03.06.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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At the beginning of last year I tested the CompuLab Trim-Slice, which was a great ARM-based Linux desktop for the time. While the hardware now shows its signs of aging in the fast-paced ARM world, modern Linux distributions can still be loaded up on the platform.
The Trim-Slice is built around the NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC, which sports a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor clocked at 1.0GHz. The device has a built-in drive and supports SHDC expansion, bears 1GB of RAM, and 802.11n WiFi. With the Tegra 3 quad-core hardware now being widespread that’s multiple times faster than the Tegra 2 and the Tegra 4 hardware being around the corner that’s much faster with its use of the ARM Cortex-A15, the Trim-Slice is no longer competitive from a hardware point of view.
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Following two years of collaborative development, the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) this week announced the availability of v1.0 of MirrorLink, which defines methods for implementing interoperable phone-centric car connectivity.
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Desktop
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Linux Lord Linus Torvalds is thinking about making Google’s Chromebook Pixel his main computer – once he installs a proper Linux distribution on the machine, that is.
Posting on Google+, Torvalds lauded Google’s newest creation, writing “… the screen really is that nice” [his emphasis] and that “I think I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less.”
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Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chromebooks, those cloud-centric notebooks, often carry low price tags that won’t generate much partner profit — at least not at first glance. But if you take a closer look at the Google Apps ecosystem, you’ll see at least five ways that channel partners can generate recurring revenues from one-time Chromebook sales. Here they are.
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Ready to take the plunge on a new all-in-one, but not super pumped about tackling Windows 8? You’re probably not alone, and it looks like HP’s got a solution.
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Server
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Amazon Web Services Monday reduced its prices on its lowest cost option, reserved instances, by “up to 27%.” That means a reserved instance virtual server may cost 65% less than the comparable on-demand instance running on the AWS EC2 infrastructure at $0.06 per hour.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, March 4, the immediate availability for download of the second maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.8.2 comprises arch fixes (x86 mostly), filesystem improvements (EXT4, FUSE, NFS, OCFS2 and UBIFS), sound improvements, as well as many updated drivers. Please check the official raw changelog for the juicy details.
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George Grey, CEO of the Linaro organization, gave a keynote speech on benefits of collaboration in Linux development at last month’s Embedded Linux Conference in San Francisco.
In his keynote, Grey expounded on the benefits of multiple companies collaborating to accelerate Linux development. Additionally, he explained the purpose and goals of Linaro and reported on the group’s recent accomplishments and current priorities. Watch the video below.
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Linux founder Linus Torvalds recently picked up a Google Chromebook Pixel, and the hardware left such a positive impression that he posed the question “Why do PC manufacturers even bother any more?” on his Google Plus page.
Google‘s design philosophy for the Pixel is decidedly unusual when stacked against the average portable PC. Chief among the differences is its 3:2 aspect ratio. Torvalds mentions that he “despises” widescreen displays and continues: “I don’t understand why people complain about ‘black bars’, when I can’t see why it would be any different to have ‘no pixels at all’, which is what the silly widescreen displays do.”
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Gaming on Linux is a very real thing right now, and most of that is thanks to Steam. Initially, Steam committed only to the most popular desktop distribution, Ubuntu but more recently has opened the door to others. So what do you do when you want to game in Linux and you’re using something a little less popular — at least, on the desktop?
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Not a bad deal this time around. I sure hope dungeon defenders has been fixed up though it’s launch for Linux in another bundle was riddled with show stopping bugs which is a common thing with Humble launches sadly.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Today I got many questions about KWin and Mir, how it affects us, what it means for our Wayland plans and so on. I did not want to write anything about it because I think there is nothing to write about, but before answering the same question again and again I think it’s better to put down a few lines here. Wiki will be updated once Wayland wiki is updated so that we have something to link to.
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There are some news in the Plasma, Lancelot, Shelf, QML components, blah blah whoop whoop land. As some of the people have noticed from the previous screenshots, I’ve begun working on a QML port of Lancelot.
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In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributors Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Richard Hughes has been working on a new package manager for the GNOME desktop that he’s dubbed “GNOME Software.” With it, and the right plugins, a user might install software from just about any repository.
It may not surprise folks that GNOME Software “currently uses” PackageKit. PackageKit has had the goal of providing one package manager for them all and, in their words, “to make the process suck less.”
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To me it seems, and with the Gnome Shell release this has become even more pronounced, that the situation around Gnome is like the situation around political parties in Czech Republic. They mostly lost touch with reality and majority of people either lost their interest in them, became their haters or their (almost) unconditional adorers. Pointing out an issue equals hating now (and yes there are some exceptions). I have lost faith. Sadly. In both. Does it need to happen to Fedora as well? If we gnomeifficate anaconda, we might end-up like this as well. Users aren’t as dumb as we tend to make them. People don’t want grey lives with nothing to look forward to, with nothing to choose from. With computers treating them as monkeys. I don’t want an environment where I cannot choose between grey two-colour symbolic icons and colorful normal ones. Is reaching out specifically to women making them feel equal?
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GNOME 3.8 is still a few weeks from release, but with the latest beta, users can view the new GNOME Classic for the first time. The replacement for the retiring fallback mode, GNOME Classic uses extensions to provide something of the GNOME 2 experience — but it is a strangely limited experience that fails to match Linux Mint’s Mate or Cinnamon, as though the GNOME project is reluctant to provide a “classic” experience at all.
GNOME Classic is not included on the beta Live CD. You might find the beta in development directories for distributions such as Fedora or openSUSE, and the option of compiling from source is always available.
However, the easiest way to view it is to download the latest version of Ubuntu 13.04, then use the command sudo add-apt-repository to add ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 and ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3-staging as sources.
Then running apt-get update followed by apt-get install gnome-shell gnome-shell extensions should add GNOME Classic to the selection of desktops when you log-in. Both these Launchpad sources are in rapid development, so you might have some unexpected problems (in my case, the keyboard stops working if the screen is locked).
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A new development version of the GVFS software has been announced yesterday, March 4, bringing various fixes, some new features and the usual translation updates.
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Over the last couple of months there have been a number of discussions on the Arch boards about the forum policy of only providing support for Arch Linux, culminating in this long thread about Archbang users (login required) being denied support and having their threads summarily closed. As it emerged in the discussion, there seem to be two separate issues at play here; the question of Arch-derivatives using the Arch brand (logo, colours and even the forum style sheets), and how the wider community of GNU/Linux distributions are treated on our boards.
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The latest version of Puppy Linux could easily win best of breed; it’s got all the convenience and user-friendliness you would expect from its bloodline, but this Precise Puppy also possesses whippet-like speed. That’s impressive when you consider that it boasts an expanded software repository. Like its predecessor, it’s also a very portable option.
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New Releases
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Proxmox Ve is an Open Source project developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Austria under the auspices of the Internet foundation of Austria (IPA) and it’s released under the GNU General public license 3. It is a solution based on Debian 6 Squeeze at 64 bit, which duly “customized”, allows to create a virtualization environment of type “bare metal” based on OpenVZ and KVM technologies.
Proxmox Virtual Environment, today announced the release of version 2.3. The version brings new compelling features like KVM live backup technology as well as the integration of the Ceph RBD (RADOS Block Device) as storage plugin.
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Gentoo Family
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For once you have tasted Gentoo you will compile the kernel with your eyes turned red monitor-squared, for there you have been and experiencing the raw power of Linux. There are some days I want to go back to the early ages of Linux, some days I want to use top notch packets and bleeding-edge software, but today I will debug — for this is Gentoo Bugday !
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I just wanted to post a quick blog entry thanking everyone who joined the first day of our inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit today. Overall we didn’t see many glitches in our plan of how to run the event, and we also gathered some fantastic feedback for things we can improve and extend upon next time.
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Not too long ago, Mark communicated the vision for Ubuntu and Unity for 2013 as “[...] Unity in 2013 will be all about mobile – bringing Ubuntu to phones and tablets [...]” and my team is responsible for taking Unity to these hardware platforms.
What you should expect to see during this year is an overhaul of Unity in order to power a wide variety of display sizes (think phone to tablet to desktop to TV to…), input methods (touch screens & on screen keyboards, traditional keyboards & pointer devices, voice, and whatever else Tony Stark makes us think of [*]), CPUs & GPUs, external peripherals and everything else we expect from a modern OS.
Looking closer at the problem ambitious goal, we had to take a few interesting decisions how we possibly would get to where we want to be.
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Canonical’s decision to develop Mir, their own display server not derived from X11 or Wayland, hit many as a big surprise today. Canonical previously committed to Wayland in a future Ubuntu release but now it turns out that for months they have secretly been rolling their own solution behind closed doors.
It will be interesting to see how the Mir situation plays out on Ubuntu, but already Canonical has once again disgruntled upstream open-source developers. Aside from end-users being surprised by this decision to no longer pursue Wayland, the X.Org and Wayland developers themselves were taken for a ride.
Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland/Weston, has posted to his Google+ page about the Canonical Mir announcement.
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After Canonical announced they are building their own display manager to replace X and to squash the Ubuntu dreams of Wayland fans, they also announced Unity Next, a new session-level shell implementation build on Qt and QML.
When Unity was first introduced back in 2010, people didn’t like it. It caused an uproar and a lot of users were not ready to adopt a new way of navigating the operating system.
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In addition to X.Org and Wayland developers criticizing Canonical on Google+ about the Mir display server, there was a colorful discussion about this new open-source project on the Wayland IRC channel.
Shared via this forum post is a copy of the #Wayland IRC channel that took place with exchanges was Chris Halse Rogers “RAOF”, he’s the only Canonical employee that participated in the discussion, who works on X for Wayland and is one of the Mir Canonical developers. Participating in the IRC exchange on the Wayland side were Kristian Høgsberg “krh”, David Airlie “airlied”, Daniel Stone “daniels”, and other Wayland stakeholders.
Chris Halse Rogers, the Canonical employee, was quick to joke around that “It’s [Canonical's] turn to pull a systemd!” He admitted that he knew internally about Mir and that’s his reason for his “lack of work on the wayland system compositor branches.”
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Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.
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The Ubuntu Touch operating system, which is scheduled for October release on a range of smartphones and tablets, will struggle to find a niche in a crowded mobile marketplace.
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The Ubuntu phone represents a new ecosystem for mobile devices, but the company behind it says that it won’t be primarily focused on Africa when it launches.
Canonical, founded by billionaire Mark Shuttleworth, plans to launch the device to the developed markets of the US and Europe first.
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The news yesterday that an Australian company called Intermatrix has begun offering pre-orders of the first dedicated Ubuntu tablet has already made waves in gadget circles – but many raised questions about the device’s legitimacy.
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In November 2010 Canonical committed to using Wayland in the post x11 world. Mark Shuttleworth had said, “There are issues with Wayland, but they seem to be solvable, we’d rather be part of solving them than chasing a better alternative. So Wayland it is.”
Despite that public support for Wayland Canonical secretly started developing a display manager without communicating it to Wayland developers. It was a U-turn from that commitment as the company is now ‘chasing an alternative’. Canonical has announced that they are working on Mir, it’s own display manager which competes with Wayland instead of contributing to it and making it better.
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Phones
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Ubuntu, Firefox, Tizen, Sailfish, WebOS, Nokia Series 40, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone want a piece of the pie, but it won’t be a cakewalk
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Ballnux
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Like the home of the US government’s gold reserves, Samsung’s KNOX project is all about keeping intruders out. Samsung’s version, however, will not protect precious metals, but business data in mobile device storage. KNOX, which was unveiled today, is based on SE Android, the Android version of SELinux that was originally developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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These screenshots mainly confirm that Samsung’s next generation Galaxy S will indeed have the much hyped Smart Scroll and Smart Pause features. The screenshots also confirm that the Galaxy S IV will feature a Full HD 1080p panel. It also looks like that Samsung is keeping some UI elements from the Galaxy S III but we are looking forward to see Samsung’s upcoming Nature UX 2.0.
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Samsung Electronics said Wednesday that it plans to introduce a 5.9-inch handset in the latter half of the year to solidify its leading position in the rapidly-growing “phablet” market.
”Samsung is working on introducing a new phablet using a 5.9-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen,’’ an official told The Korea Times on condition of anonymity.
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Android
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Owners of Verizon’s 4G LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset may soon receive an update to the latest version of Android, weeks after other Galaxy Nexus devices received it and fully six months after the Verizon model got its last official update.
Twitter user @WinDroidGuy was the first to spot the update package on Monday, which so far is only available as a downloadable Zip file that must be flashed to the device by hand.
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The next development version of the CyanogenMod’s Jelly Bean spin has been released, and supports many new phones along with the Nexus family
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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An Ubuntu-powered tablet is not something that folks would camp out for, but this does not mean we should not pay closer attention to such a tablet. The Intermatrix U7 is an Ubuntu tablet which has been touted to be the “first of its kind in the world”, hailing from Australian manufacturer Intermatrix. Just what kind of hardware does the Intermatrix U7 pack underneath the hood? For starters, it is said to come with a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex A9 CPU, coupled with a quad-core Vivante GC1000+ GPU, and accompanied by 1GB RAM, 16GB of internal memory, a 7″ IPS capacitive touchscreen display as well as cameras in front and at the back.
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After almost three decades of development, open source software has firmly crossed over into mainstream use. Companies understand the unique value derived from software developed through open communities and are welcoming its use in mission critical settings throughout the enterprise.
Companies that adopt open source are in a prime position to contribute back to the open source communities on which they depend. For example, most of the Linux kernel is developed and maintained by employees from companies like IBM and RedHat. However, corporate culture in many companies (and particularly in small businesses) tends to lean strictly toward consumption of open source and away from contribution. For example, in a recent survey of the Liferay community we discovered almost 75% of companies that responded do not reward or encourage open source contribution.
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What is known as ZIP to most of us, is actually the DEFLATE algorithm, and Google has made it slightly better.
The search giant announced Zopli today, which is a new compression algorithm that is compatible with existing DEFLATE decoders, and produces slightly smaller files at the cost of increased CPU load during compression.
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Twitter has open sourced a Java library for its Streaming API. The Hosebird Client (hbc) supports OAuth and automatic reconnections with appropriate wait periods and Twitter says it has been “battle-tested in production” by its internal teams.
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Web Browsers
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I must confess, I was neither surprised nor disturbed by last month’s announcement that the Opera web browser was switching to the WebKit rendering engine. But perhaps I’m in the minority among geeks on this topic.
The anxiety about the possibility of a “WebKit monoculture” is based on past events that many of us remember all too well. Someday, starry-eyed young web developers may ask us, “You fought in the Web Standards Wars?” (Yes, I was once a Zeldi Knight, the same as your father.) In the end, we won.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, “The Cloud.” When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, “let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud.”
Then, finally, the concept started to solidify into offering specific services or entire software applications as a commodity removed from the server infrastructure. Honestly, I think that was the intent from the beginning, but it took several years before anyone really implemented anything useful in, “the cloud.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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When I think back, I can’t remember my first involvement in the Koha community. I remember talking to Chris Cormack on Instant Messenger nearly everyday before ever really communicating with the community has a whole. I remember trying to find a job working with Koha when it was time for me to move on from my first job, but I still don’t remember really being involved in the community. I read a great post by Siobhan Mckeown about participating in the WordPress community and I highly recommend reading it, but I thought maybe I should do a Koha variation for those who want to get involved.
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BSD
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PC-BSD, the popular desktop FreeBSD-based operating system that’s rather friendly towards conventional end-users, has now become a rolling release platform.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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You see, Pete is not only motivated by what open source and open thinking can do to change our world, he is moved by it. He tell us that his passions change every few years, but always revolve around open source.
Right now, he’s working on an open source project called: Smarter Safer Better, a study and research (what he calls, neuro-hacking) on trust. Read more about his work on the subject: What They Don’t Teach You in “Thinking Like the Enemy” Classes and Mind Control.
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In addition to Norton’s revelation that the prosecution seemed surprised when she first mentioned the Guerilla Manifesto, that seems to be another significant revelation implicitly included in her article. She’s not the source of whatever Googlegroup conversations the government got. At least according to the government, someone else turned this material over willingly.
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Hacker Aaron Swartz is dead. It is reported that he hung himself.
I’m having some real trouble with the way this story is being spread. Very early on, accusatory fingers got pointed in two directions:
(1) Swartz allegedly “wrestled with depression”, a vague suggestion that he was killed by some impersonal (but psychologically devastating) illness.
(2) Swartz was driven to suicide by a mean, self-promoting prosecutor and her accomplices in the administration of MIT.
In either event we’re encouraged to regard his death as a kind of martyrdom for some vaguely specified “information wants to be free” agenda. (This may or may not be how he himself thought of dying; it doesn’t matter to my point.)
I hate this popular telling of the story because is it completely ignores the middle aged male svengalis who brought the pretty 13 year old boy to the dance of tech industry celebrity, only to turn their back on him, defame him, and even drive him out of a job as soon as the blush was off the rose.
Going down his Wikipedia page and adding some notes of my own:
At the very crest of the dot-com boom there is Philip Greenspun, emerging millionaire. The company he founded was building “community backed” web sites for clients, just before the big crash. That company, ArsDigita, spun off a publicity generating competition with cash money prizes encouraging teenagers to crank out their own “community backed” web sites.
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Programming
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The developers of Eclipse Orion have announced that version 2.0 of the web-technology-based editor and development platform has been released. Eclipse Orion 2.0 focused on making the editor technology easier to consume by other projects; library dependencies have been removed, the process for embedding the Orion editor has been simplified, and the Orion Shell has been enhanced.
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Standards/Consortia
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So, to summarize: Google forces others to use open standards which they do not support themselves.
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Security
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It’s only March, but 2013 has not been a good year so far for Oracle Java security. On the negative side, Java has been repeatedly shamed and blamed for being at the root cause of big name exploits. On the positive side, Oracle is continuing to swim upstream issuing fixes as rapidly as it can.
Late Monday, Oracle’s upstream swim continued with its fifth major update to Java this year for security fixes. Java 7 Update 15 provides two fixes for vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild today. Both vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable without user authentication, and both carry the highest possible CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) rating of 10.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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If you’ve checked out the news these past few (or many) months, you’ve probably noticed some news about drones. Drones used by the CIA to vaporize suspected terrorists. Drones used by the United States military. Drones that deliver food. Drones used by cops. Drones possibly violating the US Constitution. Drones protecting wildlife. Drones in pop culture. Maybe this has left you with some burning questions about these increasingly prominent flying robots. Here’s an easy-to-read, nonwonky guide to them—we’ll call it Drones for Dummies.
