not be surprising given Europe’s long-standing affection for open source, it is a reminder that much of the best development talent doesn’t live along Highway 101 and probably never will.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

    • Cloud, open source power TransLink’s Web presence

      It was an aging bespoke application that drove TransLink to seek a new content management system, but it was the strength of the community surrounding the open source project that helped the Queensland public transport agency choose Drupal.

      Prior to the switch to Drupal, which began last year, the former TransLink site was partly based on static files and partly on a “home-grown CMS that managed a lot of our custom content such as service disruption and events, so that we could do a little bit of distributed authoring within the organisation,” said Natalie Gorring, manager, online products and services, at TransLink.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Crowdfunding for open source software

      Nowadays when people say “crowdfunding,” most people know exactly it is, but just a few short years ago, the term was not commonly used. Bountysource is easy to explain now: it is a crowdfunding site aimed at open source software developers, but a decade ago, people just were not sure what it was or how it worked. Even the founders said the project died quickly because people were unsure of its intentions.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE Announcement

      The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.9.1 Released

      GCC 4.9.1 release supports OpenMP 4.0 also in Fortran, rather than just in C and C++.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open-Source Will Make Real-Time Measurements Affordable

      From my earliest days in measurement, the term “real-time” has been special. Its meaning has evolved over these years as a figure of merit without any actual figures being presented. But the use has continually increased as a way of denoting the presence of data as it occurs.

    • Open source biology

      At O’Reilly, we’ve long been supporters of the open source movement — perhaps not with the religious fervor of some, but with a deep appreciation for how open source has transformed the computing industry over the last three decades.

    • Open Hardware

      • Apeiros Arduino Based Open Source Robot (video)

        Students, makers and developers that are in the market for an open source robot might be interested in a new Arduino-based robot called Apeiros.

      • Social Circle: Improving social interaction at social events

        The prototype we created of the designed solution, is composed of an Arduino controlling six player boards with voting buttons and LEDs which it reads. The Arduino is connected to a virtual interface showed on a 19″ screen in the middle of the table. Players receive harmless question such as “Which player would be the best superhero?” and everyone then place a vote on each other using the player boards. Votes are then revealed and points are given to the agreeing majority. If players votes indicate disagreement, a discussion round is started where players have to persuade each other to vote differently.

Leftovers

07.15.14

Links 15/7/2014: New Plasma, Google Announces Project Zero

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Microsoft to push cheaper Windows PCs to compete with Chromebooks

      There is an interesting trend going on in the PC market. Android powered smartphones have overtaken the total PC shipment. Which means Microsoft’s operating system is no more the dominating player in the market. We all understand that the post-PC era belongs to mobile devices as average users can do much more on their smartphones they they used to do on their Windows powered PC, sans mobility. But that’s not the only trend Microsoft is worried about, the real threat is somewhere else. Interestingly as Windows powered PC market is declining, sales of Google’s Chromebooks is picking up. Chromebooks are the #1 best sellers on Amazon.com.

    • Microsoft eyes Chromebooks, low-end PC market: All about the platform
    • It’s Been A Long Time Coming But Competition Returns To The Market For PCs

      Do the maths. Millions are buying small cheap computers that do for them what bulky PCs used to do: compute and communicate. Those small cheap computers even do it better, being small and cheap (bonus for no extra charge). If M$ does give away its OS for small cheap computers or pay people to use its OS, everyone will know that the value of M$’s OS on desktop PCs and servers is about $0, too. The endgame is that M$ cannot just compete on price for consumers’ gadgets. M$ will have to compete everywhere and actually work for a living from now on. That will lower their margins considerably. That will cut into their bottom line. That may not maintain their market share anywhere near where it is now.

    • Chromebooks, Chromeboxes may become even cheaper, thanks to new chips

      To the regular consumer, Chromebook may not be a very cheap device but mind you, if you know the right places to shop, you can actually get a Chromebook that’s as cheap as $200. Now news doing rounds suggest that they could get cheaper than that. MediaTek has reportedly added a new experimental entry-level ARM Cortex A7 board to the open source Chromium OS repository. This will be used in place of the Cortex A15/A7 hybrid that is used by Samsung- not to forget the Intel Celeron chips that are used in other Chrome devices. In theory, this will make Chromebooks and Chromeboxes cost even less than $200, but will be offering sluggish speed.

    • Best Linux Desktop: Top 10 Candidates

      When it comes to selecting the best Linux desktop experience, there are a number of different factors to consider. In this article, I’ll explore 10 Linux distributions that I personally believe are the best all around desktop options.

      I’ll segment each off for newbies or advanced users, customization vs. pre-configured, along with how each performs on standard PC hardware commonly used in most homes.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.16-rc5
    • Linux 3.16-rc5 Kernel Released
    • Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 3.16 RC5
    • E2fsprogs 1.42.11 Filesystem Tool Officially Released

      E2fsprogs, a tool that provides the filesystem utilities for use with the ext2 filesystem and that also supports the ext3 and ext4 filesystems, is now at version 1.42.9.

      The development of E2fsprogs is progressing slowly and each new version managed to be quite impressive, especially if we take into account that it’s made by only one man. The new version of E2fsprogs, 1.42.11, comes with more new features, changes, and fixes than the previous release.

      According to the changelog, support has been added so that mke2fs can now create hugefiles that are aligned relative to the beginning of the disk, a bug that was causing e2fsck to abort a journal replay on a file system with bigalloc enabled has been fixed, sanity checks have been implemented so that mke2fs will now refuse insanely large flex_bg counts specified by the -G option, the ke2fs program is now able to provide a better metadata layout for moderately large flex_bg counts, and the mke2fs program will now check the kernel version number to determine whether the lazy_itable_init option is supported.

      Also, a description of ext4′s mount options has been added to the ext4 section 5 man page, the chattr man page has been improved, resize2fs will not try to calculate the minimum size of a file system, and a file descriptor leak in debugfs has been corrected.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • New Plugins for kdeconnect
      • KWallet for Plasma 5 now automatically migrates KDE4 wallets!

        Next time you’ll start your updated Plasma 5 session’s KDE Wallet system, it’ll eventually start migrating your wallets. The precondition is that you’re doing that on a system that also has KDE4 and that you previously used that installation’s KDE Wallet system. If your system doesn’t have a KDE4 wallet daemon, then nothing will happen.

      • Notes from Calligra Sprint in Deventer. Part 1: Translation-friendly code

        Last weekend we had a really nice sprint Deventer, which was hosted by Irina and Boudewijn (thank you very much!). We spent two days on discussions, planning, coding and profiling our software, which had many fruitful results.

      • The Road Ahead

        Plasma 5.0 is wrapping up and we have all learned a LOT in the first few months of the Visual Design Group’s existence. One thing is clear though. If any of us had any doubts about whether an open approach to visual design can produce great results, most of those doubts have been assuaged. I’m super-proud to be part of this community and the quality of the results we have produced. It is really exciting to see the participation and the optimism by everyone involved!

      • New Plasma brings a cleaner interface on top of a new graphics stack

        July 15, 2014. KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE’s workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

      • KDE Plasma 5 Officially Released
      • KDE Plasma 5 Final Version Is Out and It Looks Great – Screenshot Tour
      • Nixnote goes Qt

        I was fixing a friend’s computer this weekend and she asked me to install her evernote client to keep things in sync, sigh… it’s a java application and I really didn’t wanna install that but well, she needed, so I went to the developer website and WHOA, It went to Qt.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • halting problem :: codes of conduct

        you would think that, in 2014, implementing a code of conduct for conferences or conventions would not be a controversial topic. sadly, you’d also be mistaken. there are various contrarian positions about implementing anti-harassment policies; most, if not all of those positions are wrong.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO Whitehurst on VMware, OpenStack and CentOS

        “Open source gives us brand permission to enter a ton of categories,” said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.

      • Red Hat to be a Key Contributor to and Benefactor of the Kubernetes Project

        A few weeks ago, I covered the news that Google had released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is software to manage computing workloads across thousands of computer servers and leverage docker containers. We’ve also covered Google’s announcement that some vey big contributors have joined the Kubernetes project, including IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack. They are working in tandem on open source tools and container technologies that can run on multiple computers and networks.

      • Inception team launches DevOps at Red Hat
      • CentOS 7 Comes on the Heels of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

        The CentOS 7 Linux operating system became generally available July 7, providing users with a freely available desktop, server and cloud operating system platform. CentOS, an acronym for Community Enterprise Operating System, is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 enterprise OS, released June 10. Unlike RHEL 7, which is a commercially supported enterprise Linux release that requires users to have a paid subscription, CentOS is free. That said, CentOS lacks the support, services and certifications that Red Hat provides its RHEL subscribers. CentOS does, however, provide the same basic technologies as RHEL 7, but for those who don’t need or want the additional enterprise-grade commercial services, CentOS is a free alternative. Red Hat is now an official support and partner of the CentOS community, as well, ever since a surprise announcement in January. CentOS inherits the same XFS file system used in RHEL 7, which provides a file system that can scale up to 500 terabytes. Docker container virtualization support is also part of the CentOS 7 platform. In this slide show, eWEEK examines the CentOS 7 Linux operating system.

      • Fermilab Releases Scientific Linux 7.0 Alpha 2

        The second Alpha version of Scientific Linux 7.0, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, is now available for download and testing.

        The developers of Scientific Linux 7.0 have moved very fast and, just a week after the first Release Candidate, a new development release has been made available. Given the short development period since the first Alpha, it’s actually surprising that the devs managed to get all those changes and improvements in.

        “Fermilab’s intention is to continue the development and support of Scientific Linux and refine its focus as an operating system for scientific computing. Today we are announcing an alpha release of Scientific Linux 7. We continue to develop a stable process for generating and distributing Scientific Linux, with the intent that Scientific Linux remains the same high quality operating system the community has come to expect.”

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 7.6 released
      • Debian 7.6 Release Takes Care Of Security Problems
      • Updated Debian 7: 7.6 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

        Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “wheezy” CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

      • Debian 7.6 “Wheezy” Officially Released

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Partition Logic 0.74

    Partition Logic is free software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is based on the Visopsys operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system.

  • When “Free” Can Suck.

    When I first started The HeliOS Project, I was using Librenet on my personal computer. Libranet had a per-user licensing agreement in order to make the effort pay and a single user license was for 69.00 If I remember correctly. Jon Danzig and I worked out a multiple licensing agreement that we could both live with. The fact is, Jon almost gave those licenses away because he believed in what we were doing. Jon’s untimely death in 2005 eventually resulted in the Libranet venture striking their tents and moving on.

  • Open source MindRDR app to lets you control Google Glass with your thoughts
  • Is making your product free and open source crazy talk?

    Making money from open source. To many in the corporate world, that seems like a contradiction in terms. How are you supposed to make money from something that you give away? they ask. It can be done. A number of companies, large and small, have done quite well in the open source space over the years.

    Just ask Patrick McFadin. He’s the chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, a company that’s embraced the open source way. He’s also interviewed leaders at a number of successful open source companies to gain insights into what makes a successful open source business.

  • Though “barely an operating system,” DOS still matters (to some people)

    Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It’s a platform that in the minds of many should’ve died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications.

  • Best Linux Desktop, FreeDOS Still Matters, and Darksiders
  • Announcing Project Zero

    Security is a top priority for Google. We’ve invested a lot in making our products secure, including strong SSL encryption by default for Search, Gmail and Drive, as well as encrypting data moving between our data centers. Beyond securing our own products, interested Googlers also spend some of their time on research that makes the Internet safer, leading to the discovery of bugs like Heartbleed.

  • Google Announces “Project Zero” To Improve Web Security
  • OpenWRT 14.07 RC1 Brings Native IPv6 Support, New Init System

    The first release candidate to OpenWRT “Barrier Breaker” 14.07 is now available with a large number of changes to this popular embedded Linux distribution primarily for routers and other network devices.

  • A call to arms for open source!

    My personal journey with open source began 18 years ago, and for my friend Robin Muilwijk, more than a decade ago. We sat down in an empty piazza in the heart of Amsterdam’s financial district late one night with my remote podcasting recorded this “call to arms” for open source. If you rely on open source and free software, if you take it for granted, or if you would like to understand how you, like me, can do more to make sure our journey, and that of those that follow in our footsteps, can be accepted by people across the IT divide, then give this podcast a listen.

  • Open source to make caring for your health feel wonderful

    Juhan Sonin wants to influence the world from protein, to policy, to pixel. And, he believes the only way to do that is with open source principles guiding the way.

    Juhan is the Creative Director at Involution Studios, a design firm educating and empowering people to feel wonderful by creating, developing, and licensing their work for the public.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • “To whom much has been given, much is expected in return” – Free Software economics

      When it comes to Free Software projects, there’s a profound, deep misunderstanding about who does what and how it’s being done. Using the now overused quote, developers write a code “because they have an itch to scratch”, means that there can be twenty different motivations to contribute to Free Software. No one needs to explain or justify his or her contribution. In the real world, one of the most common motivation is money, be it in the form of a salary, a fee, or a transaction involving the developers to fix whatever bug or develop a new feature. Most of the FOSS projects I know -excluding Firefox- do not pay developers directly for fixing bugs except in very specific circumstances and by definition not on a regular basis. The LibreOffice project is no different. The Document Foundation serves the LibreOffice project by financing its infrastructure, protecting its assets and improving LibreOffice in almost every way except paying for development on a regular basis. What this means, in other terms, is that the Document Foundation does not provide support; nor does it provide service to customers. In this sense, it is not a software vendor like Microsoft or Adobe. This is also one of the reasons why there is no “LTS” version of LibreOffice; because the Document Foundation will not provide a more or less mythical “bug-free version” of LibreOffice without ensuring the developers get paid for this. The healthiest way to do this is to grow an ecosystem of developers and service providers who are certified by the Document Foundation and are able to provide professionals with support, development, training and assistance.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Why Python Makes A Great First Programming Language

      Invented 23 years ago, Python’s discovery as a great tool for first-timers has been more recent. The beginner-oriented Raspberry Pi has certainly influenced Python’s new role as a teaching tool, but also its increasing adoption at organizations like Google, Yahoo and NASA that make it valuable to know even after a programmer is no longer a beginner. In modern times, it has routinely been ranked as one of the eight most popular programming languages since 2008.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Next-Gen OpenGL To Be Announced Next Month

      The Khronos Group has shared details about their BoF sessions to be hosted next month during SIGGRAPH and it includes detailing the next-generation OpenGL / OpenGL ES specifications.

Leftovers

  • Argentina riot police clash with fans after World Cup loss (VIDEO, PHOTOS)

    Disturbances have taken place in Buenos Aires after Argentina’s national team lost the World Cup final 1-0 to Germany. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse angry fans.

    [...]

    Despite the late Sunday clashes, the majority of Argentinians have accepted the loss with dignity. Earlier in the evening, thousands of fans came to the Obelisk monument, waving the national flag determined to party in celebrate reaching the World Cup final.

  • Scots Self-Hating Myths

    But the generations of denigration of Scotland’s history, its reshaping to suit a Unionist agenda where the backwards and benighted Scots were brought in to the political and economic glories of the Union and British Empire, underlies so many of the attitudes to Scottish Independence today. Every culture has a right to reference its roots and history without ridicule – and the denial of the authenticity of genuine popular cultural heritage is a particularly pernicious form of ridicule, especially when it is built on lies drummed home in schoolrooms over centuries.

  • Science

    • As Honeybees Die Off, First Inventory of Wild Bees Is Under Way

      On Saturdays, the head of the landmark Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program at the U.S. Geological Survey leaves his straw-bale house, where bees burrow in the walls, and goes to his office—for pleasure. From his desk, a recycled segment of a lane from a bowling alley, he pores over bee specimens with a microscope.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hamas boasts of drone capabilities after Israel claims to have destroyed one

      There are still more questions than answers regarding a drone Israel claims to have shot down.

      According to the Israeli Defence Forces Twitter account, “An aerial drone from Gaza infiltrated Israel a short time ago. IDF forces shot it down with a Patriot missile above Ashdod.”

    • Sderot Cinema: Israelis Watch Gaza Bombing For Just Good Fun

      Ever-enterprising Israelis dragged plastic chairs and sofas up to a Sderot hill to eat popcorn, smoke hookahs and cheer when explosions lit up the night sky over Gaza in a photo posted by Danish reporter Allan Sørensen with the caption, “Clapping when blasts are heard.” A follow-up story in Kristeligt Dagblad said over 50 Israelis had transformed the hill, dubbed the Hill of Shame in an earlier war, into “something that most closely resembles the front row of a reality war theater.” The photo has caused outrage online, where commenters have blasted “the morality of a people so skewed that murder is a public spectacle.” Spectators say they were there to “look at Israel creating peace” and “see Israel destroy Hamas.” They inexplicably fail to mention the part about burning children. Oh Israel, what have you wrought?

    • Cokie Roberts: More People Should Fear the United States

      Roberts is repeating Israel’s claims that rockets launched from Gaza toward Israel were smuggled into the occupied territory by Syria and Iran–assertions whose validity is often accepted by US media without much scrutiny (FAIR Blog, 3/11/14).

      Nonetheless, her point is that the threat of US military force would stop allowing people to “get away with anything they want to get away with.”

    • Note to David Gregory: The US Is Not the World

      Iran has consistently told the world that it has no interest in developing a nuclear weapon. As of right now, there is no evidence that they are.

    • Camp X: A WWII training camp turned secret-agent school in Whitby, Ontario

      A documentary that looks to shed light on a little-known Canadian factoid, Camp X: Secret Agent School, offers an in-depth look at a top-secret Second World War training camp near Whitby, Ont., that became North America’s first secret-agent school.

    • LETTER: Iraq policy is a betrayal

      I’m not speaking of the CIA, but they have been involved in Syria since before the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. It was shortly after that attack that a U.S. news report surfaced claiming that the CIA was funneling Libyan arms to the rebels in Syria, and it turns our that even before President Obama recently publicly authorized the CIA to train and equip select rebel groups, they had already been training them in Jordan.

    • The Ex-CIA Asset Trying to Conquer Libya

      Gen. Hiftar was betrayed by Gaddafi, was approached by the CIA, moved to the USA, and now says he’ll purge Libya of jihadists. Really?

    • Former deputy CIA head suggests US needs Kurdistan
    • CIA expanding facilities in Kurdistan?

      It’s no secret that the Kurds see the civil war in Iraq as their opportunity for independence, but until now the US has publicly insisted on keeping Iraq a unitary state, even to the point that the Kurds began complaining that the US was the main obstacle to their national aspirations. Privately, however, it appears that the CIA has begun investing in infrastructure in Irbil as part of their effort to gather intel on ISIS.

    • Expansion of ‘secret’ facility in Iraq suggests closer U.S.-Kurd ties
    • New book ‘War Against All Puerto Ricans’ tells unknown tale of U.S.-Puerto Rico conflict

      Author Nelson Denis inked a deal with Nation Books to tell the story of the 1950 incident when two island towns were bombed by the U.S. Army.

    • Grandma repeatedly protested drones at base, now faces a year in jail
    • Rebel chief who deployed CIA-trained fighters to Syria is assassinated in Jordan

      Security sources said a leading Western-backed rebel was shot dead in the Jordanian capital of Amman. They identified the dead man as Maher Rahel, a commander in the Free Syrian Army, said to responsible for the deployment of rebels trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the Hashemite kingdom.
      “The killer fired one shot and fled,” a source said.
      The assassination of the FSA commander was said to have taken place on
      late July 11 near a traffic circle in western Amman. The sources said Rahel,
      27, commanded the Liwa Al Mujahideen Brigade, linked to FSA and deployed in
      southern Syria.

    • Jordan ‘cool to Syria rebel training plan’

      Jordan, where the US Central Intelligence Agency has been covertly training Syrian rebels for more than a year, is reluctant to host an expanded rebel instruction programme, US officials say.

    • Americans are fine with drone strikes. Everyone else in the world? Not so much.
    • Global opposition to U.S. drone strikes grows
    • Pakistan: U.S. Engagement Necessary as Drone Strikes Resume

      The June drone strikes killed nearly 19 militants, including a high-level Haqqani network commander, Haji Gul, and two senior Afghan Taliban leaders. Pakistan’s foreign ministry condemned the strikes, calling them a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, other media reports said that Pakistani government officials privately coordinated with U.S. authorities on the attacks. The Washington Post reported in October that Pakistani government officials have for years secretly endorsed the drone program and received regular classified briefings on drone strikes from their U.S. counterparts.

    • New Zealand government violates SIS act over drones

      After decades of lively public debate, New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961. It is not widely known that the death penalty for treason remained on the statute books until it was also abolished in 1989.

    • Lawmaker Wants Drones Out of CIA’s Hands
    • Ted Yoho Looks to Get Drones Out of CIA Hands
    • Column: U.S. Is Losing the Message War in the Mideast

      What, exactly, does the United States stand for in the Middle East? More important, what would the average Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian or Yemeni say that it stands for? The suggestion that the United States is retrenching might seem absurd, given that Yemenis can hear the buzz of drones overhead. The notion that the United States is in the business of supporting democratic pluralism might clash with their reading of our Egypt strategy or our will-they-or-won’t-they waffling over whether to actively support Syrian opposition fighters. Day by day, with chaos blossoming, it becomes clearer that if we do have a strategic narrative for the Middle East, we certainly have not articulated it effectively. In marketing terms, we are not making the sale.

    • Israelis ‘Admit’ Palestinian Teen’s Murder
    • Three charged over killing
    • Three held over Palestinian killing

      Israel has ordered three Jews suspected in the kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian teenager held until Friday as they made their first court appearance.

    • Israeli commandos raid Gaza beach as deadly air assault continues

      Israeli naval commandos have launched an early morning raid on a beach in the north of Gaza City, as the coastal enclave suffered the bloodiest day yet of the six-day Israeli assault, with 54 Palestinians reported killed.

      The raid came amid continuing speculation that Israel would launch a ground offensive in Gaza, a move likely to sharply increase the number of civilian casualties. So far, 166 people have been killed including 30 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

    • The Imbalanced Slaughter in Gaza

      Much of the world is horrified at Israel’s latest slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip but the continued power of the Israeli Lobby over Official Washington has silenced any protests against the imbalanced infliction of death, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar observes.

    • Single Israeli strike kills 18, stirs debate over targets

      However, the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs said Sunday that civilians made up the majority of Palestinian casualties over the past six days – 133 of 168 killed and nearly half of more than 1,100 wounded. And a human-rights researcher said some of Israel’s strikes appear to have violated rules of war.

    • Israel shoots down Gaza drone – live updates
    • Israel says it’s downed drone along southern coast

      Israel’s military said it downed a drone along its southern coastline on Monday, the first time it encountered such a weapon since its campaign against the Gaza Strip militants began last week.

      The drone came from Gaza and was shot down near the southern city of Ashdod, the military said. It did not say what the drone was carrying and there was no immediate confirmation from Gaza on the use of unmanned aircraft.

    • The IDF doesn’t only aim at Hamas targets

      On Saturday evening, Hamas issued a warning, saying it was going to bomb Tel Aviv at 9 p.m. It did, and luckily the rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome. Sunday morning the IDF issued a similar warning to all residents of “the northern Gaza Strip,” saying it will attack the entire area at noon. Can anyone see the difference? Does saying you’re going to attack a civilian area exempt you from responsibility for the civilians you target? I don’t think so.

    • Letter: Remote-controlled killing violates values

      As a Friend (Quaker) who believes there is “that of God” in everyone and therefore every life is sacred, I am deeply concerned about the proliferation of lethal unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

      The United States is leading the way in this new form of warfare where pilots on U.S. bases kill people by remote control, thousands of miles away. Drones have become the preferred weapons to conduct war due to the lack of direct risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers, but these drone strikes have led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in many countries.

    • Brief Lull in Gaza Ends as Israel Resumes Strikes After Rockets Fly
    • Hamas’ armed wing rejects truce offer

      A proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas from the Egyptian government late yesterday was flatly rejected early today by the armed wing of the Palestinian militant group. The notice was posted on the group’s website.