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I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.
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Seven Lib Dem rebelled to support public interest test amendment
Ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw also backed the legislation
Chakrabarti: ‘History teaches that politicians abandon ancient legal principles at their peril’
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Hacking Team’s software was allegedly used by repressive regimes to track down citizens for torture. We ask their lawyer Eric Rabe to explain
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The US government has the right to use military force on American citizens, even at home – but only in “extraordinary circumstances,” the attorney general has stated in a letter to Senator Rand Paul.
Paul had threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, US President Barack Obama’s pick for CIA director, “until [Obama] answers the question of whether or not the President can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on US soil.”https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/309174502129029120
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General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
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Cablegate
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In a cable dated April 3, 2006, Mexican cardinal Juan Sandoval appears worried about left winged leaders in Latin America, and asks for Bush’s “help”.
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Over two years ago, in January of 2011, Amnesty USA told me they were “investigating” if Bradley Manning qualified as a “Prisoner of Conscience”. They told me they weren’t sure about his motivations and they’d have to look at his employment contract. I was then dismayed to see that the LA Times editorial board, hardly a revolutionary group, came out with a strong denunciation of Manning’s barbaric pre-trial detention before Amnesty had made any public statement in his defence.
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I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.
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Julian Assange has confirmed that WikiLeaks still holds classified United States government documents that it is yet to publish.
However the transparency website will not release this material during the court martial of its source, US Army private Bradley Manning.
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New Delhi: Whistleblower website WikiLeaks on Monday claimed to have in possession ‘millions’ of Stratfor mails that establish its links with Dow Chemicals, one of the prime accused in the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. Stratfor is a US-based intelligence firm.
WikiLeaks alleged that it had proof that Stratfor monitored and analysed online activities of the Bhopal activists, reportedly on Dow’s asking.
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Please consider donating to my out of pocket expenses covering United States v. Private First Class Bradley Manning.
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We discuss Private Bradley Manning’s motives for leaking thousands of classified US documents.
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It’s the first anniversary of the day Jeremy Hammond was arrested for the last time. Since his March 5, 2012 arrest, he’s been in Federal custody, and currently resides in “The Hole”—solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The State Department’s recent conclusion that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands development was based on analysis provided by two consulting firms with ties to oil and pipeline companies that could benefit from the proposed project.
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That’s the question Ecojustice hoped to help answer when we undertook our latest research. What we uncovered was unsettling, to say the least. Our research showed that toxic emissions from oilsands facilities in Northern Alberta are polluting the nearby Athabasca River, contaminating a waterway that’s home to more than half of the province’s fish species.
The Athabasca River is Alberta’s longest and only major free-flowing river, and it holds ecological, cultural and commercial significance for the people that live along its shores. It is also a vital life source for many wildlife species.
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Finance
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Bill Moyers explores how America’s vast inequality didn’t just happen, it’s been politically engineered.
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Bitcoin’s value is at an all-time high again. Following the hype peak and crash in 2011, many seemed to have thought it was just another dotcom fluke. But bitcoin was much more than that, and it has returned with a vengeance – its market cap is now twice what it was in the 2011 peak, and it is nowhere near its potential, which is four orders of magnitude above today’s value.
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As sequester cuts start to bite a little harder, the Fix the Debt gang is pushing for a “grand bargain,” deep cuts to earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare in exchange for some vague promises about “tax reform.”
They may have a powerful ally in the White House. Rather than barnstorming the country demanding that Congress cancel the sequester (Representative John Conyers, Jr. wrote the one sentence bill to do this) and address our jobs deficit (now topping 9 million), President Obama seems ready to make a deal on the deficit, which is already in a steep decline.
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The same idea has been developed systematically in a number of bestsellers, from Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. There is also a more down-to-earth version that one often hears in the media, especially those of non-European countries: crisis, what crisis? Look at the so-called Bric countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, or at Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Peru, even many sub-Saharan African states – they are all progressing. The losers are western Europe and, up to a point, the US, so we are not dealing with a global crisis, but simply with the shift of progress away from the west. Is a potent symbol of this shift not the fact that, recently, many people from Portugal, a country in deep crisis, are returning to Mozambique and Angola, ex-colonies of Portugal, but this time as economic immigrants, not as colonisers?
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This week, BitCoin (BTC), the virtual cryptocurrency that is not supported by any national bank or government, reached an all-time trading record, selling at $33.22 for a single BTC.
Kim Dotcom’s cloud hosting website Mega has recently started accepting BitCoins as a form of payment, following the example set by WordPress, Reddit and countless other online businesses. But how do you begin working with BitCoins?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The BBC just said that Venezuela is a dictatorship, and the election will be close between left and right. They missed the irony. The incongruity and imbalance of the Chavez demonisation is ridiculous. Sky News did a five minute piece in which the evidence of him being evil and demented was that he called George Bush a devil and declared the age of imperialism over; he did however reduce poverty and improve housing, they added. I am not sure they left their audience with the same certainty as their presenters that he was a bad thing.
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…accusing him of “proposing destabilizing plans”
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Documents purporting to show extensive links between MI6 and the British media during the Cold War have been authenticated, a BBC documentary is to claim.
The documents, which were passed to a state-controlled newspaper in the Soviet Union and published towards the end of the 1960s, listed Fleet Street publications and the journalist or editor that MI6 had as its contact.
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Censorship
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We just recently wrote about the RIAA bitching about how Google wasn’t living up to its promise to “downrank” so-called “pirate” sites. The issue was that the RIAA could still find sites that it didn’t like ranked relatively highly in the index. Well, the folks at TorrentFreak have noticed that, at least in the UK, if you do a search for “pirate bay,” you no longer get the actual TPB website as one of the top 100 results. Of course, you do get a variety of proxies, instead, and perhaps that makes sense, given the decision last year by a court that ISPs must block access to TPB. Perhaps Google is just reflecting, accurately, that clicking directly to TPB will fail.
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Privacy
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BAE Systems has won a $127 million, multiyear contract from the National Security Agency to furnish infrastructure and software development support to the agency’s High Performance Computing Infrastructure Group, the company said March 6.
Through the agreement, BAE Systems will furnish architecture, installation and administration for a networking environment that supports multiple enclaves and high-speed data center access, the company said.
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A newly established government privacy oversight board said Tuesday that it has begun investigating the National Counterterrorism Center’s ability to scrutinize massive amount of information about innocent Americans.
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Civil Rights
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THE head of the Crime and Misconduct Commission says an “administrative error” is to blame for thousands of sensitive files relating to the Fitzgerald inquiry becoming publicly accessible.
The error gave the public access to sensitive files at the State Archives about murder suspects, secret informants, undercover agents, drug operations and police corruption.
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DRM
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The legality of unlocking one’s cell phone to run on any network has flipped back and forth in the past several years. It was deemed illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—then it was made legal by the Library of Congress in an exception to the DMCA passed in 2006. The Library chose not to renew the exemption in 2012, however, and it expired in January of this year. That inspired a petition to the White House, which a few weeks ago passed the 100,000 signature mark. The White House then promised to respond.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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David Mason (@dcm) and Heather LaGarde (@heatherlagarde) were interested in expressing open source in other ways and wanted to help spread mobile and open technologies across developing worlds at IntraHealth. They combined these two goals by remixing a song.
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The Pirate Bay (TPB) has revealed that the claim that it had been offered “virtual asylum” in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea by its leader, Kim Jong-un, was a hoax.
The world’s most popular peer-to-peer sharing resource revealed that the announcement, carried by a number of websites, was false, and made fun of the gullible readers who would think it would partner “with the most hated dictatorship in the world”.
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Missed this when it first came out, but Bloomberg ran a fantastic report at the beginning of February, highlighting how piracy and fraud were key components to helping America catapult into the industrial revolution. In fact, there are reasonable arguments to be made that if the US was not a “pirate” nation, it would not have had the kind of success that it has had as the industrial world leader. We’ve discussed some of this in the past, and have highlighted how Eric Schiff’s research showed how other countries (the Netherlands and Switzerland) industrialized by explicitly rejecting patents. The US didn’t go that far, but it did involve quite frequent copying of the efforts of others and then improving on them, without fear of repercussions.
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Send this to a friend
03.05.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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When Gus looked over the Chromebook Pixel recently, he liked the design but didn’t think much of the Pixel’s productivity potential. It’s feasible to take a Pixel and run other operating systems on it, including Ubuntu and Android.
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Linus Torvalds is a huge fan of Nexus 7, he wrote on his Google + stream how much he liked it. He was, however, not that excited about the early Chromebooks, but he did use one in kitchen (as a common PC to check calender etc).
Despite being the creator of the Linux kernel, he is a huge admirer of Apple’s Macbook Air due to it’s sleek design. He criticized PC vendors for using low res screens and cheap material in laptops.
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Pretty much everyone agrees that Google’s Chromebook Pixel is too expensive to just run the Chrome OS Web browser. But what if it could run Android tablet apps as well?
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Server
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Kernel Space
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“I hate that Microsoft has so much power in the Trusted Computing debates and how that plays out in new hardware,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. The kernel “should be about being an OS. It’s a fine distinction what constitutes ‘OS’ — always has been — but in my opinion, extending or modifying the Linux kernel to Microsoft’s whims is too big a concession.”
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Experimental RAID 5 and 6 support in the still experimental Btrfs will be one of the major new features of Linux 3.9, expected to arrive in late April. This has become apparent because Linus Torvalds has now issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.9 which, as usual, closes the Linux development cycle’s “merge window”, the phase during which the developers integrate the majority of changes for the next version. This time, the merge window, which started with the release of Linux 3.8, only lasted thirteen instead of the usual fourteen days.
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Applications
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For years, I’ve been singing the praises of BackupPC, and for servers, I still think it’s the best thing going. The problem with BackupPC, however, is in order for it to work reliably, your workstations need to be on all the time. This is especially difficult with laptops.
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Instructionals/Technical
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quickplot is a fast, interactive 2-D plotter. All it needs to do its job is a text file with x and y points in a list. If those points are longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, quickplot works like a simple GIS program, with some surprising capabilities.
This article explains how I set up quickplot to do species mapping for Australia. For most of my mapping work I use qgis and Google Maps/Earth, but quickplot is handy for quickly making simple maps and zooming in on details. With an executable size of only 453 kb, quickplot is the tiniest and fastest GIS I know.
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Games
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Seems like Linux is finally catching up with Mac OS users, at least as a gaming platform. Valve software has released some stats of hardware survey which shows Linux users have become almost double while compared to January. This considerable increase is obviously because of Steam being pushed to Ubuntu Software Center, thus making it available to more number of users.
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Valve’s survey shows Linux already accounts for two per cent of users
Valve’s latest Steam survey shows Linux is already close to overtaking Mac in terms of user base.
Steam for Linux recently left beta testing, and is now available for download through the Ubuntu store.
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2% doesn’t sound like much perhaps, but it’s worth noting that Mac users represent just over 3% of total users, despite having been supported for much longer. Trends show Mac operating systems are losing popularity while Linux is on the rise, too.
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The open source ecosystem is mostly about code. After all, sharing code is at the core of the open source ethos. But for many Free Software projects, there’s more at stake than code itself, as the development team behind the open source game 0 A.D. made clear recently when it highlighted the contributions of musical composer Omri Lahav–whose work is an important reminder that software success, in many cases, is about more than ones and zeroes.
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Just weeks after a native Linux client launched for Valve’s popular Steam digital distribution service, Linux users already make up more than two percent of all Steam users.
Steam for Linux launched last month with more than 100 games readily available for Linux OS users, including a multitude of Valve games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, has switched by the Gnome 3, saying the desktop’s shortcomings can be fixed via the use of extensions.
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I’ve been noticing my work machine getting slower, and slower, and slower over the past few months, and over the weekend it finally gave up the ghost and died. For the past five years I’ve been using the most current version of OS X on an old MacBook Pro, but the Mac had a hardware problem. When I dropped by desktop support with the dead Mac, they offered me an equally old Mac, or a new PC. I chose the PC. I’ve returned to Ubuntu for the first time since 2008, and I’ve gone the minimalist route with xmonad, the tiling window manager. I’ve got one thing to say about the new setup, this thing is fast.
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BP prolonged the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by two months by concealing the rate of oil flowing from the broken Macondo well, Transocean claims in a document filed in the damages trial.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the past, we’ve written about several cool KDE apps. I’m now going to show you some desktop applets – called plasmoids – that have caught my attention. They are all included in KDE 4.9. KDE and productivity junkies, read on!
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Plasmate follows the UNIX philosophy of “do one thing, and do it well”. As such, it is not a general purpose IDE but rather a tool specifically tailored to creating Plasma Workspace add-ons using non-compiled languages such as QML and Javascript. It guides each step in the process, simplifying and speeding up project creation, development, adding new assets, testing and publishing. The goal of Plasmate is to enable creating something new in seconds and publishing it immediately.
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KDE has released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. They are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended for everyone running the initial 4.10 release. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be safe and pleasant for everyone.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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While it’s already known that Raring Ringtail, the next major release of Ubuntu will mostly have Gnome 3.6, users can now install Gnome 3.8 Beta in this currently development version of Ubuntu and try out the new features. All you need to do is add a personal package archive and update the packages using apt.
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Gnome 3.8 is currently in active development phase and a few features planned earlier are being implemented. One of the Gnome developers, Debarshi Ray has posted some screenshots of awesome work he has done with Gnome lately. Like you can now add IMAP/SMTP accounts directly to Gnome Online Accounts via its single sign-on dialog, and integrate all email clients to use them. Best still, Evolution has already been integrated and you will no longer need to separately add accounts in Evolution to receive your mail.
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With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).
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I have been following ROSA Linux since 2012. Now that possibly not everything going right for Mandriva Linux, the emergence of ROSA has assumed paramount significance. ROSA has not only enhanced the Mandriva based, but also created its own very distinct theme, especially for KDE. Even I am an ardent admirer of the unique design that ROSA brings on the table. Every ROSA release so far has been very refined and amazingly attractive.
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New Releases
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We are proud to announce our release candidate of Neptune 3 “Brotkasten” our first 64bit version of Neptune. This release candidate comes with several bugfixes and changes aswell as the new KDE SC 4.10.
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Wary and Racy 5.5, as well as Quirky 5.4.91, can be downloaded from the ibiblio servers. Explanations of the different members of the Puppy Linux family are available from Kauler’s web site.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Though Mandriva has been a popular Linux desktop distribution for many years, the company early last year found itself in a tough spot financially. Since then, Mandriva has undergone some major changes, adopting a new enterprise focus and creating an independent nonprofit foundation to carry on the Mandriva open source community work. The company also recently joined The Linux Foundation, a sign that Mandriva is “back in the game,” says CEO Jean-Manuel Croset. Here, he discusses how the company turned around, its new enterprise server and cloud products and its relationship to the new OpenMandriva foundation.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon Linux 11 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a distribution inspired and based upon Gentoo Linux, a version of Linux that uses source based installation rather than binary packages. Sabayon is intended to have the features of Gentoo with less work, and does include binary package management. This is a review of Sabayon 11, using the MATE desktop. 64 bit edition. As in my previous review of Sabayon 8, I had no trouble creating a bootable USB key with UNetbootin on Windows. I chose MATE not only because it fit within 2 GB, but because I’ve done an Xfce review already.
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Red Hat Family
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Spin Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-wide medical, legal and financial solutions to Fortune 500 companies and federal government agencies, announced today that it has joined the Red Hat partner program.
Spin Systems has broad knowledge of technologies based on Red Hat and Red Hat JBoss Middleware solutions and created a solution that collects more than 1.2 billion records per day from medical diagnostic devices, electronic medical records, information kiosks, and other sources. In addition to reducing costs and improving efficiency, the solution is designed to help clients access healthcare records in seconds rather than weeks or months.
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Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Intel, (NASDAQ: INTC), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) have teamed up to open a dedicated facility for hospitals to test and deploy new healthcare software running on x86 servers using Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux.
The idea is to show small- to medium-sized hospitals and medical facilities that Epic Systems’ electronic health records (EHR) software running on x86 industry-standard servers with Linux can meet the needs of mission-critical healthcare solutions. Inasmuch as the healthcare industry has long been the poster child for proprietary software and hardware, highlighting the cost savings and interoperability advantages offered by an open source platform also is a key priority of the initiative.
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Fedora
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So in short, while I use Xfce, and will continue doing so, from this short comparison, KDE comes out as the winner.
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Debian Family
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Lucas Nussbaum has been crunching some numbers that lead him to conclude that “Debian is (still) changing.” Over the years a few trends have emerged as Nussbaum demonstrates using snapshot.debian.org and a data mining script.
In a blog post earlier today, Nussbaum posted graphs of some of the trends he’s seeing in Debian package development. His first graph shows that the number of team-maintained packages have seen a dramatic increase the last several years while the number of “not co-maintained” and small independent group maintained packages have remained fairly steady. Nussbaum believes these numbers show the team-maintained model is preferred by today’s developers.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With the recent introduction of Ubuntu Touch a very interesting change of strategy is emerging for Canonical.
As Phoronix and others have discovered, Ubuntu Phone and Touch are using SurfaceFlinger as their compositor. SurfaceFlinger uses OpenGL ES to render applications screens/windows in a hardware accelerated way using the OpenGL driver of the GPU directly.
Now, Canonical is promising a completely integrated experience for Ubuntu 14.04 which will run Phone, Touch, TV and Desktop applications in one common GUI environment. How will they be able to fulfill their promise for Linux desktop applications currently running on Xorg?
So far, everyone has believed that the Ubuntu desktop is migrating from Xorg to Wayland. This migration has been going so slow that there is actually no visible sign of happening any time soon. It seems that Canonical has slightly changed the “to” part of their migration plans. They are not moving to Wayland, they are moving to SurfaceFlinger.
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A few hours after Canonical announced Mir, a new display server that is not derived from X or Wayland, we saw mixed reactions from developers and users. While it seems that some upstream Wayland and X developers are not at all happy with Canonical taking such a decision, some users are excited and expect a faster and snappier desktop out of box, tightly integrated with Unity.
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Unity has been in development for over two years and was based on Nux/Compiz (Unity 3D) and Qt (Unity 2D). It forms the foundation of Canonical’s convergence plan to have one code base and interface on all devices running Ubuntu. This poses several challenges like developing a common display server which is capable of running on all devices without much overhead and an interface to rule them all. This was the sole reason behind the creation of Unity and not choosing other desktop environments such as Gnome Shell etc
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Owners of the Zealz GK802 Mini PC might be pleased to learn that a new released of Ubuntu has been released for the stick mini PC which allows you to get full use from the mini PC and now even includes hardware accelerated graphics to enjoy.
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Linux distro Ubuntu 13.04, which hit its first beta today, is already showing promise: there are small but very useful usability tweaks planned for Ubuntu’s Unity user interface.
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While the preview version of Ubuntu Touch for developers is a promising look at what the OS has in store it’s far from a fully featured version of the final product. However according to Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth it shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready for daily use. According to an interview with ZDnet an everyday driver is going to be ready to download in a couple of weeks.
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Last year HP announced its intention to start selling machines shipping with Ubuntu instead of always opting for Windows. That push started in China, but today HP shipped its first new consumer Ubuntu hardware for Europe.
It’s a Pavilion all-in-one carrying the forgettable name of the Pavilion 20-b101ea. It’s also not going to set any performance records as this is a low-end machine aimed at users who want to use the Internet, an office suite, watch HD video, and play a few web games. But what is compelling is the price. In the UK it is being sold for £349 including sales tax. A quick conversion puts the price pre-tax at just US$429.
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On the evening before the first online Ubuntu Developer Summit, Canonical has revealed its plans for “Mir”, a next-generation display server which will run as a system-level component to replace the X Window system. Canonical has rejected Wayland, seen by many as the successor to X Windows, because they feel it recreates X semantics in its input event handling and parts of the protocol include privileged shell integration which the Mir specifiers would rather not have. The decisions along this path of development appear to have been taken in the summer of 2012.
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Normally, I am not a big fan of smartphones. Scratch that, I am very much not a fan of smartphones. However, after I heard and saw Mark Shuttleworth present the upcoming mobile devices that will be running Ubuntu on them, for the first time, I was really intrigued with the technology and its potential use.
Indeed, sometime in Q4 2013 or Q1 2014, I will be buying myself one. In fact, I will be buying two devices, one for myself and one for the lucky winner of the Dedoimedo Ubuntu smartphone contest. Please read to see how you can participate and maybe win yourself a handsome smartphone.
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is possibly one of the most landmark long term release for Ubuntu and Canonical for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is the first long term release with Unity desktop. Second, first time the LTS is supported for 5 years. Love it or hate it, Unity has now become synonymous with Ubuntu. And after reviewing a lot of distros with stock Gnome 3 as desktop, I now understand why canonical didn’t pursue Gnome 3. Unity, at least, is intuitive and easier to use even for a Linux novice. If that right side strip irritates you, simply check the auto-hide option. Agree, customisation is sacrificed if you use Unity, but it looks elegant.
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At the time of this article’s creation, the Samsung Chromebook is the number one top seller on Amazon.com. Chrome OS is attacking other operating systems head on.
In this article, I’ll explore how Chrome OS stacks up against Ubuntu and whether the two operating systems are likely to appeal to the same user base.
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The X window system has served numerous Linux- and Unix-based operating systems well over its nearly three decades of life. But Canonical is ready to move on from X, saying a new display server is necessary to power the Unity user interface in Ubuntu as the OS expands from desktops to tablets and phones.
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Is Ubuntu Phone based on CyanogenMod 10.1? If so, is this a major scandal in the mobile business? According to some, Ubuntu Phone is indeed based on CyanogenMod, while others say that’s not quite so simple.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung may be on the verge of doing something paradoxically Apple-ish: being original. Often accused of copying Cupertino — both in and out of courtrooms — it appears the company may have something completely different to unveil at its Galaxy S IV launch event next week. Not only that, it’s taking a new tack with its prelaunch ad campaign, building suspense instead of taking swipes.
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Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.
The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.
The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.
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Android
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With an aim to meet strong demand for entry-level tablets, Acer is reportedly planning to ship 10 million tablets in 2013, an increase of 400 per cent year on year.
Of the projected shipments for this year, seven million units will use an Android-based platform, while the remaining are going to be based on Windows.
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Google has announced the release of Android 4.2.2 Android Open Source Project (AOSP) binaries. These are intended for use with any Nexus AOSP-enabled device including Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10 and the previous generation Galaxy Nexus.
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ASUS has started rolling out Android 4.2 Jelly Bean to its Asus Transformer Pad TF300 in the US region. The roll-out makes it the first non-Nexus device to receive the update to Google’s latest mobile operating system.
Android 4.2 will be released to Transformer Pad owners via a free over the air update starting today in the United States and will be available in other regions later this month. This makes the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 just the fourth device to receive the update, after the Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 devices.
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Android developer Koushik Doutta has made a name for himself developing some of the most popular tools used by folks who root their devices and install custom ROMs. His ClockworkMod Recovery and ROM Manager apps are some of the most popular tools for installing custom firmware on an Android device.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Recently Canonical showed off a special Ubuntu build for tablets, and now Australian company Intermatix is offering its customers the chance to pre-order the first tablets running the new OS. Unsurprisingly, two models are being offered: the Intermatix U7 and U10, which sport screens measuring 7 and 10 inches, respectively.
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Here is great news for our readers and Ubuntu fans. World’s first Ubuntu powered tablet is here and currently available for pre-order. The tablet is priced at AUS $299.00 and a discount of 10% is announced for the first 50 customers.
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Google has open sourced its Zopfli data compression algorithm. Zopfli, according to the company, can produce files three to eight percent smaller than zlib and can be used to speed up Web downloads.
Zopfli, based on the Deflate algorithm, has been optimised to produce smaller file sizes at the expense of compression speed. The smaller compressed size would mean better space utilisation, quicker load times, and of course lower Web page load latencies.
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The Blender graphics tool can result in some great-looking 3D imagery — once you learn the software so you can unlock all its capabilities. Blender Master Class holds the keys to those features and functions; it’s easy to understand and executed with a useful hands-on style that takes advantage of the author’s considerable experience in creating graphics masterpieces.
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A couple of former Red Hat veterans think there’s an easier way to configure, deploy and manage IT across an organization and founded AnsibleWorks to attack that problem.
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Events
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SaaS/Big Data
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The critical momentum that the industry is seeing today for the open standards cloud movement is reminiscent of Linux and its turning point in the late 1990s, and we’re willing to bet that cloud will have a similar outcome – the triumph of open standards over proprietary approaches to cloud computing.
How do we know? When you look at cloud, the fundamentals are the same.
The strategy articulated around open source in 1998 – preventing vendor lock in, providing market choice, spurring innovation, and enabling modularity of design to drive higher quality software – holds true today for enterprise cloud computing.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Apache OpenOffice has reached an impressive 40 million downloads since the release of OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) said that this number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge, excluding language packs and source tarballs.
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Education
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And the unvarnished truth is what I got. They raised a lot of interesting points. From subjects I’m well familiar with, like the need for a modern, European copyright framework. Plus we had an interesting debate about the need for a more modern, dynamic education system – one that is adapted to digital realities. It’s very challenging providing courses and certification in a fast-moving world where practices can change within months; and sometimes, indeed, the best teacher is experience.
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BSD
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I thought it would be fun to share how well GNUstep runs these days. FreeBSD now is a first-quality platform! Stable and not second to Linux at all. NetBSD is close to it too. I try hard that all application maintained by me are not “Linux centric” as most of today’s desktops are!
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
* Will you be at LibrePlanet? Register today for March 23-24
* Mako Hill remembers Aaron Swartz
* Only Gandalf can protect Europe from the unitary patent
* Winners announced for free software gaming’s highest honor, the Liberated Pixel Cup
* Announcing the Empowermentors Collective: a group for women of color and queer people of color
* GNU Press discounts Bison Manual!
* FSFE asks you to show your love for free software!
* Keep the pressure on the White House and US Copyright Office to fix anti-circumvention provisions
* Announcing status.fsf.org: Our new home for microblogging
* FSF licensing team: What we did in 2012 and why it matters for 2013
* Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
* LibrePlanet featured resource: Coreboot installation party at LibrePlanet 2013
* GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 19 new GNU releases!
* GNU Toolchain update
* Other FSF and free software events
* Thank GNUs!
* Take action with the FSF
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Public Services/Government
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Communities of developers of free and open source software can create their own governing laws, using more than just their software licences, say two Irish researchers Ian Ó Maolchraoibhe and Maureen O’Sullivan, from the National University of Ireland, in the city of Galway. The two are currently working on an academic paper, a follow up to the presentation they gave at the Fosdem conference in Brussels earlier this month.
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Open standards and the compatibility of data and IT systems are two of the core themes of a network of municipalities, founded last week Thursday. The new organisation is called Linked Organisation of Local Authority ICT Societies (LOLA). It is the international version of national networks of local administrations in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The Obama administration recently responded to a petition asking the government to “require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.”
I first heard about the petition on Google+, and am very proud to be signature #52. Back then 25,000 signatures seemed like a tall order for what is a somewhat niche area. In the end, the petition gained over 65,000 signatures and an official response from the White House. The Open Science Federation posted a screen capture of the 25,000th signature landmark on June 3, 2012. John Wilibanks started the petition with signature #1.
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Open Hardware
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For many years now, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. Open source robotics platforms have flourished, but they’ve also been fragmented, with software and hardware designs produced all around the world that have little to do with each other. That’s why it was so promising when the folks behind Willow Garage–a robotics project that originated at Stanford University–announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
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Programming
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I’ve been following the development of Orion, since the Eclipse Foundation started the effort back in January of 2011. The basic idea behind Orion is to move development online into a web-based development model.
The Orion 1.0 release came out in October of last year, and here we are four months later with an Orion 2.0 release.
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Standards/Consortia
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I just figured out that I’ve been involved with standards for almost one-third of my life, since the mid-1990s. During that time, I’ve been employed by IBM but I’ve also worked collaboratively with other people in the IT industry on standards efforts in groups like the W3C and OASIS. I think that collectively we’ve helped move the industry from “proprietary and locked-in” toward “open and interoperable.” That’s a good thing.
With that prolog, I’m pleased to help announce that, moving forward, IBM will base all its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. To kick this off, IBM will deliver a new private cloud offering based on the OpenStack open source software. (More marketing sort of stuff is available in the press release, which I will link to just as soon as I get the URL.)
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The current divide between proprietary and open approaches to enterprise cloud computing has implications beyond the obvious. More than just issues of cloud interoperability and data portability, open standards have benefits for user identity, authentication and security intelligence that closed or proprietary clouds threaten to compromise.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Ten years ago, a major American magazine published a bombshell report about the non-existence of Iraq’s WMDs. But it was hardly noticed by a corporate press corps too busy hyping the threat from those non-existent weapons.
The story appeared in the March 3, 2003, issue of Newsweek–a short piece with the headline “The Defector’s Secrets.” It almost seemed as if the magazine didn’t know what it had on its hands. Or perhaps it did.
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Remember how Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has been trying to get a straight answer about whether the United States government reserves the legal right to assassinate American citizens on U.S. soil? Well, Attorney General Eric Holder has just answered the question in a letter to Paul, partially reprinted by Mother Jones.
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The annual AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference was the stage for U.S. and Israeli leaders to affirm their message that “all options are on the table” against Iran.
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…pathologist hired by the parents in the United States after their son’s body was flown back said it showed signs of struggle, and ruled the death a homicide.
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Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation join us to discuss domestic surveillance drones and the secrecy surrounding military drones around the world. “I think the importation of the war on terror and its tactics, generally, to the U.S. is probably the most significant development in the world of civil liberties,” says Greenwald. Timm is also the co-manager of the @Drones Twitter account. As a result of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, drone use in the United States is expected to expand rapidly in the next few years, an issue that is being closely watched by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [includes rush transcript]
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As his inquiry into U.S. drone strikes gets underway, the United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism and human rights has stepped up his rhetoric against the agency he’ll inevitably investigate. The CIA’s torture program was at the center of an “international conspiracy of crime,” he told a U.N. panel on Tuesday.
The CIA’s torture in the last decade is unrelated from its current drone campaign. But Ben Emmerson, the U.N. rapporteur, will still need access to the drones from a CIA he portrayed on Tuesday morning as something similar to a Bond villain. In an interview with Danger Room last month, Emmerson said he was confident the Obama administration would grant him access to one of its most secretive counterterrorism programs.
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Cablegate
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Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world. The lengthy personal statement to the pre-trial hearing February 28th by Bradley Manning in his own words validate that his motives were for the greater good of humankind.
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A record number of Nobel Peace Prize nominations were received this year, which saw US soldier and Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning being nominated for a third time.
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Finance
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Switzerland will still go to any lengths to protect the ultra-rich dictators and mafia who flock there. Mutabar Tadjibaeva – multiple rape victim, survivor of repeated torture and still dogged human rights activist, is wanted for questioning by Geneva Police for the crime of ringing the bell of Gulnata Karimova’s 25 million dollar house and asking to speak to her.
That is absolutely all she did. I know, as I was there and did it too. We both left our visiting cards, took some photos from the streets so the children of Uzbekistan could see where the profits from their slave labour in the cotton fields went, and then we left on the bus, as we came.
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A job creator! I’m a job creator, Selig.
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Among those persuaded of the value of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) and of a transition to an economic system that includes a large and growing number of such enterprises, the question often arises, how do we get there from here? In other words, what sorts of strategies and alliances might allow or facilitate that transition? Here is an initial response to that question.
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Since the Center for Media and Democracy’s launch of ALEC Exposed in July 2011, CMD has known that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its corporate funders are accelerating the race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for America’s working families. ALEC has a raft of “model bills” to lower wages and slash benefits for workers, even one to repeal state minimum wage laws.
Now the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has joined in the effort to take a closer look at this ALEC agenda, tallying the bills introduced and pushed in states in the last few years.
In an issue brief called “The Politics of Wage Suppression: Inside ALEC’s Legislative Campaign Against Low-Paid Workers,” NELP has documented that since January 2011, legislators from 31 states have introduced 105 bills aiming to repeal or weaken core wage standards at the state and local level, and 67 of these 105 bills were directly sponsored or co-sponsored by legislators affiliated with ALEC.
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…offshore tax havens would net about $90 billion annually.
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Following the failure of the U.S. Congress and President Obama to navigate away from an otherwise avoidable sequester, the FBI is up in arms over the subsequent spending cuts they say will hamper, among other things, its ability to pursue financial crimes.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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On March 1, 2013, Milwaukee Country prosecutors shut down the long running “John Doe” probe into corruption in Scott Walker’s office during the time he served as Milwaukee County Executive. Six people were charged and convicted, including three former Walker staff, but no charges were brought against Walker. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm issued a brief, telling statement: “After a review of the John Doe evidence, I am satisfied that all charges that are supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt have now been brought and concluded.”
There is no doubt that Walker emerges from the scandal in a stronger position to advance his extreme legislative agenda and his plans for higher office.
Walker’s recently-unveiled budget is covered with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) fingerprints: his tax plan disproportionately benefits the top one-fifth of earners while putting a whopping $2 in the pockets of the bottom one-fifth; his school voucher program would leave 870,000 public school students with no additional funds; and his food stamp stipulations would force the needy to look for the 212,400 jobs that the governor has promised but failed to create. To top it all off, his ALEC cronies want to cover their tracks with a bill that would put a price on the public records that expose them.
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controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t get covered much in corporate television–it takes tens of thousands of activists marching in Washington to get a few words on the nightly newscasts.
But the State Department’s recent draft assessment of the pipeline’s environmental impact got a mention on one show, and it said a lot. Not about the pipeline, really, but about corporate media.
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For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.
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Privacy
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European rules to combat the trade of illegal timber have come into force, but NGOs and think tanks doubt the readiness of EU countries to carry out the legislation.
The new laws, which came into effect on Monday (4 March), require operators importing or producing wood to identify its country of origin and legality.
The regulation also prohibits the sale of illegally harvested timber on the European market to cut profits from the trade worldwide, which analysts link to deforestation and desertification, rising CO2 emissions, corruption, armed conflict and the destruction of vulnerable communities.
The EU law requires member states to lay down “effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties”. However, despite two years of preparation, EU countries have so far failed to apply the legislation or impose credible penalties and sanctions, said analysis by the WWF.
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National Security Agency’s massive new surveillance compound in the Utah desert outside Salt Lake City.
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A reporter tried to take pictures of a massive new government data center in Utah. Bad idea
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Most people who visit Salt Lake City in the winter months are excited about taking advantage of the area’s storied slopes. While skiing was on my itinerary last week, I was more excited about an offbeat tourism opportunity in the area: I wanted to check out the construction site for “the country’s biggest spy center.”
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National security letters are the Fight Club of government data surveillance. Thanks to the gag orders that accompany those FBI requests for users’ private information, the first rule for any company that receives an NSL is that it doesn’t talk about receiving an NSL. Now Google is doing its best to blur–if not quite break–that rule.
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Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos. We work exceptionally hard to keep that information safe—hiring some of the best security experts in the world, investing millions of dollars in technology and baking security protections such as 2-step verification into our products.
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Today, Sen. Rand Paul received two pieces of correspondence regarding the legality and constitutionality of the U.S. government using lethal force, including drone strikes, on Americans and in U.S. territory. Sen. Paul sent three inquires on the matter to President Obama’s nominee to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan (HERE, HERE and HERE). He finally received responses from both Mr. Brennan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on one item of inquiry.
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Yes, the president does have the authority to use military force against American citizens on US soil—but only in “an extraordinary circumstance,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Tuesday.
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Civil Rights
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Time is running out to ensure that the British legal system is not fundamentally altered in favour of the State’s desire to keep secret what it chooses. Today several amendments to the Justice and Security Bill are before the House and we urge MPs to back them, if they are unwilling to vote against Part 2 of the Bill.
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Unbelievably, tens of thousands of children, as young as 12, are still being subjected to the “undignified” practice of strip searches, despite reassurances from the Youth Justice Board.