    • There’s something very ugly in this rage against Israel

      Why are Western liberals always more offended by Israeli militarism than by any other kind of militarism? It’s extraordinary. France can invade Mali and there won’t be loud, rowdy protests by peaceniks in Paris. David Cameron, backed by a whopping 557 members of parliament, can order airstrikes on Libya and British leftists won’t give over their Twitterfeeds to publishing gruesome pics of the Libyan civilians killed as a consequence. President Obama can resume his drone attacks in Pakistan, killing 13 people in one strike last month, and Washington won’t be besieged by angry anti-war folk demanding ‘Hands off Pakistan’. But the minute Israel fires a rocket into Gaza, the second Israeli politicians say they’re at war again with Hamas, radicals in all these Western nations will take to the streets, wave hyperbolic placards, fulminate on Twitter, publish pictures of dead Palestinian children, publish the names and ages of everyone ‘MURDERED BY ISRAEL’, and generally scream about Israeli ‘bloodletting’. (When the West bombs another country, it’s ‘war’; when Israel does it, it’s ‘bloodletting’.)

    • Israeli Filmmakers Sign Petition, Urging Israeli Government To Hold Ceasefire On Attacks On Gaza Strip

      A group of Israeli filmmakers have added their voices to those pleading for a ceasefire to the attacks by their Government on the Gaza Strip.

    • Israel-Gaza conflict: EU pushes for ceasefire but ordinary Israelis back Benjamin Netanyahu and want bombardment to continue
    • Our endless “War on Terror”: The truth behind an incoherent foreign policy

      U.S. officials say Israel should not have to accept rocket fire aimed at civilians. But what about other nations?

    • Pentagon and CIA Want to Keep ISIS Tweeting: Exploiting Social Media to Keep the Endless War on Terror Alive

      The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies exploit social media to keep the endless war on terror alive.

    • CIA behind the rise of ISIS in Iraq, alleges Canadian think tank

      Last month, Islamic insurgent took control of two main Iraqi cities, Mosul and Tikrit, and openly challenged the pro-West Government in Baghdad.

      ISIS is portrayed as a Sunni-extremist group that split from Al-Qaeda. However, recent details leaking out suggests that the rise of ISIS is being ‘shaped and controlled’ out of Langley, Virginia and other CIA facilities in the States with the objective to spread chaos in world’s second largest oil state Iraq.

    • Hamas rejects Egypt’s proposal for ceasefire with Israel: senior official
    • Pressure for ceasefire grows in Gaza conflict

      Palestinian militants resumed rocket attacks on Tel Aviv on Monday after a 24-hour lull in strikes on the Israeli commercial capital, and Israel kept up its air and naval bombardments of the Gaza Strip despite growing pressure for a ceasefire.

    • Norwegian Physician Treating Wounded Civilians: Stop the Bombing, End Israeli Impunity in Gaza
    • Hamas Drone Intercepted By Israeli Military As Gaza Fighting Intensifies
    • Gaza death toll exceeds 2012 conflict

      The Arab League yesterday called for world powers to end Israel’s devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

      Egypt also proposed a truce to start early today to be followed by talks on easing the flow of goods into Gaza.

    • Hamas says it’s developed drones that can carry weapons
    • Hamas boasts new level of sophistication, releasing video showing one of its drones for first time

      The Israeli military said it downed a drone launched by militants in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the first time it encountered an unmanned aircraft since the start of its offensive last week, as new Israeli airstrikes pushed the death toll from a weeklong Israeli offensive to at least 175.

      Israel began its campaign against militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip last Tuesday, saying it was responding to heavy rocket fire from the densely populated territory. The military says it has launched more than 1,300 airstrikes since then, while Palestinian militants have launched nearly 1,000 rockets at Israel.

    • Israel Says It Shot Down a Hamas Drone

      The Israel Defense Forces tweeted the following Sunday: “An aerial drone from Gaza infiltrated Israel a short time ago. IDF forces shot it down with a Patriot missile above Ashdod.”

    • The Israeli App Red Alert Saves Lives—but It Just Might Drive You Nuts

      Red Alert, which alerts users every time a rocket is fired into Israel, has already been downloaded 780,000 times. It could give you peace of mind. Or it could make you hysterical.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Swedish court to consider WiiLeaks Julian Assange arrest

      A SWEDISH court is set to consider whether an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be repealed.

    • 2008 Obama Would Have Slammed 2014 Obama for This Government Secrecy Case

      In 2008, Obama griped that the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege “more than any other previous administration” and used it to get entire lawsuits thrown out of court. Critics noted that deploying the state secrets privilege allowed the Bush administration to shut down cases that might have revealed government misconduct or caused embarrassment, including those regarding constitutionally dubious warrantless wiretapping and the CIA’s kidnapping and torture of Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesman the government had mistaken for an alleged Al Qaeda leader with the same name. After Obama took office, his attorney general, Eric Holder, promised to significantly limit the use of this controversial legal doctrine. Holder vowed never to use it to “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency of the United States Government.”

    • The Obama Administration’s ‘Transparency’ Is Meaningless

      In light of a year’s worth of historic revelations about government subterfuge and mass surveillance, President Barack Obama’s early promise to oversee the most transparent administration ever now seems spectacularly ill-fated.

    • False: White House press secretary says Obama is the most transparent president ever

      Let’s go over that again. The federal government claimed the power to kill its own citizens, denying them the rights to due process and trial by jury, and tried to keep that memo from ever seeing the light of day. Hey, but at least you’ll know who has been visiting the White House.

    • Whistleblowers help to keep democracy alive

      Over 30 years ago, I was in Mexico City when an electrifying story suddenly dominated all the papers. It claimed that the CIA had made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro. I was shocked. Then I reminded myself that I was in a Third World country, and this might be political propaganda. When the American press ignored it, I dismissed it. Twenty years later, we learned it was true.

    • WikiLeaks reports the FBI to Danish police

      The FBI’s meetings with a WikiLeaks defector in Denmark were illegal and the Danish authorities knew about it, the whistleblowing organization claims in a criminal complaint filed with the East Jutland Police.

    • C.I.A Release Emails on WikiLeaks Crisis Management

      Recently released e-mails shine further light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (C.I.A) late 2010 high-level meetings with New York Times and government officials centering on WikiLeaks and Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. The emails convey the difficulties that the C.I.A and numerous government agencies had in grappling with WikiLeaks’ seismic release of Collateral Murder, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and Cablegate documents. The released C.I.A emails, published by NYT eXaminer, reveal the ways in which almost a dozen Obama administration functionaries colluded to disparage WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as engaging in conspiracy to commit espionage with Manning. A number of the officials involved in these meetings with the New York Times later went on to launch campaigns to discredit other whistleblowers.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • [Rachel Marsden] Disguise for profiteering

      Billionaire Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros is an extremely concerned humanitarian who can be counted on to put his considerable bank balance where his concerns are. Lately, those concerns have included Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states; Syria; immigration rights in America; the U.S. banking system; and the Great Lakes region of Africa, where all the mining opportunities just happen to be. Perhaps he could lay off the generosity long enough for us to recover from it all.

    • It’s hard to put the scale of London’s property boom into words, so here are some charts

      You can buy a lot with £76,000 ($130,000). That’s how much the average London home has appreciated over the past year.

    • CIA hit with Michigan tax liens
    • CIA hit with Michigan tax liens

      U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for failure to pay more than $20,000 in withholding tax…

    • Bitcoin the comic debuts at CoinSummit

      Bitcoin Comic1At the recently concluded CoinSummit in London, a preview of a comic was unveiled that’s sure to intrigue Bitcoin enthusiasts and common people alike.

    • The Myths of Big Corporate Capitalism

      Large corporate capitalism is a breed apart from smaller scale capitalism. The former can often avoid marketplace verdicts through corporate welfare, strip owner-shareholders of power over the top company bosses and offload the cost of their pollution, tax escapes and other “externalities” onto the backs of innocent people.

      Always evolving to evade the theoretically touted disciplines of market competition, efficiency and productivity, corporate capitalism has been an innovative machine for oppression.

      Take productive use of capital and its corollary that government wastes money. Apple Inc. is spending $130 billion of its retained profits on a capital return program, $90 billion of which it will use to repurchase its own stock through 2015. Apple executives do this to avoid paying dividends to shareholders and instead strive to prop up the stock price and the value of the bosses’ lucrative stock options. The problem is that the surveys about the impact of stock buybacks show they often do nothing or very little to increase shareholder value over the long run. But they do take money away from research and development. And consumer prices rarely, if ever, drop because of stock buybacks.

    • Costly copper: Dangerous scrap metal thefts on the rise

      Metal thefts, which have caused blackouts and traffic accidents, are on the rise in states across the country. A new Ohio state law aims to tackle this problem by regulating scrap yards.

    • How capital captured politics

      In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global historical importance of what was agreed upon.

    • Argentina’s Default Debacle: Sign of the Slow Unraveling of the Global Financial System?

      Kirchner’s problems are the most pressing. On June 16, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a decision of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordering Argentina to pay in full the claims of a group of creditors, who hold roughly $1 billion in Argentine bonds, about 1 percent of the country’s outstanding debt. The investors, led by New York billionaire Paul Singer and politically well-connected in Washington, acquired the tag of ‘vultures’ by buying up the bonds at steep discounts and refusing to accept an agreement signed by around 92 percent of bondholders. U.S. courts have also ruled that banks operating in New York must disclose information about non-U.S. assets of the Argentine government.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Public trust has been damaged [GOP rant]
    • Wikiwashing: how paid professionals are using Wikipedia as a PR tool

      How I long to have a Wikipedia entry to call my own! It would be a sign I’d arrived, that I’d made it. It would surely help my career no end. And even though I know myself better than anyone, it is unlikely I could write my own as I’d find it impossible to adhere to the site’s strict rules on neutrality. I’d want my entry to be a gleaming eulogy to all my wonderful achievements. Until yesterday, I might have sneakily paid someone to professionally write or edit a page for me. But thanks to a recent change in Wikipedia’s terms of use, I can’t do that any more, unless my ghost writer declares an interest. I’ll just have to labour on in non-Wikipedia obscurity.

    • Senate Tackles Citizens United As 2014 Spending Hits Record Highs

      Sixteen states, more than 500 communities, two million Americans, and now the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, are on-the-record in support of amending the constitution to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Citizens United v. FEC and related cases and to restore the power of people in elections.

  • Censorship

    • US Reporter Ronan Farrow Calls On Internet Companies To Censor Speech Of People He Doesn’t Like

      Well this is fascinating. Ronan Farrow, the well-known MSNBC reporter who is also an attorney and former State Department official (and, at times, a subject of much parental speculation), apparently has come out in favor of blatant censorship. Following in the dangerous footsteps of Joe Lieberman, Farrow is apparently angry that internet companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter aren’t taking down accounts that he believes are used by terrorists.

    • Murdoch calls for ISPs to be liable for users’ activities

      News Corporation Australia has used an inquiry by the nation’s Senate into a proposed Australia/South Korea free trade agreement to suggest internet service providers become copyright enforcers.

    • Hysteria versus Impunity

      It is a mystery why the Observer failed to name Lord Greville Janner as the paedophile abusing boys from care homes. The facts of this particular boy’s continued molestation, and the existence of the letters to him from Janner, have been public knowledge for decades. I can only presume that Britain’s appalling libel laws, which function solely to protect the very rich from exposure of their misdeeds, are the reason for the Observer’s reticence. My own view is that the gross suppression of freedom of speech in the UK has been insufficiently considered as a major reason for the impunity which the wealthy and the powerful have enjoyed for so long.

    • Techdirt Sued For $10 Million In A Frivolous Lawsuit For Posting An Earlier Frivolous Lawsuit

      Roughly a month ago, I wrote about Kenneth Eng’s doomed copyright lawsuit against author L’Poni Baldwin for allegedly stealing his techno-dragon ideas. As was pointed out by the judge in the lawsuit’s dismissal, copyright doesn’t apply to ideas — only to the expression of ideas. And Eng’s ideas (and expression thereof) weren’t sufficiently distinctive from a host of other technology-meets-mythology creations. The judge did, however, allow Eng to re-file his complaint, both to refine his copyright claims and to actually make some sort of actionable claim.

    • Guaranteeing freedom of the press is the real issue

      In May, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a subpoena issued to New York Times reporter James Risen. Federal prosecutors have demanded that Risen reveal the name of a CIA agent who was a source for his book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • If Cage has broken the law, let it be prosecuted; this reeks of the police state

      Cage has also worked with the victims of mistreatment and abuse to expose what it sees as British government participation in the secret world of rendition and torture. It also spoken out against the UK’s anti-terrorism laws, saying they are draconian and target Muslims. But it insists it has always conducted its activities legally and clearly states it is opposed to the killing of innocent civilians.