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DRM
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If restricting what consumers can do with the cell-phones, smartphones and tablets that they own is unconscionable, isn’t it time personal computers of all kinds were freed from the unconscionable terms of end-user licence agreements (more likely, decrees by monopolists) which are clear attempts to monopolize hardware and to extend copyright beyond what legislators conceived? This is not a new concept. Richard Stallman was decades ahead of the US government when he called for Free Software to be used everywhere.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of the national advocacy organization Food and Water Watch, will be in Madison, March 18, to read from her acclaimed new book “Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America.” Publishers Weekly calls it a “tour de force.”
Since 2005, Food and Water Watch has lead the fight against corporate control of the U.S. food system, against the privatization of the U.S. water supply and against water contamination by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.
In her new book “Foodopoly,” Hauter examines farming at the turn of the 20th century until today, and details the consolidation of the food chain from crop seeds to retail stores to argue that the people who grow our food, and consumers, have been cheated and manipulated by agribusiness and the leading food companies. She explores how the evisceration of anti-trust laws has dramatically increased consolidation among food and agricultural firms, which, along with the growth of big box stores and the marketing of junk food, has perverted how food is sold and marketed and what people eat.
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Copyrights
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Why is a song that I play digitally or a book I read electronically subject to extensive controls that are not considered appropriate to records or books? It’s because they are subject to licenses that can’t be applied by the seller to the physical works. Why can those licences be imposed on digital works? Because the use of digital works is considered subject to copyright, whereas the use of physical works is not. Why is that? Because the act of instantiating the work for use has been described as “copying”, allowing the rules surrounding copyright to be used as a threat to back up arbitrary license terms controlling use.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.04.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is a natural platform for “blind and low vision people …people who struggle with dyslexia and learning disabilities as well as accessibility for people with low motor skills and quadriplegics.” Jonathan Nadeau, Free software developer and activist, wants to build a completely accessible Linux distribution, and has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to fund it.
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Desktop
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Take a moment to think about how computers are used in your home. How much of that time do you spend browsing the web, working on word processing documents or presentations and checking email and social networks? If your answer is a good chunk of the time, you may be a candidate for a Chromebook computer.
Chromebooks run Google’s Chrome OS, which looks like the Chrome Web browser but runs apps as well. In fact, there’s a whole ecosystem of Chrome apps available through the Chrome Web Store. There are games, like Angry Birds Heikki, Battlefield and Need for Speed World; productivity tools, including Dropbox, Picasa and Evernote; and, of course there are the Google apps, like Google Docs, Gmail and Google Maps. Currently, there are tens of thousands of apps available through the Chrome Web Store—some that are primarily web-based and some that run within a browser tab, but have been downloaded and work offline.
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Google has pushed another Chrome OS update in its stable channel. As usual this update contains a lot of bug fixes and security improvements. Chormebooks (or boxes) running stable channel will be receiving updates over the next several days.
Some of the notable improvements are improved audio quality in Google Hangouts as it has upgraded the GTalk plugin to version 3.14.17 (if this number makes any sense to you). If you use the photo editor then you can be relaxed (you don’t have to worry if you are using Pixel which has more RAM), as the update also improves memory handling in the photo editor. It has also improved the low battery notification.
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This new operating system was originally code-named “Google OS” and since 2009 has been released to the public under the product names, Google Chrome OS, Chromebook, and Chromebox. I wrote a patent for it, #8,239,662, titled “Network-based Operating System Across Devices” that was finally granted in August 7, 2012. Long after I left Google.
Here’s a few interesting tidbits about the invention of Chromebook.
First, Chromebook was initially rejected by Google management. In fact I wrote the first version as early as July 2006 and showed it around to management. Instead of launching a project, the response was extremely tepid. My boss complained, “You can’t use it on an airplane.” Actually, you could as, under the covers, it was still a bare-bones Linux distribution and could execute any Linux program installed on it.
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Kernel Space
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Borqs International, a mobile communication software and solutions company, has joined the Linux Foundation. The company said it aims to increase its investment in Linux, bringing more innovative solutions to partners and end users. It is worth mentioning here that more than 1.3 million Linux-based Android devices are activated every day.
Borqs has four offices in the APAC region, located in Beijing, Bangalore, Wuhan and Shenzhen. In the future, Borqs will participate in the Code Aurora Forum and other Linux Foundation activities, including the Linux End User Summit. Linux and collaborative development have both become pervasive in the mobile and enterprise computing markets.
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The XFS file-system update for the Linux 3.9 kernel isn’t particularly exciting, but it does address some open bugs and regressions for this still very relevant and competitive Linux file-system.
The XFS pull request for Linux 3.9 reads, “Please pull these XFS updates for 3.9-rc1. Here there are primarily fixes for regressions and bugs, but there are a few cleanups too. There are fixes for compound buffers, quota asserts, dir v2 block compaction, mount behavior, use-after-free with AIO, swap extents, an unmount hang, speculative preallocation, write verifiers, the allocator stack switch, recursion on xa_lock, an xfs_buf_find oops, and a memory barrier in xfs_ifunlock.”
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Most often when carrying out any Linux file-system benchmarks — or really, any benchmarks in general — on Phoronix it’s using solid-state storage. SSDs are just too great to pass up with their incredible performance. However, for those still using rotating media, here’s a collection of file-system benchmarks from the new Linux 3.8 kernel when tested on a Serial ATA 3.0 Western Digital hard drive.
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Graphics Stack
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With talking recently about LLVMpipe driver improvements and having not benchmarked this Gallium3D software driver in a while, here are new benchmarks of this LLVM-based software fallback driver when using Mesa 9.1-devel Git in conjunction with LLVM 3.3 SVN code, for the very latest look at the OpenGL software acceleration possibilities.
The last time there were thorough LLVMpipe performance benchmarks on Phoronix was last November when benchmarking Mesa 9.1-devel with LLVM 3.1/3.2. Since that point, Mesa 9.1 has become stable and there’s been many Gallium3D/LLVMpipe driver changes in the past three months. LLVM itself also continues to advance and saw the release of LLVM 3.2 while LLVM 3.3 is now under heavy development.
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Applications
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Development version 0.10.8 of the upcoming Almanah 0.11 diary software for the GNOME desktop environment has been announced a couple of days ago, on February 26.
Almanah 0.10.8 brings a redesigned main window, in order to support the GNOME 3 guidelines. It also includes GMenu and a menu button in the toolbar.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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For those of you who have been abroad the Linux Steam train since the early betas late last year, things are really on the up & up.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The first Beta version of the upcoming GNOME Online Accounts 3.8 application, which is part of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released for download and testing last week.
GNOME Online Accounts 3.8 Beta 1 fixes support for the OAuth2 open source authorization protocol when getting refresh_token from URI fragment and fixes implicit declaration of goa_kerberos_identity_inquiry_new.
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Javier Jardón Cabezas proudly announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment is ready for download and testing.
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With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).
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A new development release of the Gnote note-taking application for the GNOME desktop environment has been released earlier today, March 3, including various new features, updated translations and many bug fixes.
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The Evolution developers were happy to announce earlier today, March 3, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Beta release of the upcoming Evolution 3.8 email client.
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The Linux desktop choices of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, tends to pique people’s interest. Linus has now shared he’s switched back to using the GNOME 3.x desktop.
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A new extension adds native-looking Ubuntu Unity like AppIndicator support for GNOME Shell, a feature for which some patches were submited more than a year ago, but they were rejected because the feature “conflicts with the design”.
AppIndicators have are widely used now, with Ubuntu disabling the message tray (systray) by default, and popular applications like Dropbox or Steam come with AppIndicator support by default.
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New Releases
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The developers of Grml have released version 2013.02, code-named “Grumpy Grinch”, of their Debian-based distribution aimed at diagnosing, repairing and maintaining Linux systems. Grml 2013.02 includes updates to several of its tools and the developers have extended the grml-hwinfo application which is used to collect information about the system that is being repaired. The distribution has also been updated to make use of Linux kernel 3.7.9 and has a new grml-network tool that can scan for available wireless networks.
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The Alpine Team announced a few hours ago, March 1, that the Alpine Linux 2.5.4 Linux distribution is available for download.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is by no means any stranger to either Big Data or the open hybrid cloud, having been closely involved with both efforts for several years already. But with the company’s announcement last week of a fresh strategic direction in those areas, it’s clearly embarking on a new path.
Not only did Red Hat discuss a new focus on providing solutions for enterprises with Big Data analytics workloads, but it also announced that it will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop open community, thus transforming Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for Big Data IDC big data environments.
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Let’s get this straight. Red Hat should package up its own commercial Hadoop distribution or buy one of the three key Hadoop disties before they get too expensive. But don’t hold your breath, because Red Hat tells El Reg that neither option is the current plan. Red Hat is going to partner with Hadoop distributors and hope they deploy commercial Hadoop clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Java and use the Gluster File System, known now as Red Hat Storage Server 2.0.
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Fedora
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Other than these two problems noted above, Fedora 18 has been just as good for me as Fedora 17 was. The upgrade from Fedora 17 to 18 was flawless, and I have had no major problems running F18 in the past six weeks. I have been just as productive as ever, and I conclude the Fedora 18 is a solid product.
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Debian Family
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Debian, the mother of Ubuntu, has made a historical decision by changing the terms of their trademark policy. According to the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. The Debian Project encourages wide use of its marks in all ways that promote Debian and free software.
Stefano Zacchiroli, current Debian Project Leader and one of the main promoters of the new trademark policy, said “Software freedoms and trademarks are a difficult match. We all want to see well-known project names used to promote free software, but we cannot risk they will be abused to trick users into downloading proprietary spyware. With the help of SPI and SFLC, we have struck a good balance in our new trademark policy. Among other positive things, it allows all sorts of commercial use; we only recommend clearly informing customers about how much of the sale price will be donated to Debian.”
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The Debian project has announced the first release candidate of the Debian Installer for Debian 7.0 Wheezy. Changes mainly affect the installer’s EFI and UEFI support; for example, the developers have introduced a uniform look for menu items to ensure that the installer’s appearance is as consistent as possible regardless of the boot method used. Various hardware drivers have also been added to the installation system.
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Derivatives
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It might not come as much of a surprise, but according to a recent survey conducted by EE Times, Linux continues to tear up the charts in the embedded market (embedded refers to special-purpose PCs found in things like TVs, media players, cars, machinery and so forth).
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The latest in our series of ARM Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of GCC compiler optimizations on the ARM Cortex A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual.
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Phones
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Android
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Very little is known at the moment about the next version of Android, known as Key Lime Pie, but a recently opened up public code repository may be evidence that works is well underway on the new OS. As reported by Phoronix the repository contains work Google has done on the Linux 3.8 kernel which hints, but by no means is any proof, that the next version of Android could be based on this kernel.
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It looks like there is one big paradox in the Android camp. Why is it that every other Android phone maker is struggling to stay in business while Samsung is raking in billions of dollars in profits every quarter?
This is the question Brian S Hall of Unwired recently asked. And he is definitely not the first one to pose it. Let me attempt an answer on the basis of what I see in India, where Samsung has made a killing in the two years.
It all starts with Galaxy S. This is the phone with which Samsung’s Android journey began in earnest. And yes, before you say that Galaxy S became successful because it looked like iPhone 3GS, and that Touchwiz, the user interface powering it, had the look and feel of iOS, let me clarify that I don’t agree. I will come to this point later.
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Google has open sourced a new compression algorithm called Zopfli that it says is a slower-but-stronger data squasher than the likes of zlib.
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With Zopfli, Google has introduced a new, C-based compression library as open source software. Named after a Swiss pastry, its algorithm is said to produce results that are 3 to 8 per cent more compact when compressing web content than the popular zlib library at maximum compression level. These results have been documentedPDF by Google. Like zlib, Zopfli is an implementation of the Deflate algorithm that is also used in the zip file format and in PNG files, but it appears to result in smaller output files.
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Events
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I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, and certainly I am not. Honest. But one of the problems with working on a show like Southern California Linux Expo and this year’s SCALE 11X leaves me little time to do anything but the wood-chopping and water-carrying that goes with being the publicity chair for the show. Let me be clear: This is not a complaint, but rather an explanation about why you’re not going to get a comprehensive report about the event.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox OS may be up for a good start with 17 operators wowing to support the nascent platform. Among those committing to carry these smartphones are Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), Etisalat, Smart, Sprint, Telefonica, America Movil, KDDI, Telecom Italia, Telenor, China Unicom, 3 Group, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, TMN and VimpelCom, while Telstra has only “welcomed” the initiative. These diverse group will make Firefox OS-based devices available in a number of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, with additional markets announcing soon.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Implicit in this statement, and in pretty much all of what we do at Sunlight, is an understanding that openness and transparency, enabled by technology, lead to more democratic accountability, and that, on balance, this leads to better governance. It’s an understanding that we share with a growing global community.
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One of the keys to this next generation of mashups will be a strong understanding of how copyright interacts with physical objects. While copyright will not protect functional objects, it will protect decorative ones. Understanding the difference will mean the difference between a mashup encumbered by copyright and a mashup that is in the clear.
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Open Access/Content
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The White House has released a memorandumPDF saying that the results of government-funded research must be made publicly available in a science journal twelve months after their first release. The initiative by US president Barack Obama also includes accompanying scientific data in digital formats, as long as their publication doesn’t affect third party rights such as the right to privacy.
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These digressions became more frequent and detailed as delegates watched the minister begin to internalize what he was saying. We saw the dawning realization that open access really does offer an important step for better research and faster economic and social development. After the speech, Hanekom asked the representatives from the Max Planck Institute, one of the sponsors of the Berlin Conference, for a meeting to discuss open access policy.
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Programming
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AESOP is a new auto-parallelizing C/C++ compiler for shared memory systems. This new open-source compiler was written at the University of Maryland and is now available to the public.
The AESOP auto-parallelizing compiler is based upon LLVM and is designe for real-world workloads rather than just small, simple kernels. AESOP is said to already be able to compile SPEC2006 and OMP2001 benchmarks.
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Standards/Consortia
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Aaron Gustafson and two of his fellow contributors, Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth, have announced the closure of The Web Standards Project (WaSP) which was formed back in 1998.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was co-founded by Glenn Davis, George Olsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman and has been spreading Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible and universal community as well as working towards propagation of World Wide Consortium’s (W3C) gospel.
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Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.
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The Surface Pro is not a repair-friendly machine. In fact, it’s one of the least repairable devices iFixit has seen: In a teardown of Microsoft’s tablet-laptop hybrid, the company gave it a rock-bottom score of just one — one! — out of 10 for repairability, lower even than Apple’s iPad and the Windows Surface RT.
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Hardware
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Freescale’s latest microcontroller measures 1.9 by 2 millimetres, and could be used in ‘ingestible’ computing.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Homeland Security’s specifications say drones must be able to detect whether a civilian is armed. Also specified: “signals interception” and “direction finding” for electronic surveillance.
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Cablegate
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While the trial of Bradley Manning has sparked some interest in certain circles, many people probably think the former U.S. Army private’s case will have little impact on either them or American society as a whole. Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, however, argues that they are wrong — and that if Manning is found guilty of “aiding the enemy” for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks, it could change the nature of both journalism and free speech forever.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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We know fracking isn’t exactly the safest of practices. We’ve heard of its propensity to pollute our air and drinking water and thereby raise human health concerns. The media, however, isn’t talking about the massive sinkholes pockmarking the nation, the radiation leaks, and other lesser known but no less earth-shattering effects of fracking.
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Minnesota’s depleting aquifers show consequences of climate change, unsustainable water management
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Finance
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RunRev, the company behind the multi-platform, HyperCard-like development environment LiveCode, reached its goal for its Kickstarter campaign: the fairly ambitious target of £350,000 was met about 60 hours before the campaign was due to end. In fact, although the total amount only approached the target in the last five days, donations then went far beyond the original goal, finally reaching almost £500,000 (about €570,000), allowing LiveCode to be released under the GPLv3 open source licence. RunRev plans to use the additional money to implement more project goals.
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Dell’s leveraged buyout deal has run into more resistance. Today, T. Rowe Price Chief Investment Officer Brian Rogers said that his company would vote against the buyout.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In December 1968 the state-controlled Russian newspaper Izvestia ran a series of articles accusing several high-profile British journalists of being spies – listing their names and alleged codenames.
The articles caused a storm of protest in Britain: the Russians were claiming journalists and editors at the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the BBC worked directly with MI6.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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This past week, we’ve had quite the discussion around Cecilia Kang’s WashPo piece describing a plan by the FCC to create a national WiFi network by making the right decisions on the “TV whitespaces” (TVWS), the unused, high-quality frequencies between broadcast TV stations. As Kang describes, the FCC’s opening of sufficient spectrum for TVWS could lead to “super WiFi networks (emphasis added) around the nation so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the internet without paying a cell phone bill every month.”
Although the article initially faced a great deal of skepticism, Kang’s claims are not as far fetched as they appeared. In fact, if the FCC makes the right spectrum choices, it is reasonable to assume (although not inevitable) that we will eventually get to the kind of ubiquitous and easy to use publicly accessible WiFi access Kang describes in her article.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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At the end of January 2013, the WTO authorized Antigua to suspend its intellectual property obligations toward the United States in retaliation for the United States’ breach of WTO rules. There are at least three reasons why the decision and the potential internet-based implementation of the retaliation are notable.
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It should come as no surprise, then, that Gates owns 500,000 shares worth 23 million US dollars (or more) of Monsanto stock. The very same company that has been caught running slave rings in Argentina in which workers were forced to work 14+ hours a day while withholding payment, has used their massive finances to fund organizations that literally fake FDA quotes to support GMOs, and of course peddling through GMOs that have been linked to numerous health concerns.
This is not even taking into account the farmer suicides that occur around every 30 minutes due to Monsanto’s failing GMO crop yield bankrupting small-time farmers in India’s notorious ‘suicide belt‘.
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Trademarks
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The owner of the iPhone trademark in Brazil, IGB Eletronica SA (IGBR3), said it would consider selling the naming rights to Apple (AAPL) Inc.
“We’re open to a dialogue for anything, anytime,” Eugenio Emilio Staub, chairman of IGB, said in an interview in Sao Paulo, adding that the company hasn’t been contacted by Apple. “We’re not radicals.”
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Copyrights
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A federal judge in Manhattan has thrown out a copyright lawsuit brought by an attorney who sued legal research companies Westlaw and LexisNexis, claiming they had unlawfully profited from his copyrighted legal filings.
In a brief ruling issued Friday, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed Edward White’s lawsuit. White, who specializes in intellectual property law, had alleged that Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, and LexisNexis, owned by Reed Elsevier Plc, profited by selling his copyrighted legal briefs in their databases.
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Dutch Secretary of Justice Teeven has issued a draft bill to remove the so-called ‘geschriftenbescherming’ from Dutch copyright legislation. This is part of the modernization process of Dutch copyright law. The goal is to have a flexible, technology-neutral and future-proof copyright in order to properly connect to modern reality.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.03.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Oracle has completed work on bringing to Linux a version of the widely coveted DTrace tool, though it’s only available for Oracle Linux
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Linux boot drives have been around for a long time. Geeks keep a USB stick loaded with their own operating system in their pocket all the time. And when they show up at a computer lab, all it takes is a quick plugging to load their own operating system on top of whatever is there. With smartphone and laptop ubiquity, I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend were on the way out–but there was always something neat about the idea of an OS in your pocket.
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About Linux desktops in a business environment and virtual machines… best appreciated by experienced Linux users.
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Here’s how it used to work. First there were codecs. A codec – or “coder-decoder” is a piece of software to convert videos to different formats, and then convert them back again for you to watch. There are huge numbers of them – far more than you’d ever figure there was a real use for. Traditionally, whichever piece of software you were using to the view the video seemed to support every codec in existence except the one you needed. If you were very lucky, an hour or so hunting around obscure websites would allow you to track down and install the right one.
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Desktop
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Dell’s Sputnik developer laptop, which has recently received a bump to its specifications, is now available for purchase from Dell’s UK web site and the company has also launched the product on its German language sites. The product can be found in a new “Developer/Linux” category in the Laptops & Ultrabooks entry in Dell’s Small and Medium Business (SMB) online store.
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Server
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The score? In the top 40 rated by fewest failed requests, 25 run GNU/Linux followed by FreeBSD with 7.
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Kernel Space
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Leading global provider of integrated end-to-end mobile communication software and solutions Borqs International Holding Corp. (Borqs) today announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. Borqs has four offices in the APAC region, located in Beijing, Bangalore, Wuhan and Shenzhen. In the future, Borqs will participate in the Code Aurora Forum and other Linux Foundation activities, including the Linux End User Summit. Linux and collaborative development have both become pervasive in the mobile and enterprise computing markets. More than 1.3 million Linux-based Android devices are activated every day. Based on this trend, Borqs will increase its investment in Linux, bringing more innovative solutions to partners and end users. In addition to Borqs, the firms Denx, Gazzang, Genymobile, Mandriva and Seneca College have also joined the Linux Foundation.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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Shared earlier today were OpenGL game benchmarks under different Linux desktops. Now to complement those earlier results are 2D performance tests under Unity, KDE, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, and Razor-qt.
From the same Intel HD 4000 “Ivy Bridge” system after completing the OpenGL tests this morning, some 2D performance tests were carried out. Past testing has revealed the 2D performance also fluctuates a great deal depending upon the desktop environment / window manager.
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Applications
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That’s Open Cubic Player, in its ocp-curses flavor, which might just be my new favorite music application. I know, that’s brash, but it’s true.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Over the course of the Steam Linux sale, we grossed $16,958 and made 2,079 sales.
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Indie Royale, organizers of the pay-what-you-want DRM-free bundle, have launched their latest collection of indie titles called the The Mash Bundle (thanks to Blue’s News). This new bundle offers Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, Guns of Icarus Online, Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior’s Rise, KRUNCH, and Delve Deeper.
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A lot of things happen at the start of each month, and one of those that I look most forward to is being able to check out the updated hardware survey at Steam. It’s especially interesting right now, because Windows 8 is only four months old, and the platform became official for Linux only a couple of weeks ago. Given it happened so recently, I think most might agree that the Linux aspect is a bit more interesting than the Windows 8 aspect at the moment.
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Christopher May-Townsend on our Facebook page let us know that Wargame: European Escalation is now available for Linux through Steam. Here’s the details:
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I was a loyal and happy KDE 3.x user way back when only dinosaurs used Linux. Then KDE4 came along and my happy KDE world was upended. The first KDE4 release was back in 2008– how time flies!– and like so many KDE3 users I had my complaints: Too lardy! Too weird! Where is my stuff?
Well, that was then, and here we are five years later. So what does KDE4 look like these days? Is it still lardy and full of weird stuff? I installed Kubuntu 12.10 just to get KDE 4.10 so I could poke at it and see what it’s doing.
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It’s that time again, release time! In this period it seems very easy to round some edges and push up things.
And this because of the great contribution people is giving us via patches, comments (also on this blog), bug reports… I cannot remember a release where I coded myself so little and checked patches and suggestions so much 
The result is this rekonq 2.2 release!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Florian Mullner submitted a patch that keeps Overview open when a Control key is held. This 19-only lines patch will be one of the greatest new features in GNOME Shell 3.8, together with the pressure sensitivity Message Tray.
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Gnome 3.4 introduced a new application called Gnome Boxes. The 3.6 release brings many changes for Gnome Boxes, and now here is a hasty preview. The various bug fixes and stability improvements make the 3.6 release far more refined, so try it today.
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Rolling releases are not new. Gentoo was one of the first, if not the actual, that was considered a rolling release. Later rPath, then PCLOS came along and Sabayon followed. Arch joined the fray and openSUSE began Tumbleweed. But more projects are kicking around the idea these days and some have even done it.
Rolling release are those systems which are updated in smaller increments over time usually from within the system with a software management client as opposed to the more traditional installation of a new system every so often. The advantages to the user is obvious, but the developer has his reasons as well. That’s why more and more projects are implementing the rolling release model, or are at least talking about it. Here are two very recent examples.
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XBMC gets an upgrade that adds some of the most important features to date, namely better Raspberry Pi support, and PVR functionality
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In case it wasn’t evident from the name, LXpup is a custom distribution spin made from Puppy Linux with the LXDE user interface. I should say by default, because the developer also distributes modules of several other popular desktop environments, but more about that later. Just remember that the user can substantially change the look and functionality of the desktop, so even if LXDE is not your thing this spin might still be for you.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Barclays Capital analyst Raimo Lenschow this morning picked up coverage of the open source software company Red Hat with an Overweight rating and a $60 price target. The stock closed Wednesday at $50.55.
“Open source continues to proliferate within enterprise IT, disrupting the traditional software license model,” the analyst writes in a research note. “Red Hat is the clear enterprise open source leader: While open source already has a strong foothold in enterprise IT, we expect it to play an increasingly large role as cloud and software defined infrastructure adoption gathers momentum. With its leadership in the open source community, Red Hat is positioned to benefit as this trend continues to play out.”
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that, according to the terms of the new trademark policy, Debian logos and marks may now be used freely for both non-commercial and commercial purposes. The Debian Project encourages wide use of its marks in all ways that promote Debian and free software.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A while back, Leann Ogasawara, Canonical Kernel Team Manager, has said that it has been discussed internally to use a rolling release model for Ubuntu between LTS releases, but that it is just an idea for now. With the new Ubuntu Touch, which needs both “velocity and agility”, the rolling release mode seems to be more than just an idea and Rick Spencer, Engineering Director at Canonical, has made a proposal about this on the Ubuntu Devel mailing list.
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Within the Ubuntu realm there have been some dramatic changes that have erupted at the end of February 2013. The first shift was that the Ubuntu Developer Summit has shifted to an electronic-only format with the first one in the new style set to launch within a week of announcement. The second shift was the announcement that rolling releases are under formal consideration with that release paradigm change being under consideration at the hastily-announced event.
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Let’s get one thing clear: The VP of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical, Rick Spencer writes a mean proposal. Honestly. I deal with more than a fair amount of marketing copy-writing and I can tell you it’s a great pitch. It’s completely decided in its stance and it uses emotive and empowering power-words like converge, velocity and agility. You’ll find nothing but the finest propaganda here.
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Flavours and Variants
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If you prefer to use Debian as your system base instead of Ubuntu, I suggest you check out Linux Mint Debian Edition. There will be a new release very soon now.
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Enea® (NASDAQ OMX Nordic:ENEA), a world leading operating system solution vendor for 3G and 4G infrastructure equipment, today announced its Enea® Linux support for Xilinx Zynq™-7000 All Programmable SoC.
Enea® Linux is now available for the Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC family, providing a comprehensive cross-development tool chain and runtime environment that may be combined with Enea and other proprietary technologies, depending on the specific use cases and requirements.
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Wind River has joined the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) in a moves designed to support embedded Linux applications.
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The folks who built the Raspberry Pi knew they had a great idea, but they probably didn’t anticipate just how successful it would be. The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is celebrating the computer’s first birthday, a million devices sold, and countless DIY and programming projects completed.
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Developers plan to use Linux in half of their upcoming embedded projects, according to preliminary data from an annual EE Times embedded market survey. And Android leads the Linux pack.
The data from EE Times’s “2013 Embedded Market Study” were disclosed to embedded market executives by UBM Tech vice president David Blaza and EE Times editor-in-chief Alex Wolfe at Embedded World in Nuremburg last week.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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If you are among the many people waiting eagerly for a revelatory smartphone from Motorola, Google CFO and Vice President Patrick Prichette wants you to tone down those expectations. According to The Verge, Prichette has said that the products in Motorola’s pipeline are “not really to the standards that what Google would say is wow — innovative, transformative.”
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Are you planning to buy a Sony Android phone this year? Well, you might want to wait for Sony C670X, a 4.8-inch handset in the works.
According to a report by Xperia Blog, Sony C670X should be similar to the Xperia Z (codenamed C660X). It is likely to pack a 1.8GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 (APQ8064T) processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 13-megapixel camera and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean out of the box.
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It is Mobile World Congress week, and we all know about the plethora of new Android devices announced. Phones and tablets are everywhere, mostly from familiar names. Then there’s also the new HP (yes, them) tablet, the budget-friendly HP Slate 7. With pricing that starts at $169.99, the big comparison will come from the Nexus 7.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The government should not have an “open source first policy,” Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Richard Spires said Wednesday, but added officials should look to open source technology whenever possible.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is now build by one instance of make that is aware of the whole dependency tree. According to my master development build (that is: a build without localization, help, extensions) yesterday, this instance of make now knows about
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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So what a Free Software activism is expected to do? You can see it on their mailing list (in Romanian language): they are unhappy, threaten the TV channel, invite members to comment on the website, talk about a flashmob, boycott, even the “DDOS” word was heard (that mail is still up). Currently the flashmob is under planning, supposed to happen tomorrow morning (details in the linked thread). Focus was lost, it moved from the license to linguistics.
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Project Releases
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Samba 4 has been in development for a long time but an official first release is imminent, the developers say. Its biggest feature is Active Directory Server support, which removes the last hurdle in a pure-Linux server set-up, with only Windows PCs and Macs as clients. In this FOSS for Windows special issue of LFY, let’s explore how to set up Active Directory Server, so that you can finally phase out those pesky Windows Servers while keeping Windows desktops and Macs intact.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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It seems the non-FREE software model is dying albeit slowly:
* governments are actually aware of the benefits of FLOSS (ending denial)
* governments now see the FUD about FLOSS costing more as hollow
* governments are beginning to prefer FLOSS by banning trademarks from purchasing requests
* governments are sharing more data and more knowledge about FLOSS with citizens and students
* a few governments are even moving to GNU/Linux on clients and servers
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see 5 tech rip-offs to avoid | Fox News.
1. Microsoft Windows OS – A reasonable price to use a modern operating system on a personal computer is ~$20. With M$, you pay the retailer ~$100 for the privilege. The retailer takes a markup and the OEM (Original Equiment Manufacturer) gets about half what’s left and M$ gets the rest, so two organizations are being paid about twice the going rate for an OS. You can have Debian GNU/Linux, for instance for about 30 minutes’ work.
2. Apple’s hardware – The same people make your PC whether it’s from Apple or Acer or HP or Dell, the Chinese.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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In the first jury trial stemming from an Occupy Wall Street protest, Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges yesterday after his lawyers presented video evidence directly contradicting the version of events offered by police and prosecutors.
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Cablegate
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The separate, but deeply entwined, stories of US Army private Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange have taken another step towards resolution.
Having taken responsibility for his leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic reports to WikiLeaks, Manning now faces the prospect of a long prison sentence.
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According to some reports, Manning’s call went to the public editor’s voice mail at the Times, which could explain why no one in the newsroom contacted him — as anyone who has ever worked in a large newsroom knows, crank calls and vaguely conspiratorial reports from would-be tipsters come with the territory, and many don’t result in any action. The part of his story about speaking with someone at the Washington Post directly would seem a little more damning, but he apparently didn’t provide many details to the reporter he spoke to.
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Pretrial hearing ends with a closed session. The government wants to call a witness that the defense says is both irrelevant and prejudicial. But the government doesn’t believe the defense should be allowed to interview him before he testifies.
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This is not the first time that WikiLeaks has come under attack, Assange tells me.
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Finance
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On Capitol Hill, there’s still no deal in sight to avert the 85-billion-dollars’ worth of cuts which will kick in later on Friday. It’s known in Washington as the ‘sequester’ and would see significant reductions on military and domestic spending. But Republicans and Democrats just can’t agree on what to do. President Obama says U.S. will get through the deep budget cuts if it has to, but admits the economy will get even worse. Economist Richard Wolff says the American people should prepare for the worst.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As part of an effort to capture one of Africa’s most wanted men, an unique partnership has taken shape in central Africa where battle-tested U.S. special operations forces have been working alongside a team of young activists from California to eliminate the notorious rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.
“We were able to come together with them and strategize,” said Sean Poole, counter-LRA programs manager for Invisible Children, a San Diego-based non-profit group. “It all started with military chartered aircraft dropping leaflets.”
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In 2009, we learned from Wikileaks cable that Beyonce got $1 million to perform at Gaddafi’s family party. So did Usher and Mariah Carey. Mariah Carey received $1 million dollars to sing four songs at Gaddafi’s son’s birthday party at Nikki Beach, St Bart’s. When the story broke, Beyonce was so embarrassed that she donated the money to earthquake relief agencies in Haiti. Usher also donated his to charities, including Amnesty International. In his statement to the press, Usher said that he was “sincerely troubled.”
When Maria Carey donated hers to charity she made this statement: “I was naïve and unaware of who I was booked to perform for. I feel horrible and embarrassed to have participated in this mess. Going forward, this is a lesson for all artists to learn from. We need to be more aware and take more responsibility regardless of who books our shows. Ultimately we as artists are to be held accountable.”
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This week we take a look at how the Washington Post challenges some sequester spin. And CBS pokes fun at Iranian claims about Argo–but are the Iranians right that Argo is fiction? Plus George Will has some thoughts about stop-and-frisk policing.
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Privacy
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Earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans didn’t have standing to challenge secret surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency. Now, new details about the eavesdropping have surfaced—which will likely fuel fresh concerns about the scale and accountability of the agency’s spy programs.
A book published earlier this month, “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry,” contains revelations about the NSA’s snooping efforts, based on information gleaned from NSA sources. According to a detailed summary by Shane Harris at the Washingtonian yesterday, the book discloses that a codename for a controversial NSA surveillance program is “Ragtime”—and that as many as 50 companies have apparently participated, by providing data as part of a domestic collection initiative.
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Civil Rights
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The following week the motion “This house believes that Israel is a force for good in the Middle East” was also defeated. I hear Peter Tatchell was excellent.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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he Canadian government today introduced a bill aimed at ensuring the Canada complies with the widely discredited Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Despite the European Union’s total rejection of ACTA along with assurances that ACTA provisions would not resurface in the Canada – EU Trade Agreement, the new bill is designed to ensure that Canada is positioned to ratify ACTA by addressing border measures provisions. The core elements of the bill include the increased criminalization of copyright and trademark law as well as the introduction of new powers for Canadian border guards to detain shipments and work actively with rights holders to seize and destroy goods without court oversight or involvement. While the bill could have been worse – it includes an exception for individual travelers (so no iPod searching border guards), it does not include patents, and excludes in-transit shipments – the bill disturbingly suggests that Canada is gearing up to ratify ACTA since this bill addresses many of the remaining non-ACTA compliant aspects of Canadian law. Moreover, it becomes the latest example of caving to U.S. pressure on intellectual property, as the U.S. has pushed for these reforms for years, as evidenced by a 2007 Wikileaks cable in which the RCMP’s National Coordinator for Intellectual Property Crime leaked information on a bill to empower Canadian border guards (the ACTA negotiations were formally announced several months earlier). [Update: On the same day the Canadian government introduced Bill C-56, the U.S. Government issued its Trade Policy Agenda and Annual Report, which calls on Canada to "meet its Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) obligations by providing its customs officials with ex officio authority to stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory"]
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Copyrights
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03.01.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Slowly but surely, Google is chipping away at advantages that proprietary operating systems have over its still relatively young Chrome OS. Meanwhile, Chromebooks, portable computers based on Chrome OS, have become popular in the market. In fact, Acer’s President recently told Bloomberg that its C7 Chromebook accounted for 5 percent to 10 percent of Acer’s U.S. shipments since being released in November.
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Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform’s sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of “administrator friendliness”.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation’s Facebook page surpassed 100,000 fans this month and to celebrate we awarded one of our most loyal fans with a $100 gift certificate to the Linux.com store and a free pass to LinuxCon North America in New Orleans or LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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The Linux 3.9 kernel will likely be introducing support for the line of Synopsys ARC700 processors. More than one billion ARC-based chips are shipped annually by Synopsys licensees and now the mainline Linux kernel can finally begin tapping this hardware.
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The KVM updates for the Linux 3.9 kernel merge window includes initial support for APICv hardware acceleration, x86 real mode emulation fixes, stronger memory slot interface restrictions, improved handling of large page faults on shadow, and other fixes.
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The Linux Foundation is holding its annual Collaboration Summit April 15-17 in San Francisco, Calif. And now, the linuep of keynote speakers and other details about the meetup are in place. “Leaders from the Linux developer, industry and end-user communities will gather at the invitation-only Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to advance the state-of-the-art of Linux and open source software,” the announcement notes. Here are more details on what to expect at the conference, and details on complete video sessions form last year’s Collaboration Summit.