    • On the Nature of Our Regime

      I’m afraid I don’t have an obvious alternative to “libertarian” that would encompass this third pillar of our present order, and distill the entire structure’s complexity to a single word or phrase. But the third pillar’s heft and importance is too substantial to ignore, and there are all kinds of elements of our age — from “too big to fail” to the Department of Homeland Security, from the design of Obamacare to the nature of our coalition politics, from the political forays of Mark Zuckerberg to the fate of Brendan Eich — that don’t make sense if you can’t sense its shadow, or recognize how big a role it’s likely to play, going forward, in keeping the whole edifice standing up.

    • Target security officer fired after reporting shoplifting

      Dallas Northington spent nearly eight years working for Target in loss prevention, roaming the stores and scanning the surveillance cameras. In an episode at the Leesburg Target store in May that he said was typical, a man was allegedly captured twice on video shoplifting, and Northington responded as he said he always did: He called the Leesburg police, made a report and provided them the videos of the two incidents.

    • Khadr loses bid to have war-crimes convictions tossed out

      Canada’s Omar Khadr has lost his bid to have his war-crimes convictions tossed after the U.S. government argued a previously secret memo that raised questions about the legal underpinnings of his prosecution was irrelevant to his case.

    • The Drone Memo Makes It Clear: Khadr’s Conviction Lacks Legal Foundation

      As readers of this blog will know, after the Second Circuit released a redacted copy of the OLC’s “drone memo,” those of us who represent Omar Khadr filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (“CMCR”) arguing that it undermined the validity of his convictions. In due course, the government filed its opposition to the motion, which somewhat predictably argues that the OLC’s analysis is not relevant to the case. As we were about to file a reply, the CMCR denied the motion to vacate, albeit “without prejudice.” Thus, the issue is not going away any time soon.

    • Letter: Omar Khadr’s rights

      Since 2008, the Harper government has been guided by unthinking support for Guantanamo and the military commissions, a blind eye to the violation of Khadr’s legal and human rights, willful ignorance of the law and disregard for decisions by the Supreme Court.

    • Provincial jail term for Khadr serves justice

      Khadr’s case is one where wrong has been piled onto wrong over the years, both in Canada and the United States, during the long war on terror. Khadr’s father’s close al-Qaida connections rightly angered Canadians, who felt betrayed. But under international convention, child soldiers in these circumstances are to be rehabilitated, not sent to jail. When all is said and done, this will go down as a dark chapter in our federal government’s willingness to ignore long-held principles of juvenile justice, as well as its obligations to international conventions on children and the rule of law.

    • Roman Seleznev kidnapped by US agents, whisked away by CIA rendition flight

      The father of Roman Seleznev has offered a $50,000 reward for information regarding the arrest of his son in the Maldives, including any video or other evidence supporting the reports and witness statements that it was American agents that arrested, questioned and then transported his son to Guam. The case is another example of the United States and the CIA flaunting international laws and forcing countries to allow them free reign.

    • Woman, step daughter ‘tortured to death’

      The dead bodies of a young married woman and her stepdaughter were found from their house here in village Jurian village.

    • Emails show UK Government is keeping renditions evidence from Parliament

      UK Foreign Office documents concerning the use of British territory by CIA ‘rendition’ flights show that ministers have been keeping key evidence in their posession from MPs, it has emerged.

    • UK police have details of CIA torture flights despite past denials of logs – report

      Crucial logs that confirm the British overseas territory Diego Garcia was involved in the CIA’s black site rendition program as a secret prison have been passed to the UK police for further investigation, despite earlier claims that there were no logs.

    • Spy Novel Derailed CIA Career, Agent Claims

      CIA agent claims the agency derailed his career because he wrote a novel that cast The Company in a negative light…

    • Pope Francis: ‘About 2%’ of Catholic clergy paedophiles

      Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.

    • Ex-solicitor general urges Butler-Sloss to stand down from child abuse inquiry
    • Tory child abuse whistleblower: ‘I supplied underage rent boys for Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet ministers’

      Whistleblower and former Conservative party activist Anthony Gilberthorpe says he provided child prostitutes for a sex and drugs party with top politicians

    • Gang Turned Muslim Denied Right to Fly
    • Where’s the Outrage Over Spying on Muslim Civil Rights Leaders?

      Michael Ratner: NSA and FBI spying on the lawful political activity of Muslim Americans, as revealed by The Intercept, is no different than the surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and other black civil rights leaders

    • The Illusion of Democracy in America. Rebellion Across the US against “Phony Democracy”

      Have we reached that point? Many think so. A recent poll found 74% of Americans agree the broken political system needs to be fixed first. The poll found that “corruption of government by big money and frustration with the abuses of the political ruling class: incumbent politicians, lobbyists, the elite media, big business, big banks, big unions, and big special interests unites Americans.” And, “the battle lines of the new political order are emerging. When presented with the proposition that ‘the real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but mainstream America and the ruling political elites,’ over 66% of voters agree.”

    • All They Will Call You Will Be Detainees

      One of corporate journalism’s bad habits is framing international stories on the premise that news is what happens to the US. There is no better recent example of this than the story of tens of thousands of children fleeing Central America for refuge in other countries, including, but not limited to, the US. With some exceptions, this story is covered as the US’s “border crisis,” and the latest installment in our supposed immigration debate, with the children little more than nameless symbols of a troubled policy.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Internet Titans Defend Net Neutrality in an FCC Missive

      In recent weeks, there have been several notable developments related to the future of Internet freedom and access. Now, The Internet Association, a consortium that includes Facebook, Google, Twitter and Netflix, has a comment filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission demanding better enforceable net neutrality rules for boh wired and mobile networks.

    • Help us protect an open Internet
    • Kickstarter, Etsy And Dwolla All Speak Out On Net Neutrality And Why The FCC’s Plan Is Dangerous To Innovation

      During this open comment period for the FCC’s proposed rulemaking on net neutrality, it’s been great to see hundreds of thousands of comments go in to the FCC on the matter. It’s also been fantastic to see that a number of innovative startups have decided to speak out on how important an open and free internet is for being able to build their businesses, to innovate and to compete on the modern internet. They also point out that the current plan from Commissioner Tom Wheeler would put that all at risk. Here are three interesting ones worth mentioning.

    • Comments on net neutrality top half a million as FCC deadline looms

      THE UNITED STATES Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has received over half a million comments about its proposals for the future of net neutrality in that country.

      Ahead of tomorrow’s deadline, a total of 647,000 comments have been sent to the commission expressing views on the future of the internet.

    • Tell the FCC: Net Neutrality is crucial to free software

      The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to be convinced that Net Neutrality is worth saving.

      The agency has asked members of the public, along with industry leaders and entrepreneurs, to tell it why Internet Service Providers should be banned from traffic discrimination. This comment window is one of the best opportunities we’ve had to make an impact. Comments are due July 15, 2014. Submit your statement in support of Net Neutrality right away using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s free software commenting tool.

      Net neutrality, the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, should be a basic right for Internet users. It’s also crucial for free software’s continued growth and success.

    • CNBC’s Net Neutrality Conflict Of Interest Hidden On Closing Bell

      On the July 14 edition of CNBC’s Closing Bell, host Kelly Evans interviewed Harold Ford, Jr. and John Sununu about the FCC’s latest proposed regulations, introducing them as “Broadband for America honorary co-chairs,” without explaining what Broadband for America was. Both Ford and Sununu insisted that the Internet should not be treated as a public utility and claimed that new regulations would slow Internet speeds and innovation.

    • Internet giants press for net neutrality in FCC filing

      An association of more than two dozen technology companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix urged the Federal Communications Commission on Monday to create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules for wired and mobile networks.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Bolivia Shows How To Dismantle Corporate Sovereignty Provisions In Treaties Without Losing Foreign Investment

      As Techdirt has reported, corporate sovereignty chapters in TAFTA/TTIP and TPP have emerged as some of the most controversial elements in those agreements. Meanwhile, countries that already have bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are looking for ways to get rid of them in order to avoid the loss of sovereignty they imply. One nation that already has considerable experience in this area is Bolivia. A new report provides fascinating background information on exactly how it has gone about this (pdf), with valuable lessons for others looking to do the same.

    • Democrats Push to Delay Trans-Pacific Partnership Until After Elections

      Democrats in Congress are pumping the brakes on negotiations of a multinational trade pact, worried that a significant bloc of their base would leave the party should the agreement be approved before the November elections.

    • Copyrights

      • Dotcom prepares to drop ‘political bomb’

        Kim Dotcom says he will drop a political bomb just days out from the election and prove Prime Minister John Key misled the public.

        Mr Key has always maintained the first he knew about Dotcom was a day before the raid on his mansion. But Dotcom says that is not true and he has hired the Auckland Town Hall.

        Dotcom says he will drop a political bomb, which goes right to the core of Mr Key’s credibility, five days out from the September 20 election.

      • The Internet’s Own Boy: A movie everyone online should see

        The Internet’s Own Boy is a documentary about computer prodigy, Internet pioneer, and activist hacker Aaron Swartz, but even if you’ve never heard of Aaron Swartz you should see this movie. The story has implications beyond the short life of one man. Through the passion, drama, and tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s life The Internet’s Own Boy describes issues that impact everyone online: censorship, government surveillance, free speech, transparency, and net neutrality.

      • Neil Young becomes PonoMusic CEO after the Kickstarter gold rush

        Musician steps up to run digital music company that he founded, ahead of launch for gadget and high-def downloads store

      • Dotcom’s Baboom “Overwhelmed” By Indie Music Support

        Kim Dotcom’s emerging music service Baboom is inviting would-be investors to grab a piece of what should be an intriguing startup. Speaking with TorrentFreak the senior advisor handling the offer says that not only is it tracking “exceptionally well” but the company is being “overwhelmed” with support from the global indie music industry.

      • Suing File-Sharers Doesn’t Work, Lawyers Warn

        The American Bar Association has released a detailed white paper advising the Government on how to tackle online piracy. The lawyers recommend several SOPA-like anti-piracy measures including injunctions against companies hosting pirate sites. At the same time, however, they advise against suing file-sharers as that would be ineffective or even counterproductive.

      • News Corp Wants to Hold ISPs Responsible For Piracy

        With its significant entertainment business interests, media giant News Corp has been making its feelings known in the ongoing piracy debate. After targeting Google last month the company says it wants the government to tighten up the law in order to hold Australian ISPs responsible for the actions of their pirating subscribers.

07.13.14

Links 13/7/2014: KDE Activity Surge

Posted in News Roundup at 9:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

07.12.14

Links 12/7/2014: CrossOver, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 2:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • BitPay’s Copay Open Source Multisig Wallet Launches in Beta

    We’ve heard a bit on BitPay’s doings in the open source field, and today, the company announced on their blog that they’ve got a multisig, open source wallet in the works called Copay.

    We’ve heard of Copay previously, but now it’s got its own website at Copay.io, and has launched in beta.

  • BitPay is pleased to announce Copay, an open source, multi-signature wallet
  • BitPay Releases Beta for Open-Source, Multi-Signature Bitcoin Wallet
  • Asciidoctor coder writes less documentation

    I’ve been working as the documentation manager for the Koha project for six and a half years, so when I saw that Sarah White would be talking about documentation at OSCON this year I knew I wanted a chance to interview her.

  • Understanding the metrics behind open source projects

    What do the numbers behind an open source project tell us about where it is headed? That’s the subject of Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona’s OSCON 2014 talk later this month, where he looks at four open source cloud computing projects—OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and OpenNebula—and turns those numbers into a meaningful analysis.

  • LinkedIn behind the scenes: How open source software can transform a company – and the world

    Open source also helps the branding of our engineering team – the fact that we work on world-class technical problems, the scale of the problems we have to solve, and the complexity of the features that we’re building. Being able to showcase our technology to the world is something that hopefully is going to be attractive to world class engineers around the world, which we would love to have work for us.

  • Metaswitch unveils open source NFV project Calico to bolster cloud datacentres

    Networking technology vendor Metaswitch Networks announced the formation of Project Calico, which will focus on developing an open source networking virtualisation solution it claims will help enable the implementation of large, cloud datacentre infrastructures as IP-based starts to account for the majority of network traffic.

  • Metaswitch Contributes Virtualised Network Code To Open Source

    UK-based Metaswitch Networks has given away some of its network virtualization code to the open source community, designating it as Project Calico.