The Collaboration Summit homepage is here, and you can find a very complete collection of free videos from last year’s event here. According to the Linux Foundation, the following somewhat exhaustive set of topics will be tackled at this year’s summit: automotive engineering, big data, cloud computing, virtualization, mobile and embedded development, filesystems, kernel development, legal topics, the Linux Standard Base, SPDX, parallel processing, Tizen, tools, and tracing.
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The merge window for the Linux 3.9 kernel is coming to a close and most of the major merges have already occurred, so let’s take a look at some of the best new features coming to this next Linux kernel release.
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All of those specific problems have gone, but the questions they raise are just as important today. And despite being used everywhere, from tiny black boxes and Android phones to the multiplicity of servers run by Google, Linux is still difficult to understand.
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Graphics Stack
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The 2013 State of X.Org Report has been issued by Bart Massey on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation. There isn’t too much new information out of this brief report, but they may be doing less X.Org “katamari” releases or abandon this process all together. The annual report also expresses a belief that 2013 may be the year of “Mobile Wayland.”
The X.Org Foundation is now a 501(c)3 and they have intended for these annual reports to be, well, annual, but this is their first report since 2010. Their previous report can be found on the X.Org Wiki. When asking Bart about the lack of reports back at XDC2012 in Germany, it was a combination of forgetting / simply not doing the annual reports in time. Fortunately, there’s a report out for this year.
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Kristian Høgsberg has proposed patches to Wayland and the Weston compositor for implementing pointer locks. Pointer locks allow for applications to lock the pointer so they receive relative inputs, which can improve the handling of some games running on Wayland.
Pointer locks let an application lock the pointer position and receive relative motion events. As it concerns Phoronix readers, it’s mostly important for gamers in correctly interpreting the mouse position when hitting the edge of the screen, namely first-person shooters. The Wayland pointer lock interface is modelled after the HTML5 pointer lock extension.
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Chris Wilson at Intel has begun hand-tuning his SNA acceleration architecture within the Intel X.Org driver in order to take advantage of modern CPU instruction set extensions.
With commits that started getting pushed into the mainline xf86-video-intel driver repository over the night, Chris began making changes to the Intel driver to let it take advantage of more advanced instruction set extensions found on modern CPUs. The CPU capabilities are then checked at run-time so the most appropriate version of the hand-tuned code can be utilized.
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The last time I extensively tested the AMD Radeon Gallium3D LLVM shader compiler back-end was last April. Since then the R600 LLVM back-end has matured quite a lot with new features and was merged into upstream LLVM. In the past few days I carried out some new tests on several different graphics cards using Mesa Git master of the R600 Gallium3D open-source graphics driver.
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The Intel DRM graphics driver will feature a number of user-facing improvements within the Linux 3.9 kernel.
Going back to last month I’ve been talking about Intel DRM driver changes for Linux 3.9 that have been queuing up for this future kernel release. This work includes improved Intel Haswell support and KMS locking.
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The Texas Instruments’ OMAP DRM pull request for the Linux 3.9 kernel is now known. The OMAP DRM graphics driver will leave the kernel’s staging area while at the same time picking up support for the OMAP5 SoC.
While Rob Clark has left Texas Instruments to go work on Linux graphics at Red Hat, he still today went through with taking care of the TI OMAP pull request to go into drm-next for Linux 3.9.
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The Freedreno graphics driver that supports reverse-engineered Qualcomm ARM graphics is nearing a state of mainline support within Linux.
Rob Clark, the developer formerly at Texas Instruments and now employed by Red Hat as the original creator of Freedreno, is becoming quite comfortable with the state of this 2D/3D graphics driver stack.
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Benchmarks
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Performance testing of Ubuntu Linux — in the form of the brand new Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview — on the Google Nexus smart-phones continues to move forward, but so far findings are mixed.
For those that aren’t caught up in their reading from the weekend, if you haven’t already read about the Phoronix explorations with the Ubuntu testing on the Google Nexus 7/10, see: Ubuntu Touch/Tablet Is Using SurfaceFlinger, My Favorite Command For Ubuntu Touch/Tablet, and Benchmarking The Google Nexus With Ubuntu.
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Earlier today were the results from a 9-Way Low-End NVIDIA/AMD GPU Comparison On Open-Source Drivers using the open-source Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers. For those more concerned about the 2D Linux desktop performance, here are some results for reference.
These 2D benchmarks are coming from a sub-set of the AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards used in the comparison earlier. Curiosity led to running some 2D benchmarks on the Radeon and Nouveau open-source drivers since it’s much less of a focus at Phoronix and among enthusiasts it’s often taken for granted. The 2D motivation also came from delivering new Intel 2D benchmarks with SNA Ivy Bridge and SNA Ironlake results today that showed much promise for the UXA replacement. (Plus the other reason for the uptick in the increased number of articles the past few days is needing to make some advertiser performance goals by month’s end.)
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Keyboard and mouse wheel support in the Mac driver.
– Regular expression support in VB Script.
– Many RichEdit code cleanups.
– Various bug fixes.
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Games
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Glyn Moody revisits the subject of open science, sees how others are now making the connection between open source and science, and contemplates the likelihood of a web-based future.
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The Dagon Game Engine that powers the first person adventure “Asylum” horror game has been open-sourced.
The Asylum game and the Dagon engine were developed by the Senscape indie game studio. An SDK is also being developed to allow for gamers to more easily develop mods to the Asylum game.
Dagon is modular and cross-platform with current support for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Dagon uses Lua for scripting, OpenGL graphics rendering, FreeType for font handling, OpenAL for audio, Theora for video, and Ogg Vorbis for audio.
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This article is a sort of old news, if you will. As you know, I really love Kerkythea. It’s my favorite 3D rendering software. It’s simple, extremely easy to use, runs on both Windows and Linux, and comes with a handy plugin for Google SketchUp. So the best thing that can happen is a new version, right.
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Do you remember the Humble Bundle Mojam? Yes, it is now time for the second episode of this bundle!
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Distance, the first game that managed to get through the tough Steam Greenlight program, will also be arriving on Linux.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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So much music, so many desktop music players, and so little time.
I’m sure that most Linux users can rattle off the names of a few music players. We’ve all tried a few (sometimes more than a few), in the hopes of finding the right one. I know I have. The closest I came to finding that music player was one called Songbird. Until it stopped working and the developers stopped showing the Linux version any love.
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The way Plasmoids currently create user interfaces for configuration is not really what one would hope it to be. We have set out to fix this for Plasma Workspaces 2 and today after some back and forth between Marco and myself, we are edging closer to what could well be a solution as near perfect as one could hope for. Before showing what we’ve come up with, let me explain how it works right now.
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The project I am talking about is named “ArtiKulate” and is a new kind of language learning application. It shall help students, adults, professionals, etc. to improve their foreign language pronunciation skills. This shall be done as follows: A user gets a text phrase and a corresponding sound file that is recorded by a native speaker. Then the user can play the sound (or if she/he feels lucky, this step can be omitted) and tries to speak that phrase by herself/himself. This trial is recorded by the application and the user can then compare both recordings (for now I only plan to implement a comparison done by the user by listening to both sound files, but surely an automatic highscore that states how similar both recordings are would be nice in the future…)
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New Releases
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UPDATE: New Pricing for OS4 OpenDesktop is $19.99 USD a copy. These are offered for users who want the convenience of just buying a USB vs downloading and creating a USB key or a DVD. Order yours today !!!!!!!
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Gentoo Family
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To begin with, Sabayon 11 release is not be missed. At least that is the evidence I got post using the Sabayon 11 XFCE and KDE releases. Hardware support is better than ever with complete EFI/UEFI and UEFI SecureBoot support, greatly improved NVIDIA Optimus support through Bumblebee, a selection of MySQL flavors, including Google MySQL and MariaDB, up to 14000 packages now available in the repositories per architecture, and much, much more. I already reviewed the XFCE and KDE releases and found both to be really really good. Next in line is the Mate version.
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Red Hat Family
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Get people to believe what you want them to believe.
The Raleigh executive was one of 27 leaders whose success advice was compiled by Business Insider.
“For any business there are three levels of leadership,” Whitehurst says. “One is getting somebody to do what you want them to do. The second is getting people to think what you want them to think; then you don’t have to tell them what to do because they will figure it out. But the best is getting people to believe what you want them to believe, and if people really fundamentally believe what you want them to believe, they will walk through walls.”
Whitehurst reiterated the advice in a tweet Wednesday, calling it “one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned.”
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EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) and VMware,Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced a Hadoop distribution Pivotal HD, which would be a tough competitor to Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) as early indicators point that the Pivotal has the potential to bring a radical shift the enterprise software market.
The latest announcement comes after both companies launched a new firm Pivotal Initiative in December to tap the rapidly growing big data and cloud application market.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One of the coolest aspects of Linux is its ability to support hardware long before other OSes – and even well before consumers can even get their hands on the hardware. Take USB 3.0, for example, which hit the kernel months before the first products hit the market, in September of 2009. And then there’s the SSD command TRIM, which was first launched to the kernel in December of 2008 – six months before Windows 7 introduced the same thing as standard.
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Ubuntu Linux maintainer Canonical has canceled its semiannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) conferences in favor of a new, more-frequent series of events to be conducted online only.
In the past, Canonical has organized a new UDS event at a different city around the world every six months, to coincide with the beginning of each new release cycle of the open source OS.
The purpose of the meetings has been to develop plans and work schedules for the upcoming version, not to mention simply to get the more prominent members of the Ubuntu community together in one room.
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We’ve seen some relatively sparse desktops in recent weeks. This week’s featured desktop, a Ubuntu system from Lifehacker reader technofhile, goes in the other direction with a wealth of useful information at the bottom of the screen.
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It’s touch-driven interface joins a market that is surprisingly well populated, beyond the Android and iOS staples we all know. Yes, yes, and Windows Phone, though you chaps only have 2% globally.
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The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, “Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs”.
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You’ve got to give Microsoft credit for attempting a single OS that bridges PC, phone, and tablet users. What it ended up with, however, was a collection of pseudo-compatible platforms that have left the marketplace confused and largely unimpressed.
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After spending the better part of the past week running continuous open-source Linux benchmarks on the Exynos5-powered Google Nexus 10, the first extensive benchmark results for the Nexus 10 tablet running the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are now available. This performance comparison from Ubuntu on the dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 powered device is compared to numerous other ARMv7 and x86 devices. One of the interesting findings from this new round of ARM Linux testing is that the Google Nexus with its dual-core ARM SoC is competitive with AMD’s first-generation Phenom Quad-Core processor for some demanding workloads.
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We’re also not sure about the ecosystem – the devices will ship with a handful of apps on launch and the enhasis will be on the developer community to chip in and enhance usefulness. With four core platforms already fighting it out for market share and the upcoming Tizen and Firefox operating systems also set to be launched, it remains to be seen if Ubuntu can be anything other than niche.
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Rick Spencer, the vice president of Ubuntu Engineering, has restarted the discussion on making Ubuntu a rolling release distribution like Arch or Gentoo.
There are three kinds of Ubuntu users, from what I understand — LTS users, six months upgraders and daily build users. Those users (which includes big enterprise customers like Google) who do a lot of customization or want extremely stable system use the LTS version which is maintained for a longer period.
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The convergence of devices and software platforms is being driven by the shift towards cloud computing, which will ultimately become the engine room of all modern applications, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.
Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, following last week’s launch of a developer preview of Canonical’s mobile-friendly version of Ubuntu, Shuttleworth said that one of the key challenges in the mobile space is the fragmentation of the underlying platforms.
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This excerpt is from the book, Ubuntu Unleashed: 2013 Edition by Matthew Helmke, published by Pearson/SAMS, Dec 2012, ISBN 0672336243; copyright 2013 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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-Ubuntu is coming to your phone and tablet, and in style. I got my hands on the forthcoming Ubuntu Touch operating system for smartphones and tablets at mobile industry shindig Mobile World Congress, and I’d say on first impression it knocks rivals like Firefox OS and Samsung-backed Tizen into a cocked hat.
Ubuntu Touch is developed by Canonical and set to be available to the public in October. Manufacturers are yet to be confirmed, but you can try the software right now on selected Google Nexus devices. I tried out the new OS installed on a Google Nexus 4 smartphone, and the tablet version on a Google Nexus 7 slate.
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The Ubuntu OS on smartphones and tablets has been grabbing headlines and gaining support quickly since the plans were formally unveiled at the beginning of 2013. ZDNet met the man behind Ubuntu to see what he had to say about the project.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint has quickly climbed the ranks in the past few years and has surpassed Ubuntu on Distro Watch as the most popular distribution (conditions apply).
With the next rendition of Mint they have added yet another personalization feature that is sure to get a lot of attention. The MDM is the default display manager for the login screen in Linux Mint and it now supports HTML5!
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Bodhi Linux has earned respect and high praise from users and respected journalists all around the Linuxhood. Later Bloathi, more of a good thing, was introduced. Well, Bodhi fans, rejoice because another edition has joined the line-up. Introducing Bodhi “Friends and Family,” or bloated Bodhi.
Jeff Hoogland introduced the new edition in a blog post today saying it is actually the system he keeps around for those friends’ and families’ computers to save time installing extra software. He said, “Today, I would like to offer a bit more choice for Bodhi users. I think it is finally in a state that I am happy sharing it. It is simply a Bodhi 2.x branch live/install CD powered by a Linux 3.5 kernel and the latest E17.1 Enlightenment desktop. It comes with a bunch of software pre-installed that should keep most people happy.”
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Intel is going all-in on embedded Linux development. The company this week released the Intel System Studio, an all-new development suite that includes profilers, debuggers, code analysis tools and optimized compilers for Linux apps destined for hardware built with Intel-based SoCs as well as the company’s Atom, Core and Xeon processors. The news came at the annual Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany.
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In a Google+ posting, Intel employee and Linux kernel developer Darren Hart has announced the MinnowBoard, a development board and associated community pushed by the company. The MinnowBoard is described as “Open Hardware utilizing Intel processors” and is supposed to be easily adaptable to the requirements of developers. To facilitate this, the board’s design is deliberately simple and uses standard components.
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Phones
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The Tizen project has now released Tizen 2.0, source code and SDK, in what it describes as a “major milestone”. The Tizen 2.0 update includes an enhanced web framework with many of the latest W3C/HTML5 APIs supported, a Web UI framework with fullscreen and multi-window support, and extra APIs for Bluetooth and NFC devices and access to calendars, call history and messaging.
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At Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, centre stage was given to a panel discussion between the figureheads of the three newcomer operating systems in the mobile space: Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker (Firefox OS), Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu for Phones), and Jolla CEO Marc Dillon (Sailfish OS) spent an hour discussing their respective products.
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Well, the latest tool from Samsung in the fight against its long-term rival is the new Wallet mobile payment app. The Korean company unveiled the Samsung Wallet app at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Similar to Apple’s Passbook app for iOS, the app allows users to store tickets, boarding passes, membership cards, and coupons in one central location on their phone. With time and location-based push notifications, users can easily know about offers and updates; they can also display barcodes to scan at payment desks. Does that remind you a lot like Apple’s Passbook? Yes, you guessed it right! They are indeed Passbook features.
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Ballnux
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The Optimus line gets new flagship, mid-range, and lower-end models — and the South Korean electronics giant promises new top-end Optimus G family members soon.
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More than 6 months after its debut, LG Optimus G has finally arrived in India. Featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 processor, this 4.7 inch (the same as on the Nexus 4) smartphone runs on the latest Android v4.1.2 (Jelly Bean) and packs a battery of 2,100 mAh.
We recently reported that LG’s smartphone is also making its European debut in Sweden this month followed by France, Germany and Italy.
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SUSE Linux has no plans to enter the mobile or tablet markets, but instead will concentrate on other areas which are part of the integrated Linux market, the president and general manager of the company, Nils Brauckmann, told iTWire yesterday.
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Android
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Following up on its tablet version, Adobe has now launched Photoshop Touch for smartphones including Android, iPhone and iPod touch.
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Android phone makers can thank Sprint for much of their sales gains in the November-through-January period, says market researcher Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
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Google recently opened up a public code repository that contains their experimental work to re-base Android off the recently released Linux 3.8 kernel.
Surfacing recently is the experimental/android-3.8 repository. This experimental kernel is derived from the Linux 3.8 source tree plus Google engineers layering their modifications atop to make it suitable for Android’s use. The work is labelled as “experimental” but it seems to be evolving fast.
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ClockworkMod Recovery and ROM Manager developer Koushik Dutta has released a beta version of a new super user application for Android. According to Dutta, the ClockworkMod Superuser tool will be integrated into the settings application of the next major CyanogenMod release. The tool is open source, supports Jelly Bean’s multi-user functionality, and uses Android’s built-in permission model to give selected applications super user permissions when they are required.
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At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, one company looms over proceedings, writes Matt Warman, and that company is Google.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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-After a rocky start, Samsung Electronics is finally seeing the light when it comes to the tablet business.
The Korean consumer electronics giant, already the world’s largest handset manufacturer, plans to double its tablet sales from a year ago, according to Y.H. Lee, executive vice president of the company’s mobile unit.
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As I sign off from my duties at ZDNet, and more than 20 years following open source, I am struck with the realization that open source has, in many respects, really taken over the world.
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The OSI board, which meets in person at least twice per annum, has selected Washington D.C. as the location for the Spring 2013 Board of Directors Meeting. The city serves as a central location for gathering the OSI’s geographically diverse board membership. It is also considered a location of open source policy dialog and debate as well as high-profile implementations within US federal government operations.
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Events
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Embedded developer Bjarne Rosengren has never been to the Southern United States. But he’s got a better idea of the fun that lies ahead at LinuxCon in New Orleans this September – and the chance to go — thanks to Tux.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Remember Ingress? A mobile game launched by Google last year, to be played out in real life? Well, the search giant is back with Chrome Experiments!
Google has announced a desktop browser-based game called Super Sync Sports, where you take on friends in multiplayer running, cycling or swimming events using your smartphone or tablet as the game controller.
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Mozilla
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Do you ever get annoyed by how advertising cookies in your browser seem to know what your interests are and serve up creepy ads that hit a little too close to home? If so, you probably don’t use Apple’s Safari browser, because it doesn’t allow third-party cookies by default. Other major browsers do, though.
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The Japanese electronics company has “an ambition” to release a Firefox OS phone next year in partnership with carrier Telefonica.
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Here’s a young man I am VERY proud of, Javier Aguera, founder of Geeksphone who’ve produced the exciting new Firefox smartphone everyone’s been talking about this week.
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Mozilla’s fledgling Firefox OS was recently announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but it surely seems to be gaining quite a lot of attention. First, we saw Twitter jumping on to the bandwagon by launching its app for the OS, and now Sony has come up with an experimental ROM of the operating system for the Xperia E. Sony has plans to launch smartphones running Firefox OS later this year.
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The Mozilla Foundation doesn’t expect the first phones running its Firefox OS to appear until this summer – and even then, only in select markets – but developers can start tinkering with the platform on real hardware today, thanks to Sony Mobile.
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Jeff Griffiths, the product manager for Mozilla’s Add-on SDK, known as Jetpack, has announced that, from Firefox version 21 (which will include SDK 1.14), the SDK will synchronise releases of the SDK with releases of the browser.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Intel has surprised developers by announcing its own distribution of Apache Hadoop, the distributed “big data” framework. The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software is, says the company, optimised for Intel Xeon processors with Intel SSD drives and Intel’s 10GbE networking. Hadoop is a Java framework for scalable distributed systems based around the MapReduce approach and developed by the Apache Software Foundation.
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Intel wants more organisations and people to use the vast amounts of data being generated, collected and stored every day. This is the reason why the chipmaker has announced Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software. The offering, which includes Intel Manager for Apache Hadoop software, is built from the silicon up to deliver improved security features.
Hadoop is an open source framework for storing and processing large volumes of diverse data on a scalable cluster of servers that has emerged as the preferred platform for managing big data. With even more information coming from billions of sensors and intelligent systems also on the horizon, the framework must remain open and scalable as well as deliver on the demanding requirements of enterprise-grade performance, security and manageability.
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The 3D graphics drivers that are available in Mesa 3D 9.1 offer improved support for current and expected-soon graphics chips and promise enhanced 3D performance. The new version of the graphics library, which is typically used by default by Linux distributions for their 3D drivers, now includes an OpenGL driver that, together with a driver in Linux 3.8, supports the graphics core of Intel’s Haswell processors. These processors are scheduled to be launched as Core i-4000s in a few months and will supersede Intel’s current “Ivy Bridge” generation.
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After almost exactly a year of development, SpringSource has released Spring for Hadoop 1.0 with the goal of making the development of Hadoop applications easier for users of the distributed application framework. VMware engineer Costin Leau said in the release announcement that the company has often seen developers use the out-of-the-box tools that come with Hadoop in ways that lead to a “poorly structured collection of command line utilities, scripts and pieces of code stitched together.” Spring for Hadoop aims to change this by applying the Template API design pattern from Spring to Hadoop.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The 4rth major release of our favorite libre office suite has been released, bringing amazing new things and fundamental changes that guarantee a brighter future.
Michael Meeks, who has always been an important player in the LibreOffice team, explains the technical details of the highlights of this release and shares some future plans and hopes with us in this quick interview.
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CMS
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In this last installment of our three-part series on finding the best open-source content management system (CMS) for your needs, we asked two organizations — online magazine Quartz.com and Carleton University — to talk about why they chose WordPress over other open-source options and how well that decision has stood the test of time. (Our first installment examined Drupal and the second looked at Joomla.)
WordPress got its start as a blogging platform in May 2003 and gradually evolved, first into a blogging system that let users add Web pages outside of the blog and then into a full-featured, popular CMS. Of the three most popular open-source CMSs — WordPress, Joomla and Drupal — WordPress is both the most popular and the fastest growing by far, according to Web technology tracker W3Techs.
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Healthcare
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BSD
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When it comes to kernel mode-setting and open-source graphics drivers, the BSD operating system with the best support is presently FreeBSD. For those, however, using NetBSD, improvements are forthcoming with an investment by the NetBSD Foundation.
FreeBSD 9.1 introduces Intel KMS support after it was an out-of-tree porting project for quite a while. While not yet merged, Radeon KMS is also being ported to FreeBSD. For other BSD platforms, the support level varies but it’s mostly out-of-tree work at this point. For more details see BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers.
Taylor Campbell of NetBSD announced on the mailing list earlier this month that the NetBSD Foundation hired him to port the current generation Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support to NetBSD. This work includes bringing forward KMS (Kernel Mode-Setting) and GEM (Graphics Execution Manager) to this BSD distribution.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In the world of computers we have our own Rosa Parks, Richard Stallman, who expanded the concept of freedom to include:
* running the software,
* examining the software,
* modifying the software, and
* distributing the software.
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Project Releases
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The latest version, 1.4.0, of the open source QEMU emulator and virtualiser has been released and brings with it a new experimental threaded backend to manage direct PCI IO. This new backend is regarded as the highlight of the new release as, in testing, it managed to give a 900% increase in IO performance for a single KVM guest, from 150,000 IOPS (IO operations per second) to 1.33 million IOPS.
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Public Services/Government
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Using technical specifications to discriminate ICT solutions continues to be a widespread practice within the EU, says Openforum Europe, advocating the use of open standards in ICT. Publishing the results of its audit of European procurement, OFE yesterday urged for action. “These persisting discriminatory practices are not properly addressed.”
OFE yesterday shared the results of its most recent inspection of ‘invitations to tender’ published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It studied 785 tender requests from the last quarter of 2012. “Almost one in five, 19 per cent, includes technical specifications with explicit references to trademarks. That is the highest in the last three years.”
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The Italian city of Udine has been using open source solutions wherever possible for years. The city’s IT department can rely on many local IT service providers. It is also supported by the university, where this type of software development is actively used in teaching and research.
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Openness/Sharing
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One man decides to publish his own book—but there’s no road map, no previous information to help him navigate how to do it! How will he sell a copy to people he doesn’t already know?
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A year ago today we launched the beta of Inside Government on GOV.UK – a working, public demo of a product which to many people had previously seemed unimaginable.
The site was a live test of what multiple departments sharing a single platform could look like, with 10 departments actively re-publishing all their content to the beta site over a 6-week period.
It was the predecessor of today’s Inside Government section which, with DCMS, HMRC and the Office of the Advocate General for Scotland having joined this week, is now the main corporate web presence for 14 departments.
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I recommend using Debian GNU/Linux because it works just to save shopping for a distro although that can be fun too. Some schools are set up to allow users to choose a distro and get it on the next reboot. I like to make individual configurations for users. It’s not hard with systems like Sabayon. One could even arrange that users would be able to publish their configurations and have users choose any of them to be theirs. Compare that flexibility with the rigidity of that other OS. To think that people actually pay extra for that other OS is simply sad. It’s like a billion people paying to be locked up.
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Open Data
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Maps touch our lives daily. Whether you are trying to find a nearby point of interest or directions to a faraway land, maps help us find our way. In recent years, maps have moved from paper into the digital world of cartography and open source contributors have been in the trenches gathering data for the masses.
In 2006, a group of map enthusiasts formed the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Registered in the United Kingdom as a not-for-profit organization it quickly grew to become a 400,000 person strong organization. Since the beginning of the project, volunteers from every continent have put their mark on the map showing where everything from roads to bike paths and from fire stations to ice cream stores are located. The information is licensed with copyleft licenses which allows anyone to use the information to build their own maps both paper and digital.
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An Open Data Future is a debate that aims to look under the hood of the open data movement.
Over the past few years open government data has evolved from a niche concern to one that has been embraced by national government, European Commission and other states and organisations around the globe.
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Open Access/Content
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Professor Kelsey Kauffman has made efforts to educate DePauw faculty and staff about open-access policies for the past year. But it wasn’t until internationally renowned computer genius Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Jan. 11 that the university began to seriously consider adopting such a policy.
In light of Swartz’s death, DePauw officials are contemplating adopting an open-access policy, which would give faculty the opportunity to submit their scholarly articles through a DePauw database. These articles would be available for free to anyone in the world — not limited to only students, professors and employees tied to institutions with subscriptions to academic journals, as they currently are.
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In a memorandum issued on Friday, John P. Holdren, science adviser to President Obama, called for scientific papers that report the results of federally financed research to become freely accessible within a year or so after publication. The findings are typically published in scientific journals, many of which are open only to paying subscribers.
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Open Hardware
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Cloud service provider Cumulocity is presenting an Arduino board with a GSM module designed for mobile communications at the Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, from 26 to 28 February. A Foca FTDI adapter adds serial access for programming and a light sensor for DIY projects are also included, along with an M2M SIM card from Deutsche Telekom to enable sending data over GSM to the cloud. The Arduino Cumulocity M2M Kit is due out in the second quarter of 2013 and should be able to be pre-ordered for €89 from Deutsche Telekom’s developer web site; details of the ordering process are yet to be announced.
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Aaron Swartz, brilliant hacker and political activist, committed suicide in January 2013 in the midst of an aggressive criminal investigation into his downloading of the entire JSTOR archive. Swartz was charged with thirteen counts of felony hacking and wire fraud and faced a possible sentence of decades in prison and millions in fines. In the wake of his suicide, many have called for the reevaluation of the cybercrime laws under which he was prosecuted.
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Programming
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The second point release in the Git 1.8 series will introduce several new end-user features and support for new operating systems.
Git 1.8.2-rc0 was released on Sunday by Junio Hamano and provides a glimpse at what’s to come with this next release.
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Although it is now February, almost March, the language ranking numbers below were actually run in January in keeping with our roughly quarterly pace for updates. As we have done since 2011, we’re repeating the analysis originally performed by Drew Conway and John Myles White in December of 2010. Measurement of performance depends, of course, on what you measure. In this case, the rankings are derived from a correlation of programming traction on GitHub and Stack Overflow.
While there are many approaches to measuring language performance, none perfect, GitHub and Stack Overflow collectively represent statistically significant volumes of data. More importantly for our purposes, their respective communities, while overlapping, remain distinct and thus provide some balance to a measurement of one on a stand alone basis. The statistical correlation between the two properties has remained strong; it was .78 during the first analysis and has never been weaker since – the results below also feature a correlation of .78.
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Since my first Palm PDA I have been using a nifty Palm app, Titrax, to track the time I spend working on projects. It’s simple to use — just tap to start a project, tap again to stop — gives detailed time reports, and lets me add notes each time I start tracking (so that I can describe what specific task I am working on). It works great.
But, as I’ve traveled less and less, and I’ve used the Palm less and less, I’ve come to realize that the only thing I’m now using the Palm for is Titrax. The Palm sits in its cradle, atop my PC, and I tap projects on and off and scribble short notes. I then download those logs to the PC with Jpilot, and extract the data I need there. The only thing I’m tracking is work I’m doing on the PC, so why not just track my time on the PC?
A web search for “Linux time tracking” turned up this useful page at LinuxLinks, describing seven tools. Two are web-based, which I specifically do not want, and Kontact is part of the KDE suite, which I’m trying to avoid (and which is overkill for my needs at any rate). Of the remaining four, three seemed overcomplicated for my needs, while Project Hamster looked promising. Perhaps I was also influenced by the LifeHacker article which recommended Hamster as “super simple”. Simple is good — I don’t want a program that tries to record which apps I’m using. (I use three different text editors for a mix of about a dozen projects — good luck tracking that.)
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Governments want to define professionalism through certifications — rather than community reputation built on real work
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Security
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Malware has infected a Russian police computer network, knackering speed cameras in and around Moscow, according to reports.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The Government has secretly ramped up a controversial programme that strips people of their British citizenship on national security grounds – with two of the men subsequently killed by American drone attacks.
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Afghan President Hamid Karzai and local residents insist that the answer is yes
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Hackers from the US have repeatedly launched attacks on two Chinese military websites, including that of the Defence Ministry, officials say.
The sites were subject to about 144,000 hacking attacks each month last year, two thirds of which came from the US, according to China’s defence ministry.
The issue of cyber hacking has strained relations between the two countries.
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The US is to step up its support for the Syrian opposition as it fights to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Secretary of State John Kerry says.
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Tom Flanagan was one of Stephen Harper’s key mentors, and remains perhaps the most influential ideologue of the current “Conservative movement” — the movement that’s in power in Ottawa right now.
You can get some sense of Flanagan’s ideology in his many articles and speeches and in his books, especially Waiting for the Wave: The Reform Party and the Conservative Movement which was originally published in 1997, but re-issued in an updated version last year.
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Cablegate
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A pretrial hearing for PFC Bradley Manning at Fort Meade, MD, ended early for the press and public today, as the court moved to a closed session in the afternoon to litigate how to handle classified information during trial. Prosecutors intend to call 141 witnesses during the trial, and they expect testimony from 73 of those to include classified information.
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Frequently throughout the long and drawn out process that has become the court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, reporters covering proceedings have complained or expressed frustration about the lack of access to court records. But, finally, the military has decided to allow a smidgen of transparency in the court martial to possibly avoid a major First Amendment ruling in a military appeals court that could find the United States military should be granting the press and public access to court martial records in the same way the press and public have access to federal court records.
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Bradley Manning is expected to defend himself as a whistleblower in court today as he admits for the first time that he stole classified US documents from a secure military network in Iraq and handed them to WikiLeaks.
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Well, now we have an even more compelling reason to have a New York Times reporter at the trial: To report on Manning’s claim to have approached … the New York Times before he turned to WikiLeaks. In pleading guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him, Manning today read a statement in which he detailed his attempts to reach out to various media organizations — The Washington Post and Politico as well — with his wares. Those attempts apparently didn’t work.
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Manning had gone to US press outlets. Two organizations showed no interest in the war logs.
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A statement Pfc. Bradley Manning read in court yesterday as part of his guilty pleas provided further evidence of how organizationally establishment US media organizations are incapable of responding to tips from whistleblowers. It also included much to ponder as President Barack Obama’s administration continues to maintain a war on whistleblowers, especially those whose work involves so-called national security.
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Finance
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Last week, the Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine worked together to publish a package in the Nation and a new online wiki resource on Pete Peterson and the Campaign to Fix the Debt, an entity we consider an “astroturf supergroup” with a huge budget working hard to create the fantasy that Americans care more about national debt and deficits than jobs and the economy. Fix the Debt is currently exploiting the “sequester” debate in Congress to encourage steep cuts to incredibly popular social programs like Medicare and Social Security.
After the release, Fix the Debt’s press person called to confront me about what he said were “false things” in our exposé.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Bank of America Corp. won a delay of Dodd-Frank Act requirements that they wall off some derivatives trades from bank units backed by federal deposit insurance.
Commercial banks including the Wall Street firms may get as long as an additional two years — until July 2015 — to comply with the rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a notice yesterday. The so-called pushout provision was included in the 2010 financial-regulation law as a way to limit taxpayer support for risky derivatives trades.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and other regulators need to complete swap rules to allow “federal depository institutions to make well-informed determinations concerning business restructurings that may be necessary,” the OCC said in the notice. Dodd-Frank requires that equity, some commodity and non-cleared credit derivatives be moved into separate affiliates without federal assistance.
Regulators including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke had opposed the provision, saying it would drive derivatives to less-regulated entities. In February, the House Financial Services Committee approved with bipartisan support legislation that would let banks keep commodity and equity derivatives in insured units by removing part of the rule.
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It’s not as if Bill O’Reilly has never uttered things reasonable people might consider racist: He wondered when African-Americans would “reject immorality,” compared Al Sharpton to David Duke, used the term “wetbacks” on his show, explained that Africa and “fundamental Islam” were antithetical to “Western reasoning,” joked that “the most unattractive women in the world are probably in the Muslim countries.”
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The agreement has still to be approved by EU governments before coming into force next year. While details may still be tweaked, it is expected that the main points will become EU law.
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Campaign for America’s Future writer Richard Eskow puts two important headlines together from this week, about the budget cuts which will go into effect on Friday harming average Americans and the poor and the ongoing corporate welfare the U.S. government is handing out to the “too big to fail” banks on a daily basis.
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Today’s “austerity policies” represent a moment in which the above lessons have been forgotten so the system rushes toward another set of catastrophes which will teach, yet again, why mashing down the bottom 2/3 of the economy is counterproductive for lenders and capitalists. And once again, millions will suffer and vast resources will be wasted as this teaching occurs. And this time it may be stretched out even further as capitalists imagine they can substitute cheap workers abroad for costly workers in Europe and the US without encountering the same old contradictions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Heavy water is just water containing hydrogen in the form of a heavier isotope, deuterium, which contains an extra neutron. It is a great moderator for fast neutrons from nuclear fission because of the high probability of a hard collision when a neutron zips through the molecule. In the collision, the energy of the fast neutron is shared well with the deuterium thus slowing the fast neutron so it’s more effective at triggering further collisions in the chain reaction. So, heavy water is not about producing plutonium but about facilitating nuclear chain reactions in fission. Deuterium is also useful in nuclear physics experiments and producing fluxes of really slow neutrons for all kinds of purposes. Plutonium is a by-product of any uranium fisssion reactor where U238 is present. In fact, enriching uranium implies reducing the concentration of U238 in favour of U235 actually reducing the production of plutonium. So, Haretz is just spreading more FUD when it suggests readers should be worried about heavy water.
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There’s always a place for a “national security” Republican–no matter how wrong they’ve been.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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At first sight it’s spin for data protection. The sort of expressions you hope these persons don’t take home from work, and it gets you pleased as a punch. Anyway, what seems to contradict the lobbying from Us corporations in Brussels against data protection makes sense from the perspective of Deutsche Telekom.
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Border Force staff seized 1,147 pieces of luggage as a result of secret baggage searches at Birmingham Airport in the year to September, however serious concerns about whether the powers are being used proportionately
The report by Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration John Vine, found that staff at Birmingham Airport were not keeping records of how many times they searched luggage and no contraband was found. Guidance to staff was “contradictory and out of date” and managers admitted there had been no checks made to ensure correct procedures were being followed when bags were being searched to protect people’s privacy.
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There are four — maybe five — members of the NSA who make sure that its secret domestic spying program isn’t overstepping its reach according to a new book, Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry.
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SAN FRANCISCO. In the world of online privacy, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are all front and center. The chief privacy officers from all four vendors took the stage at the RSA Security conference today to debate what online privacy is all about.