    The technology integrates with OpenStack and provides the framework for orchestrated IP routing between virtual machines (VMs) and host machines, along with internal and inter-data centre interconnects. It describes Layer 3 virtualisation techniques, and is aimed at large cloud data centres.

  • As Chef gets bigger, it’s learning how to appease its open source community

    A former employee singled out the open source configuration management company for not practicing what it preaches, and as a result, Chef said it will be working on addressing its developer community.

  • Mellanox Contributes the World’s First Open Source Ethernet Switch MLAG Implementation
  • iSchool Pair Demo Open-Source Code at Labman Conference

    Two Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) information technology professionals wowed the crowd at this year’s Labman computer lab managers conference by presenting a live demonstration of their Remote Lab 2.0 software, which they recently released as open-source code.

  • CartoDB’s Odyssey.js Is An Open-Source Tool For Telling Stories With Interactive Maps

    Everything happens somewhere. That’s the logic behind Odyssey.js, an open-source tool that utilizes maps to help turn data into interactive multimedia stories without the user needing coding skills.

  • Building an Inter-University Private Cloud with Open Source ownCloud

    In late 2011, a lively discussion (we enjoy lively discussions here in Germany) among the IT managers of the publicly-funded research universities in Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW), Germany’s most populouIn late 2011, a lively discussion (we enjoy lively discussions here in Germany) among the IT managers of the publicly-funded research universities in Northrhine-Westfalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous federal state, started over a set of interrelated topics:s federal state, started over a set of interrelated topics:

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Remote Desktop Plug-in Now Supports Linux Users

        Being able to access a computer remotely, or let someone else remotely access your computer, can be an enormous convenience. It can help you retrieve a much needed presentation that you left behind while on a trip, and it can help you allow a distant user to make changes to or access your files.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • CMS

    • Introduction to 4 Open Source CMS

      A content management system (CMS is a computer application that allows publishing, editing and modifying content, organizing, deleting as

  • Funding

    • Is the IRS scheming to destroy open source projects?

      The IRS is one of the most feared and loathed parts of the federal government. It has recently been found to target political groups that don’t tow the line of the people currently in charge of the US government.

  • BSD

    • There’s Now Even LLVM Support For Pascal-86

      The latest programming language that can leverage using LLVM and its plethora of back-ends is Pascal-86, a language most Phoronix readers have probably never even heard of.

    • LLVM’s Clang Is Working Better For Building Windows Programs

      While LLVM’s Clang compiler is predominantly used on Linux, OS X, and BSD systems, the Microsoft Windows support has been a focus over the past several months and is reaching an improved state for building native Windows programs with Visual C++ compatibility.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Untapped potential? Rise of open source council web tools

      UK councils are so far failing to tap into the full money-saving potential and speed of open source web service tools, but moves are underway to address this, delegates heard at yesterday’s ‘Building perfect council websites’ conference in Birmingham.

      Although most councils still run a Microsoft-based ICT infrastructure, almost all do also now run at least some open source software, Kevin Jump, director of digital services firm Jumoo, told delegates.

      Jump is former web manager at Liverpool City Council, which migrated to open source CMS Umbraco in 2011.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Working to keep the Internet an open source

      In a nutshell, open-source is the opposite of proprietary. Consider the sale of a muffin. The person who sells you the muffin is selling you a proprietary product. The ingredients (what they are and from whence they came) are kept a secret. With open source, the person not just gives you the muffin; she also gives you the recipe and invites you to change it even more, and pass it along to the next person.

    • ‘Open source’ real estate brokerage willing to share best practices

      “We call it an open source real estate company,” he says. That’s because Go Realty not only shares lessons that agents have learned within the company, but with other companies.

    • Xiki shell Kickstarter, HummingBoard computer, and more

    • Open Access/Content

      • What is open knowledge and how do you spread it?

        Beatrice Martini shared the work she does alongside a talented group working to bring openness to the world for Open Knowledge with me earlier this year. This time she tells me what it’s like to bring to fruition an event like OKFestival 2014, organised by Open Knowledge. How does a gathering organized by one organisation (and a small team) reach out to the global ecosystem of open communities? How can participants co-create its message and mission?

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source robot is waiting for you to make it even more amazing

        It is not uncommon to hear that many people don’t like bugs. Those tiny, many-legged creatures are the source of our worst nightmares. Robots, on the other hand, are fantastic. Whether they come to us as Furby-sized companions or giant robot protector of the Earth Gundams, they amuse and entertain us to no end. So when we heard of the open source project combining insect-like parts and robotics, we timidly decided to check it out.

  • Programming

    • rest: Open Source REST Framework For Haskell

      Silk has recently open-sourced a REST framework for Haskell, called “rest”. It provides a DSL for defining REST services which can then be run in popular web frameworks such as happstack. This comes with features such as type-safe URLs, abstraction of format-type support, and a clean separation of API specification and business logic.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • FTC files suit against Amazon over accidental in-app purchases

    For most parents, seeing a random $358 charge on their credit card bill would elicit a lot of questions.

    But for the parents of the 71% of children who play mobile games such as Angry Birds or Temple Run, those seemingly random charges are becoming more common as the games allegedly trick children into buying virtual goods with real-world money.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why ABC Thought Suffering Palestinians Were Israelis

      But there’s a pretty well-established pattern of corporate media trying to paint the conflict as between equals, a type of false balance that treats the threats to Israeli lives and Palestinians lives as similar. But at times it’s much more than that; this ABC report, and others like it, foreground the fear that Israelis are dealing with as sirens warn of incoming rockets from Gaza. “Running in terror as sirens wail” is how ABC correspondent Alex Marquardt began the segment right after Sawyer’s introduction. He conveyed Israel’s view of the conflict before shifting to life in Gaza.

    • When Does the ‘Cycle of Violence’ Start?

      But determining when such a “cycle” begins is a political act. The current conflict is usually traced back to the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers on the West Bank (CNN, 7/7/14). When their bodies were found on June 30, Israel “retaliated” by attacking Gaza. The July 2 killing of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir, allegedly a revenge murder by Israeli extremists, was reported as further escalating the conflict.

    • Let’s Name the Victims on Both Sides of Israel-Palestine Clashes

      Over a three-week rescue mission to find the three Israeli teenagers, more than 700 Palestinians were arrested, with more than 400 still being held, according to Palestinian prisoner’s rights organization Addameer. Many are being held in administrative detention, an Israeli practice that holds prisoners without charge or trial set, but renewable amounts of time. At least 58 of the arrestees are former prisoners released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap; their re-arrest directly contradicting the terms of the agreement. One of these prisoners is Samer Issawi, who was released last year after engaging in a prolonged hunger strike protesting his first arbitrary re-arrest.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Just the beginning: 2 million come out fighting

      TWO MILLION people defied Tory strike ban threats yesterday to come out fighting against poverty pay — and PCS union leader Mark Serwotka warned the government it was “just the beginning.”

      Mr Serwotka rallied a sea of teachers, firefighters, council workers and civil servants in Trafalgar Square in his first major speech since recovering from heart surgery.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • NPR and the Eagerness of White Guy Sources

      NPR’s official response to the brouhaha was a memo, instructing staff to be more careful about sharing private thoughts on social media. Likewise missing the point that the problem lies in what the network does–and doesn’t do–in public.

    • ABC: Three Cheers for Walmart!

      The “economists” in question would appear to be the Boston Consulting Group, a consulting firm that advises major companies. It’s not a stretch to think that Walmart is one of them. So you might want to take those job creation numbers with a grain of salt.

      But ABC’s newscast looked less like journalism and more like PR–even including footage from a Walmart infomercial and a comment from the company’s CEO that this initiative “is not a PR thing.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • One Nation Under Surveillance
    • New German spy scandal — RT interview

      As a second Ger­man intel­li­gence officer was arres­ted for spy­ing for the Amer­ic­ans, here’s my recent RT inter­view on the sub­ject…

    • Germany Expels Top US Intelligence Official, Says It Will (Officially) Spy Back On US And UK

      Techdirt has been following the complicated German reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations about US and UK surveillance of people in that country, whether or not in high places, for some while now. Although the German public has been deeply shocked by the leaks, the German government has been keen to preserve good relations with the US.

    • Opinion: Is online privacy lost? Forever?

      What is the way forward? – Is privacy already gone forever with the war being lost… or are there still some battles that may determine better outcomes for a subset of the human population? I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. In the mean time, I continue to fight off the little voice in my head that says I need a smart phone… and I try to learn more about and utilize some of the desktop tools that make me look suspicious.

    • Emergency laws to monitor phone and internet records ‘to stop terrorists’

      David Cameron says Iraq and Syria makes emergency data laws necessary, warning: ‘The consequences of not acting are grave’

    • Here’s a challenge: Can you shun Facebook for 99 days?

      What if you are asked to perform a different kind of fasting – to log out from Facebook for 99 days?

      Do not fret as this is a challenge set out by a Dutch creative agency Just.

      Called “99 Days of Freedom”, the non-profit initiative asks whether people would be happier without Facebook.

      It asks users to give up Facebook for a 99-day period, completing anonymous happiness surveys on days 33, 66 and 99.

    • Silent Circle guns for Skype with global expansion of encrypted calling service

      SECURE COMMUNICATIONS OUTFIT Silent Circle expanded its encrypted calling service globally on Thursday, allowing people worldwide to make secure phone calls without incurring roaming charges.

      Until now, Silent Circle’s apps – which enable users to make encrypted calls, send secure messages and transfer files – had to be used by both parties, but the firm announced on Thursday that it is expanding the service worldwide, allowing users to make private calls to non-Silent Circle subscribers across 79 countries.

    • Surveillance Stitch Up to be Rushed Through

      Pirate Party spokespeople are always ready to give a lively, informed, and often provocative view on the issues of the day. Whether it’s tech politics, civil liberties, the EU, local issues or anything else we’ll have something to say.

    • “Emergency” Data Retention: What I told my MP

      The European Court of Justice ruled in April that blanket data retention, which the government requires of ISPs, is illegal and ignores the fundamental rights to privacy and data protection. However, rather than take the time to debate and redraft the law, they are pushing through a new Bill in record time: released today and put before Parliament on Monday.

  • Civil Rights

    • Water Damage

      The FCO claim that records of extraordinary rendition flights to Diego Garcia were destroyed by water damage is an insult to all our intelligence. The FCO is refusing to say where the records were at the time, or what else was damaged in the (presumed) flood. This is of a piece with, but much more serious than, the “accidental” shredding of all Tony Blair’s parliamentary expenses claims. It is not that they expect us to believe them – they just don’t care. They have the power, and we don’t.

    • The Worst Butt Dialing Fiasco Ever

      His wife called 911. Thirty(!) SWAT team members, with machine guns, descended on the middle school at 5 p.m., and spent three hours searching it for the mysterious gunman. “At one point three news media choppers hovered overhead.”

    • The Absence of Liberalism

      The overruling of a European Court judgement to assert individual privacy, and the anti-democratic rushing of emergency legislation through parliament where no emergency exists, are the antithesis of liberalism. So of course is the jettisoning of all the Lib Dem manifesto pledges on civil liberties.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC got over 647K comments on net neutrality, will it listen to ‘The People’?

      FCC chief, Tom Wheeler, today tweeted that they have received over 647k net-neutrality comments on the FCC website, as it reaches the July 15 deadline. Reply to these comments are due September 10th. There is an anger in the US against Wheeler’s proposed ‘fast lane plan’ which would destroy the net-neutrality as we know it.

  • DRM

  • Copyrights

    • UK Lawmakers Favor Legalization of MP3 and DVD Copying

      Earlier this year the UK Government promised to legalize the copying of MP3s, CDs and DVDs for personal use, but the changes have yet to pass. The entertainment industry and some lawmakers have voiced concerns over the plan, but the majority appears to be in favor of decriminalizing format shifting.

07.10.14

Links 10/7/2014: LXLE 14.04 in Headlines, Plasma 5

Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Issue with disc on Linux User & Developer 141

    Summary: Linux Mint 17 – the live-booting distro on the disc for 141 – does not install properly. Please download a newer version of the ISO from the Linux Mint website.

  • Desktop

    • Will upcoming Chromebooks have reversible USB ports?

      The answer to your USB worries was presented in April this year in the name of the reversible USB dubbed USB Type-C. Unlike the present USB, the new Universal Design Bus design will be smaller and symmetrical. So you no more have to worry about the orientation and can smoothly slip it inside the slot without fumbling. Now the latest news is that Chrome developers are reportedly working on supporting the new USB. So suggests the recent commits to the Chromium source code.

    • Free software to assist indigenous access to computers

      But he adds that it is important to make sure there are no compatibility problems between GNU/Linux and hardware, which is often a problem due to its complexity, and to ensure automatic updates are available.

    • No, Linux is not dead on the desktop

      I hate having to wade through these kinds of articles, but it’s necessary to answer them lest the perception take root that “Linux is doomed!” and all the usual blather that goes along with such nonsense. Every single time I read one of these articles my eyes roll into the back of my head and various profanities burst from my lips.

      The article focuses on the corporate desktop, but as we all know there has been a revolution going on inside companies as people move their focus from desktop computers to mobile devices. And Linux has been a part of that via Android and Chrome OS since the very beginning. And let’s not forget that we’ll soon have phones and tablets coming from Canonical that run Ubuntu.

      The author acknowledges the transition to mobile, but then downplays it and focuses back on Windows on the desktop. Well, if Windows is still the main OS being used on the desktop then who’s fault is that exactly? I hardly think that the users can be blamed for that, it’s much more likely the IT department that is making those kinds of decisions.

  • Server

    • Why is Docker the new craze in virtualization and cloud computing?

      It’s OSCON time again, and this year the tech sector is abuzz with talk of cloud infrastructure. One of the more interesting startups is Docker, an ultra-lightweight containerization app that’s brimming with potential

      I caught up with the VP of Services for Docker, James Turnbull, who’ll be running a Docker crash course at the con. Besides finding out what Docker is anyway, we discussed the cloud, open source contributing, and getting a real job.

    • DESKTOP CONTAINERS – THE WAY FORWARD

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel Testing Philosophy

      Almost all Linux kernel developers, if not all, are very active Linux users themselves. There is no requirement that testers should be developers, however, users and developers that are not familiar with the new code could be more effective at testing a new piece of code than the original author of that code. In other words, developer testing serves as an important step in verifying the functionality, however, developer testing alone is not sufficient to find interactions with other code, features, and unintended regressions on configurations and/or hardware, developer didn’t anticipate and didn’t have the opportunity and resources to test. Hence, users play a very important role in the Linux Kernel development process.

    • Linux Foundation SysAdmin Andy Grimberg Loves New Tech and Snowboarding

      I’ve been doing some form of systems administration since my freshman year in college (1994) and I’ve been making my living as only a sys admin since 2000…

    • Linux Kernel 3.14.12 LTS Brings Updated Nouveau and Radeon Drivers

      Now that the 3.14 branch of the Linux kernel has been declared LTS (Long Term Support), which means that it will be supported for a few years with patches, updated drivers, and general improvements, a new maintenance version is available for download.

    • The future of realtime Linux in doubt

      In a message about the release of the 3.14.10-rt7 realtime Linux kernel, Thomas Gleixner reiterated that the funding problems that have plagued realtime Linux (which he raised, again, at last year’s Real Time Linux Workshop) have only gotten worse.

    • DisplayPort MST Code Starts Lining Up For Linux 3.17, Other DRM Changes

      The DisplayPort MST support code that’s been in the works for several months is starting to land with the Linux 3.17 kernel that will be officially entering development stages next month.

    • try out experimental linux kernel features with the kernel-playground

      Josh Boyer (Fedora Kernel team member & FESCo Nominee) recently announced the new kernel-playground COPR repo. Basically, this is a repo for users that want to try out some new and shiny (yet not ready for primetime) kernel features in Fedora, such as the overlayfs “union” filesystem, and kdbus (the in-kernel d-bus replacement).

      It is important to note that this new kernel-playground is an “unsupported” kernel, designed for developers of the new features they include, as well as curious users that want to test out these bleeding edge features, and that.

    • To Linux Foundation SysAdmin Ryan Day, Elegance is the Best Tool

      System administrators keep our lives and work seamlessly humming. They are the super heroes who often go unnoticed and unrecognized only until things go wrong. And so, leading up to SysAdmin Day on July 25, we’re honoring the hard work of our Linux Foundation sysadmins with a series of profiles that highlights who they are and what they do.

      Ryan Day is one of nine Linux Foundation system administrators, and is part of the global team that supports developers working on collaborative projects. Here he describes a typical work day, talks about his favorite tools, his nightmare scenario, and how he spends his free time, among other things.

    • 3.16 Fedora ARM kernel status

      So 3.16 is has quite a few new features in terms of newly supported devices, also some what surprisingly this blog post will be out before 3.16! In terms of new device support all the SoCs listed here are exciting for a number of reasons for Fedora ARM. Aarch64 (ARM64) makes it’s first debut with support of real hardware although we’ve actually had kernel support enable for it for some time in Fedora even if only usable on the glacial Foundation emulator.

      The 3.16 release is also very likely to be the kernel that ships with Fedora 21 GA and with the Alpha due in about a month we’re starting to polish and test all the platforms and devices we want to support for GA.

    • Linux 3.16 File-System Tests On A Hard Drive

      In complementing the earlier Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD (and the later Btrfs testing), here are benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs from the Linux 3.15 and 3.16 kernels being compared from a traditional rotating hard drive.

      As has become common practice at Phoronix, for each new development kernel we end up benchmarking the most commonly used, mainline Linux file-systems on a hard drive and solid state drive. With the SSD results out there in the aforelinked articles, in this article are results using a high-performance Western Digital HDD from a Core i7 Haswell system running Ubuntu and comparing the mainline stable Linux 3.15 kernel against a daily snapshot of Linux 3.16 from this week.

    • Linux Kernel 3.10.48 LTS Improves Support for Radeon GPUs
    • Linux Kernel 3.15.5 Is Now Available for Download

      The fifth maintenance release of the current stable Linux kernel package, version 3.15, was announced last evening, July 9, by none other than Greg Kroah-Hartman. The release introduces numerous improvements and bug fixes.

    • Linux Kernel 3.4.98 LTS Brings Updated Wireless Drivers and Better PowerPC Support

      Linux kernel 3.4.98 LTS is here to introduce better support for the PowerPC (PPC) computer architecture, several updated wireless, Radeon, ACPI, SCSI, and USB drivers, improvements to the CIFS and NFS filesystems, as well as networking enhancements, especially for Bluetooth and Wireless.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • 11 ways LXLE Linux will make you forget all about XP

      Windows XP’s long run may have finally come to an end, but that doesn’t mean your XP-era hardware has to go too. No indeed: There are numerous options available in the Linux world, and one shining example is LXLE.

    • LXLE 14.04 review – new paradigms

      LXLE has been kicking around for a while now and, for a supposedly lightweight distro, it’s looking fearsomely feature-packed right now. Having said that, it’s hard not to love LXLE, as it’s treading the line between resource efficiency and usability pretty well, and is borderline addictive when it comes to the DE itself. The clue’s in the updated acronym; rather than standing for ‘Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension’, as it did in the days before Lubuntu LTS releases, when LXLE was around to fill that niche using the LXDE desktop environment, it’s now pitched as the ‘LXDE eXtra Luxury Edition’.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Here comes the first release of Plasma 5

        The KDE Community has announced the first release of Plasma 5. It’s a release candidate so it’s meant for testing and preview purpose, like the developer preview of Android L. The final release will be announced next week so this is the last chance for testers and developers to find issues and get them fixed before the release.

      • KDE’s Frameworks 5 released
      • Firefox Might Finally Be Moving Closer To Better KDE Integration

        For KDE desktop users unhappy with the level of integration with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, the situation might finally be changing.

        There’s been a bug going back to early 2002 about properly integrating Mozilla with KDE, “Mozilla has ‘Windows Integration’ on win32, I believe it should have such a thing on KDE as well (gnome folks, feel free to file your own bug). We should at least provide an icon in the KDE menu, perhaps we could even tell KDE that some file types can be opened with Mozilla…” That bug, Mozilla Bug 140751, has been open for the past twelve years and finally now might be inching closer to being resolved.

      • Looking Forward To The Future Of KDE Frameworks 5

        While KDE Frameworks 5 was just released this week, there’s already new features and functionality sought after for future revisions of this modularized set of next-gen KDE libraries.

      • Exclusive interview with Nitrux founder Uri Herrera

        Nitrux SA. is well known for their themes and icons and recently they also collaborated with the KDE Community for the default icons of Plasma Next. Nitrux does much more than just themes and icons and in this exclusive interview, the founder and main designer of Nitrux, Uri Herrera talks about it.

      • KDE 4.14 Branched, Mix-Release Planned For December

        KDE 4.14 code is getting ready while being worked on for a December debut is a mix of KDE4 and KF5 application code.

        The KDE 4.14 software code has been branched from master for all KDE Software Compilation repositories (sans KActivites that’s being left out for a 4.14 release). In terms of what’s next for the master code-base, while before a potential “KDE 4.15″ release was talked about, it was agreed upon by KDE developers that 4.14 will be the last of KDE Applications that exclusively use KDE Platform 4.

      • Qt Creator 3.2 beta released

        We are happy to announce the Qt Creator 3.2 beta today. So you can already check out the many improvements we have done for the upcoming 3.2 release, and, not to forget, give us feedback on what we have so far. We mostly concentrated on stability and improvements, so no completely new platform supported this time, sorry Wink . I’ll randomly highlight some of the changes here, but you should probably check out our change log as well for a more thorough overview, and just download the binaries and try it for yourself.

      • On Plasma 5

        This is the first release of a new chapter of Plasma, in which a new release method will be used to celebrate the diverity of the KDE community.
        We used to have a 6 months “big release” of all things KDE, called in the beginning just “KDE”, then “KDE SC”, but this release is not that anymore, because KDE grown a lot in the past years, is not just that anymore, and “a single release of everything” scales only so much….

  • Distributions

    • SparkyLinux 3.4 GameOver — a Linux distro for gamers

      Historically, Linux and gaming were like oil and water — it did not mix. For the most part, this was just accepted as a fact of life. Quite frankly, this was OK as users were more interested in maintaining their box and chatting with other Linux users anyway. However, as time went by, jealousy of DOS, and then ultimately Windows, definitely grew as more and more amazing games were released for Microsoft’s operating system. Even Linus Torvalds himself dual-booted Linux and DOS to play Prince of Persia.

    • Operating System U: a new Linux, Wayland based operating system

      Enter Operating System U, OSu. It’s not Ohio State University with a lower-case “u.” The “u” is for you, the one reading this, and the one wishing to control your operating system. The standout thing about OSu is how much customization it gives to the user. That’s our mission and our statement. (It also happens to be our mission statement, but I’m done with little jokes).

      OSu is Linux-based. It boasts a Wayland display server, which I love because it squashes clunky xorg extensions and renders directly. We’re also looking at starlight and customization through GUI’s.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch may be our last hope for a Linux tablet

            My daily computing experience is pretty “tablet-heavy.” My Nexus 7 is my constant companion. In fact, for the better part of the last year, I’ve done the vast majority of my actual work on this little Android tablet of mine.

          • Codio: A Multi-language IDE with Its Own Ubuntu Instance

            Codio is a browser-based IDE supporting a large number of languages and including its own Ubuntu instance to test the code.

          • Ubuntu Touch Apps Pass 100k Downloads Despite No Phones on Sale

          • Flavours and Variants

            • 5 reasons to switch to Deepin 2014

              Deepin 2014 is the latest version of Deepin, a Linux desktop that’s based on Ubuntu Desktop. Deepin 2014 is actually based on Ubuntu 14.04. It was released yesterday.

              Deepin has always been on my list of the best desktop distributions, and Deepin 2014 just vaulted it to the top-2 of that list. The aim of this post is to show you why that happened and why I highly recommend that you should take Deepin 2014 out for a spin. I guarantee that you will like practically all it brings to the table.

            • Tech-Friendly: Bring new life to an old PC with Linux Mint

              Linux Mint (Xfce) has a simple interface and is pretty perky, even on old computers. The installer will install Firefox, the LibreOffice office suite, and a variety of programs for managing e-mail, videos and music; perfect for a backup Internet surfing and word processing computer. The installer will ask if you want to install third-party utilities — choose “yes” for compatibility with websites that use Adobe Flash and other multimedia software. Depending on your computer, the installation should complete in fewer than 30 minutes.

            • Ultimate Edition 4.2 Final

              It is with great pleasure I give you Ultimate Edition 4.2 Lite.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Renesas – Virtual platform and fast Linux porting for new custom ASIC
    • Linaro’s Android Open-Source Project Ported to ARMv8-A

      Following the recent announcement of the Android L Developer Preview supporting the 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture, Linaro, the collaborative engineering organization developing open-source software for the ARM architecture, has announced that a port of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) to the ARMv8-A architecture has been made available as part of the Linaro 14.06 release.

    • Automotive Grade Linux Released: An Interview With Dan Cauchy

      On June 30, the Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project released the first version of its open source AGL stack for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). Based on Tizen IVI, AGL adds a stylish user interface and various applications written in HTML5 and JavaScript. The AGL stack, which is partially compatible with the somewhat similar, open source Linux GENIVI Foundation spec, supports multiple hardware architectures.

    • Phones

      • Ballnux

        • Samsung Nixes Knox: The Android Security Saga Continues

          Granted, Google has been updating handset issues at a quicker pace – particularly when it comes to security patches, via Play Services –and so far, the telcos have not played spoilers. But remember: Google has not initiated a move to push an entirely new OS directly to users except to those who own Google’s telco independent Nexus brand devices. Keep in mind that there’s a big difference between updating a feature or security patch and producing an entirely new OS. OS updates typically up the Kernel and the radios. It will be interesting (and historical) if the telcos continue to stay out of the way.

      • Android

        • Afraid of the NSA? A new secrecy-cloaking mobile app lets you make, receive private phone calls; available on Android, iOS

          Silent Circle, a company known for mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, is introducing on Thursday a secrecy-cloaking phone service that lets customers make and receive private phone calls for as little as $12.95 a month.

        • Android DLP projector doubles as a mobile hotspot

          Sprint has launched the “LivePro,” an Android-based, ZTE-built DLP projector and 3G/4G mobile hotspot shareable by eight WiFi-users, with a 4-inch display.

          ZTE showed off the LivePro at January’s CES show as its “Projector Hotspot“, and it’s now coming to the U.S. via Sprint under the LivePro name. On July 11, Sprint will begin selling the device for $450, or $299 with a two-year contract. Of course, the real money is in the data plans, which start at $35 per month for 3GB of data.

        • Early Reviews of Android Wear Reflect Promise for the Platform

          This week, following much talk about it coming out of the Google I/O conference, there are a lot of discussions arising about Android Wear and whether it will become the next big mobile platform. Some early smartwatches running the open platform are appearing, and some reviewers are really liking them. Just as you once didn’t carry a smartphone, and then did, are you on the cusp of owning an open source smartwatch?

        • Security company says your data can easily be recovered from ‘wiped’ Android phones

          Software maker Avast is calling the security and thoroughness of Android’s factory reset feature into serious doubt today. The company says it purchased 20 used Android smartphones online and set out to test whether personal user data could be recovered from them. Each phone had been reset prior to being sold, according to Avast, so in theory the test should have failed miserably. But that’s not what happened.

          Using widely available forensic software, Avast says it was able to successfully pull up over 40,000 photos previously stored on the phones. Many of those featured children, and others were sexual in nature with women in “various stages of undress” and hundreds of “male nude selfies.” The company also managed to recover old Google search queries, emails, and texts. All told, Avast successfully identified four original phone owners using data that those people falsely assumed had been permanently deleted. Users must overwrite previous data to truly get rid of it, Avast says.

        • LG G Watch Rides In on 1st Android Wear Wave

          Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

        • Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 2012 get unofficial Android L

          Developers have cobbled together unofficial builds of Android L for the Nexus 4 and the first Nexus 7 model.

          Google’s approach to the release of Android L is a little different to that for previous versions of its OS: for the first time, it’s offering developers a preview version and a subset of source code for the forthcoming operating system.

        • CM11 M8 finally released with Android 4.4.4 and ‘Heads Up’

          So last month we saw the release of CM 11 M7 as a Snapshot. Again, those of you who are new to CM a ‘Snapshot’ is a nearly-stable release. This type of release is considered safe-to-use by CM and believed to contain all features and all bugs worked through. It is worth remembering being a Snapshot this does mean it is possible some unknown bugs may still exist although these will be minor. Now already we are seeing the next major release available today. CM 11 M8 was released this morning and offers Android 4.4.4. As the release has only just been made public the devices supported are rather limited although the variance will grow quite quickly knowing CM.

        • Odroid hacker board jumps to faster octacore SoC

          The Odroid-XU3 runs on a 5V 4A power supply, and once again features four energy monitoring chips for tracking the Big.Little cores. A plastic enclosure and an active cooler are available, along with numerous optional modules. OS support has been boosted to Android 4.4.2 and Ubuntu 14.04, available with full source code.
          Schematics will be posted upon shipment, and community support is available via the Odroid project. The quad-core Exynos4412 based Odroid-U3 board came in at third place after the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black in our recent Top 10 Hacker SBC survey.

        • Android mirroring is now available on Chromecast

          Chromecast users can now start ‘mirroring’ their Android devices over the WiFi. Google has pushed an update for Chromecast, which adds this new feature to the device. The feature was already there on Apple TV and the star Android developer Koushik Dutta (Koush) also offered mirroring for his ‘AllCast’ app.

        • Volvo Cars add Android Auto to its next generation cars

          Volvo Cars has joined the Open Automotive Alliance to make the Android smartphone platform available to drivers through its new ground breaking user interface. This move brings together one of the world’s most progressive car companies and the world’s most popular smartphone platform, developed by Google.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Metaswitch launches cloud datacentre open source project
  • Metaswitch Launches Open Source Project Calico

    Metaswitch Networks today is contributing the initial code base for Project Calico, an open-source solution that enables the implementation of large, standards-based, cloud data center infrastructures. The code is available to the worldwide community of network operators, software developers and systems integrators at Project Calico.

  • Distrowatch Disappearance, RentOS 7 Coming, and OSS Lost

    In tonight’s Linux news, Distrowatch.com went offline for much of Sunday. Serdar Yegulalp looks at the upcoming CentOS7, the first since joining hands with Red Hat officially. Bruce Byfield says Open Source has lost its way and is now wandering aimlessly with no purpose. And that’s not all.

  • OPEN SOURCE INITIATIVE (OSI) ANNOUNCES NEW AFFILIATE MEMBER
  • Building, deploying, and distributing software with JFrog

    Founded in 2008, JFrog provides open source solutions for package repositories and software distribution aimed at a new breed of developers. With a focus on open source and the burgeoning cloud scene, JFrog has garnered their fair share of awards and press from industry heavyweights and communities alike.

  • Top 5 open source customer relationship management tools

    Creating and maintaining relationships with customers can be a challenge. But it’s also essential for a business’ survival and growth. To maintain those relationships, a CRM system is a must. And CRM is one area in which open source shines brightly.

  • Open-Source Software: Bad For Non-Profit Organizations? [article now removed for being a trap]

    For non-profit organizations, open-source/free software might not actually be the best solution according to a director at a non-profit software solution provider.

  • Tech Giants Use Open Source to Get You to Cough Up for Other Products

    Most open source software projects come to life because someone is trying to scratch an itch.

    Some group of coders or a team of academics or a fast-moving startup will build some software that solves a very real computing problem, and then they’ll open source the code, sharing it with the world at large. Maybe, the coders are trying to help the larger world of software developers, believing that others will find the code useful too. Maybe, they’re trying to get more eyes on their code, hoping that others will contribute bug reports and fixes to the project. Or maybe, as is typically the case, they’re trying to do both.

  • The open source movement at IIT Bombay

    The activities of FOSSEE revolve around creating educational content around open source software and encouraging the introduction of courses on open source in syllabi of universities, apart from promoting it through publicity initiative.

  • DevOps is inherently open source, discuss

    DevOps (developer-operations) was born out of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) by its very nature because it aims to address the “incongruous nature of integrating traditional LOB applications” with other applications.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • PostgreSQL: What’s behind the pull of this open source database?

      Postgres continues to ride high in the database popularity stakes — and the new features appearing in its next release will only add to that appeal, according to Dave Page, a member of the open-source project’s core team and EnterpriseDB chief architect.

      The open-source relational database — full name PostgreSQL — for which EnterpriseDB sells apps and services as well as its own commercial fork, currently sits in fourth place in the DB-Engines rankings, behind Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server.

    • New release of OpenStack Swift brings storage policies

      Object storage with OpenStack Swift gained an important feature in yesterday’s 2.0 release with the addition of storage policies. John Dickinson, Swift Program Technical Lead, called storage policies the “biggest thing to happen to Swift since it was open-sourced four years ago.” So what exactly are storage policies, and how do they affect the way data is stored in an open source cloud?

  • Databases

    • SolidFire: SSD Offers Huge Performance Boost to MongoDB

      MongoDB is a popular open source “NoSQL” database platform, offering functionality not available in traditional, relational databases, such as MySQL.

      SolidFire hopes the performance increases offered by its all-flash storage solution will attract enterprises aiming to maximize the speed of their MongoDB deployments. “Enterprises choose to deploy NoSQL solutions for a variety of reasons,” said SolidFire founder and CEO Dave Wright. “Our customers often cite performance, scalability, and ease of deployment as key factors in choosing to deploy MongoDB. The YCSB Benchmark demonstrates that utilizing SolidFire’s all-flash array with MongoDB allows businesses to achieve their objectives regardless of type of workload.”

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Honda Smart Home is now open source

      Earlier this year, Honda introduced its Smart Home, a home on the University of California Davis West Village campus that, among other things, produces more energy than it consumes. Interest in the Smart Home has been high, and due to that demand, Honda has announced that its Smart Home is now open source.

    • Lamassu announces Rakia, New Open-source Back-end System for ATMs

      Bitcoin ATM’s have been popping up in cities all over the world during the last 12 months and so are companies that manufacture these machines. Like any new technology, however, the company that keeps their products on the cutting-edge and provides a wide range of services will be the most successful. Bank ATMs often allow not only withdrawals but additional services such as direct deposits and bill paying as well.

    • Open storytelling to boost literacy

      I’m in love with open source, but I’ve been dating open content for many years. You would think these two would jump at the chance to cross-promote, but too often that doesn’t happen. Open source claims it has a headache. Open content says it’s too busy. Really, a headache? Really, too busy?

    • Open Data

  • Programming

    • It’s better to share with functional programming

      Katie Miller is a Developer Advocate at Red Hat for the open source Platform as a Service, OpenShift, and co-founder of the Lambda Ladies group for women in functional programming. She has a passion for language and linguistics, but also for the open source way.

      I have a Red Hat sticker on my laptop that simply says: It’s better to share.

      In this interview, Katie shares with me how she moved from journalism to a job in technology. Also, how she got introduced to functional programming, the Haskell programming language, and how open source is part of her daily life.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

07.07.14

Links 7/7/2014: CentOS 7 Released, Linux 3.16 RC4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Lamassu Brings Rakía, a Brand-spanking-new Open Source Back-end System for their ATMs

    Lamassu which has revolutionized the in-person acquisition of Bitcoin via a streamlined thirty-second process earlier introduced a modular two-Bitcoin ATM system; has now brought in Rakía, a brand-spanking-new open source back-end system for its ATMs. The decision is aimed to continue providing A better experience for its clients.

  • Out in the Open: The Crusade To Bring More Women to Open Source

    Recent reports from Facebook and Google confirmed what we’ve known all along: the giants of tech have a diversity problem. But in the world of open source, the problem is even worse.

    According to a survey conducted last year, only about 11 percent of open source contributors are women. Meanwhile, women account for 23 percent of all computer programmers and 39.5 percent of web developers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  • Oculus Acquires RakNet Middleware & Open-Sources It
  • Announcing Oculus Connect, RakNet Open Source, and E3 2014 Awards

    We’re thrilled to announce Oculus Connect, a developer conference that brings together engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world to share and collaborate in the interest of creating the best virtual reality experiences possible.

  • Oculus VR acquires game-networking engine RakNet — and makes it open-source

    The company announced today that it is acquiring RakNet, which specializes in a software-development engine for connecting games across an online network. RakNet, which is also the name of the technology, enables studios to quickly add voice chat, network patching, and secure connections to their products. Oculus VR, which is building its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, notes that thousands of indie developers and major companies like Everquest developer Sony Online Entertainment and Minecraft studio Mojang licensed the tech for their games. Oculus isn’t just purchasing RakNet, it is also making it open source, which means other developers can see the code, add to it, and use it for free.

  • Mellanox Contributes the World’s First Open Source Ethernet Switch MLAG Implementation

    Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Ethernet Switch MLAG functionality is now available as open source as part of the community driven Open Ethernet program. MLAG provides the ability for a host to connect to two standalone switches with a pair of load balanced bonded interfaces. Now open and freely available, the MLAG functionality allows for faster failure recovery. The open source code is available at https://github.com/open-ethernet/mlag and can be installed and run on a Linux host.

  • Open Xchange: The internet wouldn’t have happened without Linux

    Open Xchange acts as an open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office 365. With more companies moving to open source, we ask Mr Laguna if he believes that Microsoft’s proprietary system is viable.

  • Open source tool could sniff out most heavily censored websites

    Georgia Tech researchers enlist owners of websites — and website users — via Encore project

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox’s Share Falls as Chrome’s Continues to Rise

        While Mozilla was mostly in the headlines during the early part of this year for news related to Brendan Eich and for the company’s newfound focus on smartphones and Firefox OS, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: In April, Google Chrome moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications.

  • Funding

    • From zero to Spark Core in two years

      As for open source, I think that the electronics world has been proprietary for a very long time, but open source is taking its hold, and will eventually play a huge role, just like it does in software. The Internet is built on open source underpinnings like GNU/Linux, and I hope that soon the hardware world will be too.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.3-RC3 Now Available

      The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

      This is expected to be the final RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

    • FreeBSD 9.3 RC3 Released
    • FreeBSD 9.3 RC3 Released with Several Bug Fixes

      Glen Barber has announced the immediate availability for download of the third and probably the last RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 9.3 operating system.

    • The Linux Kernel Might Use FreeBSD’s Capsicum Security Framework

      A Linux kernel developer is working on porting FreeBSD’s CAPSICUM security framework over to the Linux kernel.

      In announcing his work at the end of June that’s now being discussed amongst kernel stakeholders, David Drysdale wrote, “The last couple of versions of FreeBSD (9.x/10.x) have included the Capsicum security framework, which allows security-aware applications to sandbox themselves in a very fine-grained way. For example, OpenSSH now uses Capsicum in its FreeBSD version to restrict sshd’s credentials checking process, to reduce the chances of credential leakage. It would be good to have equivalent functionality in Linux, so I’ve been working on getting the Capsicum framework running in the kernel, and I’d appreciate some feedback/opinions on the general design approach.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Unifont 7.0 Update Covers The Unicode 7.0 Basic Multilingual Plane

      Following last month’s release of Unicode 7.0, the GNU Unifont project is out with an open-source glyph for each printable code point in the Unicode 7.0 Plane 0 standard.

    • Unifont 7.0.03 Released
    • Wanted: A Purpose for Open Source

      Free and open source software is a way of life for thousands of people. Yet, as we trudge the endless treadmill of release upon release, there’s one question you don’t hear much any more: where is open source heading? Or, perhaps, should it have a purpose at all?

      Not too long ago, the answer to either question was obvious. The goal was to provide a free alternative to proprietary systems. But progress got stalled at a good-enough ninety percent or so, and looks likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.

  • Licensing

    • Open source’s identity crisis

      For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn’t simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one.

      It’s a matter of life and death.

      Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn’t analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she’s been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend.

    • IRS: Yorba Open Source Software Project Must Pay Taxes

      Should open source software projects that give their products away freely have to pay taxes? Although the answer to that question traditionally has been “no,” the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may be changing its mind, if the case of the Yorba desktop Linux software project is an indication.

    • The IRS wages war on open source nonprofits

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Why OpenStack matters, celebrating four years, and more

      Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

    • Intel Wants Open-Source Analytics

      Intel wants to drive big-data analytics toward open-source software accelerated on its processors.

      In a first step in that direction, it is working on an upgrade of its version of Hadoop that blends in features from the distribution provided by Cloudera, a leading open-source supplier of the code. Meanwhile it has already started working with customers to determine what sort of analytics apps they want on top of Hadoop and how to accelerate them on x86 chips.

    • Secure Bitcoin Hardware Wallet With Open Source Smart Card: PRISMicide Crowdfunding Campaign

      PRISMicide, the first security solution based on open source smart cards, protects the privacy of its users… starting with their Bitcoin wallet.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • North Korean and North American tensions could create the Cold War II

      These statements are reminiscent of Cold War propaganda and show how North Korea is neutralized in American eyes: North American media interprets their responses as madness.

      Even if the republic’s response to this film is threatening, they haven’t threatened war, something which The Huffington Post and several other prominent media outlets reported. The Huffington Post even quotes The Christian Science Monitor, saying that Kim himself threatens “all-out war” upon release of the movie, though there aren’t any sources cited to prove this.

    • DHS’s Risky Airport Alerts

      When DHS releases details to the worried public, it also releases them to jihadists.

    • Blackwater’s Death Machine

      I’m sorry Moniem and fellow Iraqis participate in this farce. They are hoodwinked. There will be no justice, merely damage control. And what of countless other unjustified killings, which will not even see the semblance of prosecution? Blackwater on one hand, Obama, with his hit list and targeted assassination on the other, and in between, CIA-JSOC paramilitary operations geared to regime change, together constitute the package of Obama’s liberal humanitarianism, bringing democracy to the ignorant at gunpoint.

    • UK Trains Nigerian Security Forces on Crisis Response Strategies

      The United Kingdom Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBR) has trained the Nigerian security forces on crisis response strategies.

    • Editorial:New rules needed for use of drones

      Thirteen months ago, during a speech at the National Defense University, President Barack Obama promised greater transparency and new guidelines for drone use as part of his counterterrorism strategy.

      So much for promises.

      An authoritative, bipartisan report released recently by the Stimson Center charged that the U.S. use of drones threatens to destabilize legal and moral norms worldwide. It also chastised the Obama administration’s failure to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of drone use and questioned drones’ effectiveness.

    • Reining In the Drones

      Targeted killings by drones may be justified at times against terrorist threats to the United States, but the “blow back” from unintended civilian killings in places like Pakistan and Yemen is becoming “a potent recruiting tool for terrorist organizations,” the report noted. The panel, which had experienced specialists from the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations, concluded that there was no indication that drone attacks on suspected terrorists had advanced “long-term U.S. security interests.”

    • Israel Air Strikes Kill Seven Gaza Militants
    • Five Gaza militants killed by Israel drones: medics
    • Six Israelis held over ‘revenge’ killing of Palestinian teen

      Israel has arrested a group of Jewish extremists suspected of kidnapping and murdering a Palestinian teenager in a revenge killing, triggering violent clashes spreading from east Jerusalem throughout Israel.

      Tensions were already peaking early Monday in the south after two Israeli strikes on Gaza left five militants dead, following continuous mortar and rocket fire at southern Israel.

    • Two Palestinians killed by Israeli drone in Gaza
    • Another two Gazans killed by Israeli drone
    • Israel launches deadly airstrikes in Gaza
    • Nine Palestinian killed after Israeli deadly attacks
    • Israel’s Lieberman and Netanyahu to end political deal: Reports

      Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is gearing up to dissolve the Likud-Beitrinu ruling partnership in Israel, local media reported on Monday.

      Lieberman is scheduled to hold a press conference at 12pm local time (10am GMT) at which he is widely expected to officially terminate the political deal.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • WikiLeaks, Bringing The First Amendment To The World
    • Two Years Later, WikiLeaks’ Assange Still Pushing For Freedom, Transparency

      While Americans celebrated the adoption of the Declaration of Independence over the weekend, there were people around the globe, including in the United States, celebrating the birth of a man who is fighting for his freedom and the freedom of information: Julian Assange, who turned 43 years old on July 3.

      Widely known for his roles as co-founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, Assange sought to create an organization that aligns with his belief that a transparent government reduces corruption and in turn creates a stronger democracy, which explains why WikiLeaks has released more classified intelligence documents than all other media organizations around the world combined.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • The Right to Be Forgotten

      The “right to be forgotten” in European law has now taken the place of what people in the past used to call “the forgiveness of sins”. Formerly it was believed that old offenses, especially when these did not result in prosecution or suit, were somehow effaced by the passage of time. “Long dormant claims have often more of cruelty than of justice in them”, says Halsbury’s Laws of England.

    • Google Restores Some Links To Articles Removed In ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Mess

      Last week, of course, there was a lot of attention around Google alerting publications that some of their stories had been removed from its index over “right to be forgotten” requests, following a dangerous European Court of Justice ruling. Various publications in the UK complained about some of the removals, and requested if there was any sort of appeals process. The BBC was initially told that there was no such process, though the Guardian claimed it was looking for ways to appeal.

    • Hollywood Studios Tried To Add File Sharing Sites To New Zealand’s Child Porn Blacklist

      We just wrote about the UK’s filtering systems blocking access to 20% of the world’s top 100,000 sites, even though only about 4% of those host the porn Prime Minister David Cameron seems so obsessed with blocking. Also noted in that story was the fact that many “pirate sites” are being blocked at ISP level via secret court orders.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Rulebook needed for U.S. drone strikes

      To understand why U.S. drone strikes outside traditional battlefields make so many people so uneasy, look to the past and look to the future.

      Start with the past. In 1976, exiled Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier was driving to work in Washington when a car bomb planted by Chilean agents ripped through his vehicle, killing Letelier and his young American assistant. From the viewpoint of Chile’s ruling military junta, the killing was justifiable: Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s regime considered itself at war with leftist insurgents and viewed Letelier as a security threat.

      U.S. authorities saw things differently, of course: They condemned the bombing as an assassination. The FBI opened a murder investigation, and a Senate committee launched an inquiry into illegal foreign intelligence activities on U.S. soil.

    • Sri Lanka: Hate verses in Islam’s religious text is the main cause of global Islamic issues

      Muslims the world over must introspect. There were no Americans, US State Department or CIA when the spread of Islam took place violently with the core mission to ‘kill infidels” or non-believers. Islam via sword cut across entire continents and destroyed entire civilizations. These natives did not even have time to defend against the attacks. Undeniably, the acts were not in self-defense and the use of sword were inspired by the Quran. It is these factors that raise the existential fears of non-Muslims once more. The fear of history repeating itself prevails when 95% of violent conflicts around the world involve Muslims even if these conflicts are mischievously ignited by Western Christian countries. These conflicts are drawn using Koranic verses by numerous Islamic groups. That Islamic groups/Islamic leaders uses verses from the Koran to instill mayhem and draw Muslims into their fold raises the question of how far Islam is being manipulated by Islamic leaders as well as how far the West is manipulating this weakness. That these groups have no shortage of followers and these groups are heavily funded and are able to easily manipulate moderate Muslims makes any to wonder how many Muslims are able to go against the tide without submitting themselves to their religion and those who are leading them. What needs to be said is that Muslims leaders and the West are manipulating Islam’s Koranic verses because there are verses that can be manipulated. Herein lies the core issue and root cause for the violence. With no central authority to control doctrine in Islam, a proliferation of bizarre religious edicts has resulted in chaos the world over.

    • UK airport terror measures: Passengers warned to keep mobile phones and laptops charged or lose them at security for US-bound flights

      Passengers hoping to fly to the US this summer will be turned away at airport security checkpoints if they have forgotten to put their mobile phone on to charge the night before.

    • TSA will not allow passengers with discharged cellphones onboard
    • Devices with flat batteries banned from transatlantic flights

      THE UNITED STATES Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has announced security measures that might cause serious problems for air travellers who forget their chargers.

    • Foreign airport scrutiny focuses on electronic devices

      Don’t bring dead phones or laptops to those overseas airports for flights heading to the USA.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Pew Report: 65 percent believe Internet will be more open in the future

      A research report published by the Pew Research Center revealed that among 1,400 experts, 65 percent believe that the Internet will be more open by the year 2025.

      The respondents hope that, more than 10 years from now, there will be no major changes that will negatively affect how people obtain and share content on the Internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Our single market is crying out for copyright reform

        Our duty as lawmakers is to find a balance between creators and the justified interests of society. Yet that balance is changing. Transforming technology is changing how people use and re-use information. And disrupting a longstanding legal framework.

      • Tough New Piracy Law Sees No Takers in More Than a Year

        For years Norway was pressured to do something drastic against pirates and 12 months ago this week the country introduced tough new legislation. But one year on and not a single file-sharer has been inquired about nor has a single site blocking request been filed. What’s going on in Scandinavia?

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