The most heated moment during the panel discussion came when Keith Enright, Senior Privacy Counsel at Google, challenged Microsoft on privacy claims. Microsoft has been running a marketing campaign called ‘Scroogled’ alleging that Google Gmail is privacy risk.
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The Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee in the European Parliament will vote on amendments to the proposed Data Protection Regulation on March 18th-19th. Their opinion will influence the final report from “LIBE”, which is the lead Committee. So what happens in the JURI vote is an important factor in what the final law will look like.
The JURI Committee will be voting on some specific amendments to the proposed Regulation. Below we detail the top amendments that we think MEPs should support or reject. This is based on a full analysis of the JURI amendments by EDRi, which is available on the campaign site www.privacycampaign.eu
We have produced a briefing on the Data Protection Regulation, which provides more detail on what the issues are.
If you live in the North West of England or in Yorkshire and the Humber, your MEPs are involved in this vote. Please write to your MEP and ask them to support a strong Data Protection Regulation. We have some guidance on how on the blog. If you want to go into more detail, here are the top amendments that MEPs will be voting on.
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Members of the European Parliament are in the process of shaping a new Data Protection Regulation, which was proposed by the European Commission last January. A number of Committees in the Parliament are giving their opinions, which will influence what the final law might look like. (Full text of the proposed Regulation (pdf))
The original proposals from the Commission were very promising, offering much stronger privacy rights and a stricter regime to make sure those that collect and use personal data play by the rules. This sort of update to data protection law is badly needed. We have produced a short guide to the issues.
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The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—CIPSA, the so-called “cybersecurity” bill—is back in Congress. As we’ve written before, the bill is plagued with privacy problems and we’re urging concerned users to email their Representatives to oppose it.
Many of the bill’s problems stem from its vague language. One particularly dangerous provision, designed to enable corporations to obtain and share information, is drafted broadly enough to go beyond just companies, creating a government access loophole.
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Civil Rights
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The U.S. Supreme Court may roll back two pillars of the civil rights era this term — the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and affirmative action — both of which have long been targeted by the right-wing and whose challenges are backed by the same set of deep-pocketed ideological funders.
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Amnesty International, JUSTICE, Liberty and Reprieve have warned that the threat of secret courts is graver than ever after ministers defied the House of Lords and reverted back to the original version of the highly damaging Justice and Security Bill.
Yesterday – as Westminster and the media concentrated on same-sex marriage – the House of Commons Committee responsible for scrutiny of the Bill passed new government amendments which reverse changes to the Bill made by the Lords in November.
In November the government suffered several large cross-party defeats on the legislation in the House of Lords, as Peers introduced a series of amendments. Those changes – supported by Labour, Liberal Democrats, Crossbenchers and some Conservatives – improved the likelihood that secret courts would be used only as a genuine “last resort”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Following an intergovernmental seminar on digital policy [fr], French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced a law “on the protection of digital rights and freedoms” for early 2014. While this announcement offers hope for the defense of freedoms online, recent statements made by members of the French government suggest it is not yet ready to break away from the repressive trend initiated by its predecessors.
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DRM
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On February 13th, we asked you to join in with thousands of others to call on the White House to protect users where the Copyright Office had failed. Because of your actions, the White House now must respond to the call to fix the DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions list in order to protect the right to unlock cell phones. But there is more we should do.
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I’ve owned two different Android phones since they first were released, and I eventually rooted both of them. My Droid (original) was such a popular phone that rooting it was very simple. I used my rooted Droid until it wore out and rebooted every time I slid open the keyboard. My second Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2, is the phone I have right now. It actually was quite a bit more challenging to root, but in the end, I couldn’t resist the lure of total control. Sadly, no amount of rooting can supply a hardware keyboard for my S2, but at least I can run whatever ROM I want on it now. Before I go into how to root an Android device, it’s important to discuss why you might want to do so, or why you might not.
One of the most common questions I get via e-mail or Twitter is how to root an Android phone. As you can see by the size of the following article, that’s not a question easily answered in 140 characters. So, in this article, I talk about rooting an Android device and then describe the process for installing a custom ROM. It’s complex, sometimes frustrating, and it can be dangerous if you don’t do your homework in advance. If that doesn’t scare you off, read on.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Google was handed a small victory in Germany this week when lawmakers there approved a bill that will allow the search giant to freely include headlines and snippets from German publishers on services like Google News.
Using a larger portion of content, however, will require payment.
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Reader David Sutherland emailed us this week about a DMCA notice that he received via his MediaFire account. The notice, which we’ve included below (including all of the crappy formatting) claimed that he was using MediaFire to host “one of the following files: Downton Abbey, CONTRABAND (2012), GRIMM (2011), House M.D., MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS, THE, The Office.” The “file” they claimed was one of those TV shows/movies was “Cantha Cartography Made Easy 2009.tpf” which is actually a game mod for Guild Wars. You might possibly be able to argue that ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars could have a copyright claim (maybe, sorta), but that’s not who sent the notice and it’s not what they claimed it was. Sutherland notes that he set up this MediaFire account solely to host game mods and has never hosted any other content there.
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Send this to a friend
02.27.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Makers of Linux-based operating systems have been letting you boot Fedora, Ubuntu, and other popular software from a removable CD, DVD, or flash drive for years. Now you can use your Android phone instead.
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The governmental IT supplier for schools in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg has committed to stop development of its in-house Linux-based school server software paedML in favour of a new solutionGerman language link based on Univention’s UCS@schoolGerman language link product. This move was originally announced by the government organisation at the end of 2012; the intention was to reduce the workload on the teachers developing and supporting the software by outsourcing this work to a commercial company. UCS@school is based on version 3.1 of the open source Univention Corporate Server.
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Free Software means nobody can stop you doing whatever you want with the software³, but this also protects the developers’ rights to do whatever they want. Nothing they change (even GNOME 3) can actually infringe that freedom, even if you don’t like it.
So: there may be legitimate criticisms of new software like pulseaudio or juju (or GNOME 3 or the new anaconda), but any complaint along the lines of “the developers are taking our freedom/choices away!” is 100% rhetorical nonsense.
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Reglue is no different. From picking up and diagnosing donated computers to taking care of vehicles, coordinating volunteers and making sure computers get into the hands that need them, sometimes the little things can slip below the horizon.
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On my test machine table, I have Google’s brand new Chromebook Pixel. Beside it, I have what had been the fastest Chromebook before it, the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. Is the Pixel better? Yes. No question about it. But, here’s the real question: Is it $850 better?
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For the first time, both hiring mangers (850) and Linux professionals (2,600) were surveyed in the 2013 Linux Jobs Survey & Report, which forecasts and provides a comprehensive view of the Linux career landscape, including business needs and personal incentives.
The report also includes insights into why employers are seeking Linux talent now and what the top incentives are for Linux professionals.
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Desktop
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There are plenty of reasons to not want to spend $1450 on the Chromebook Pixel, but most of them are an extension of the fact that Chrome OS hasn’t grown up enough to replace a traditional OS. Fortunately, Google’s new BIOS makes it easier to work around the native operating system than any Chrome OS hardware before it.
The main appeal of the Samsung Chromebook and its ilk has been price. For $250, you could afford to pick one up and see if you were going to like it. You could give one as a gift to that family member who considered it a biological imperative to click on every link they came across, leaving you to scrub the shame off of their hard drive the next time you were over for a visit.
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I’m a huge fan of Dan Gillmor. As a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, he was on top of a lot of great tech stories. His book, We the Media, was an incredibly accurate prediction of where American journalism was heading in the early part of this century. And he’s been very public about his move to Linux. So I’m pretty psyched to have his participation here.
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I’ve been searching for a new laptop for a very long time. My old Dell Inspiron 6400 has served me very well for over four years, but about a year ago I decided I needed a refresh. I finally decided upon the Dell XPS but it was a hard journey coming to that decision! Read on for a little bit more background about why I picked this laptop on how Mageia runs on it!
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Server
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As enterprises move to adopt private clouds in the backend, Linux will increasingly become the operating system of choice for server infrastructures in Australia, according to IDC research director Matthew Oostveen.
In financial year 2012, AU$235.35 million was spent on Linux servers, and in the same year, one in four servers shipped in the Australian market was Linux-based. Approximately 29 percent of all the money spent on server infrastructure in Australia went towards Linux servers.
Based on those figures, IDC believes Linux is now running more enterprise mission and business critical workloads than other OSes such as Windows Server.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Canonical launches Ubuntu Touch for tablets. Steam has been officially released for Linux. LG has bought WebOS for its televisions. Tizen SDK 2.0 has been released and Mozilla says there’s plenty of interest in its Firefox OS. Hear our discoveries and the interim results of our challenge, plus your own opinions in our internet famous Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Last week when benchmarking the new F2FS file-system from Samsung that was introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel its performance was compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. For those hoping to see file-system performance results of NILFS2, those results are available today.
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The EXT4 file-system in the forthcoming Linux 3.9 kernel will support using the previously-introduced punch hole functionality for inodes not using extent maps.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The two games worthy mentioning that were pushed out to the public for Steam Linux users are Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Wargame: European Escalation. There were also some other new titles pushed, but these are the two noteworthy additions. The full list of Linux titles can be found via the Steam Store.
Counter Strike: Condition Zero is a multi-player follow-up to the original Counter-Strike game. Condition Zero also features a single-player mission and bots. The game has been available to Windows gamers since 2004, but now nearly a decade later it’s been pushed to Linux. This is a native Linux port of another Valve “GoldSrc” engine game after Counter-Strike 1.6 and the original Half-Life.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A few weeks ago we released a brand new major version of Kolab. The feedback we received was overwhelming and we are truly happy that we see more and more people who are taking control of the cloud and escape the monopoly with Kolab 3. It is great to have such an amazing community that encourages and supports our work while providing helpful and constructive feedback to make Kolab even more awesome.
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When Google Chrome first came out sporting its process separation feature where each tab is in its own process, it was broadly hailed as the best thing ever. The idea was to increase stability and security.
This was during a time when Plasma Desktop was still facing a number of implementation hurdles that impacted stability. So a number of well-meaning people decided that I should be informed about this revolutionary new idea in Chrome and every component in Plasma Desktop should be put into its own process.
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The second episode of KDE from the future, where we briefly talk about what happened this week in the development of Plasma and KWin is online here
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Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed..
I was watching a film about the Pirate Bay last night on BBC’s Storyville, turns out the people who run The Pirate Bay run KDE.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last month OpenMandriva announced a contest to solicit community contributed logo proposals. The entry deadline has come and gone and the next phase has begun. Once verification is complete, public voting commences. So, let’s take a look at some of the proposals.
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Gentoo Family
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The name “Sabayon” always rings me of a very refined and extremely polished Linux operating system. As has been my experience with Sabayon 9 and 10, even the Sabayon 11 release doesn’t disappoint. Sabayon 11 is refinement exemplified and is released in four flavors: Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. I start this series of review with my preferred desktop environment, XFCE.
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To begin with, Sabayon 11 release is not be missed. At least that is the evidence I got post using the Sabayon 11 XFCE release. Hardware support is better than ever with complete EFI/UEFI and UEFI SecureBoot support, greatly improved NVIDIA Optimus support through Bumblebee, a selection of MySQL flavors, including Google MySQL and MariaDB, up to 14000 packages now available in the repositories per architecture, and much, much more. I already reviewed the XFCE release and found it to be really really good. Next in line is the KDE version.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 arrives this month as a small but beautifully formed “minor” release with several new components including scale-out data access through parallel NFS (pNFS). To provide this, Red Hat has collaborated with its partners and the upstream community on the parallel Network File System (pNFS) industry standard.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 27th February 2013: Big data holds big opportunities for companies here in the Middle East. Correctly leveraged, it can enable the organization to attract and retain new customers, deliver more innovative and profitable products, improve business performance and tap unexpected revenue streams. Oil companies are using real-time data to better manage remote drilling operations. E-commerce websites are using data from their operations to personalize the shopping experience and radically improve customer support. And an ever-growing number of start-up companies are combining innovative cloud services with big data analysis to create highly targeted products and services sold directly to consumers.
Yet harnessing the power of big data is not without challenges. The same massive volumes of structured and unstructured data that create these opportunities for innovation can confound attempts to cost-effectively contain it, let alone extract value from it. And while the strategic questions surrounding big data are indeed difficult- What data do we actually need? How should we analyze and interpret it? What value will we eventually get from it? Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the most basic: How will we store it?
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Red Hat is the 800-kg gorilla of the commercial Linux space. SUSE is about quarter of that in terms of revenue, yet is the second biggest of the three companies that vie for business attention in the burgeoning Linux market.
Last week, Red Hat announced its intention to get into the big data business; this week SUSE is trying to woo new businesses in Australia and keep its existing partners in the loop.
There could not be a bigger contrast in the approach the two companies take.
Red Hat’s presser was a webcast, with Ranga Rangachari, vice-president and general manager of the company’s storage business unit, making a presentation. I understood it to be a one-hour affair, but it ran for only 32 minutes.
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Debian Family
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Kademar is Debian-based Linux distribution, with KDE as the default desktop. The first beta of what would be Kademar 5 was released a few days ago. And this beta release is my introduction to this distribution.
As always, I’m always curious to find out what the installer looks like and if it supports the features that define a feature-complete graphical installation program for a modern Linux distribution.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets last week.
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At the time of this article, Canonical’s efforts with Ubuntu have done wonders for gaining new adopters for Linux. Sadly however, Canonical’s efforts have yet to make the company profitable.
Despite their financial shortcomings thus far, Canonical is bullish about their efforts with the Ubuntu phone and the Ubuntu tablet. Recently I was given the opportunity to try both firsthand.
After spending some time getting to know the interface and understanding the core back-end, I was shocked to find that in many regards the Ubuntu developer preview had a ton going for it. In this article, I will share why I think this could be a winning alternative to Android on the tablet.
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Canonical has been hard at work on some very interesting projects lately. This new direction started last year when it announced Ubuntu for phones, a fully featured desktop loaded onto an Android device. More recently — and more mysteriously — they’ve been working on the Ubuntu operating system for phones and tablets as a replacement for Android.
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Ubuntu 13.04 (codenamed Raring Ringtail), apart from being a long-term release, will bring along some major changes to the Ubuntu operating system. With the proposed improvements in Dash, one of Shuttleworth’s major goals, that is bringing the web and the desktop together, will get a shot in the arm. Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 13.04 marks a crucial release for Canonical.
Their new project on the other hand, which is bringing Ubuntu to smartphones, is in heavy development. But the busy developers at Canonical are making sure that their core product gets all the attention it deserves. Ubuntu 13.04, apart from bringing new features to the user, will also come with a more polished and refined look that will hopefully put it head-to-head with Microsoft’s convoluted Windows 8 desktop.
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While Ubuntu’s upcoming phone and tablet dominate the headlines, an existing controversy is threatening to flare up again as the 13.04 release nears. The display of Amazon search results in the dash, which first became an issue in the 12.10 release, is erupting again as Ubuntu plans to extend the feature to dozens of other websites. The company also plans to add direct payments from the dash and more suggestions.
Ubuntu has been displaying music search results in the dash for several releases. However, the music results were drawn from Ubuntu’s own music store, and those who use the dash to search for applications on their hard drive may have never noticed them.
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Some of you may have seen the news about us transitioning to an online Ubuntu Developer Summit and running the event every three months. If you didn’t see the news, you can read it here. I just wanted to share my personal perspective on this change.
For a long time now I have been attending Ubuntu Developer Summits as part of my work, but for the last event in Copenhagen my wife was about to give birth and so I attended the event remotely. As someone who has been heavily involved in the planning and execution of UDS for the last 10 or so events, I was intimately aware of the remote participation features of the event, but I had never actually utilized them myself. I was excited to dive into the sessions remotely and participate.
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The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, “Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs”.
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s not easy to shell out $1,450 for a laptop that runs a Web-dependent operating system, especially when it has much, much cheaper counterparts. Why spend that much money on the Chromebook Pixel when you can get an Acer C7 for $200, a Samsung Series 3 for $250, or an HP Pavilion Chromebook for $330? The Chromebook Pixel does have great hardware replete with a display that can rival Apple’s Retina screen – and it does come with an amusing Konami easter egg – but the limitations brought about by Chrome OS might still deter most people from getting the device. Still, if it entices you enough that you actually want to get it, know that you can at least install Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it thanks to an extra BIOS slot.
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Ease of navigation, better battery performance, Fedora-style functionality; how can Linux users not find the fun in Fuduntu? This distro brings the open source goodness to the desktop, and provides workarounds for popular applications like Netflix, but does so in a way that’s almost an homage to classic Linux — right down to the old-school GNOME 2 desktop effects like woobly windows.
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When I first started preparing Bodhi ISO images almost two and a half years ago I set out with the goal of providing a clutter free operating system powered by the latest Enlightenment desktop. We call what we do “minimalist” meaning it doesn’t come with a whole lot by default. This ideology isn’t for everyone, though. Thankfully, the power of choice is something that greatly empowers free software development.
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Phones
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BARCELONA, Spain–The chief executives from Ubuntu, Firefox and Jolla argued that the wireless industry is desperately in need of additional smartphone choices, and that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung’s dominance of the market needs to be broken.
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The head of Android praised the advent of Firefox OS, saying Mozilla’s effort can bring the Web to parts of the market that Android can’t reach.
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Ballnux
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Android
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Let’s start with my favorite topic, producing videos. As long as your need is only for production of short-form, nothing-fancy videos, the Nexus 7 can do it. Yes, it has only a front-facing camera. However, I was surprised to discover I had good results when I held it in the general direction of the action, without the aid of a screen to see what was captured. I used the app Camera ICS+, the plus being the pay-for $.99 version that captures 720p HD video from the Nexus 7. It also can be used for shooting high-quality still photos as well.
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ASUS has launched a 7-inch FonePad with built-in phone functionality at Mobile World Congress. You may have already heard about the tablet before its official launch but here are a few more details to share.
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Samsung Electronics Co. and Google Inc. together have stemmed Apple Inc.’s dominance in smartphones, but there is new tension in their partnership.
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As rumored 10 days ago, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is climbing back into the tablet business with an Android-based, consumer-targeted, mobile device the vendor will showcase today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The HP Slate 7, which runs Jelly Bean 4.1, features a 7-inch screen–the same size as Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire–housed in a stainless steel frame measuring 10.7mm by 197mm by 116mm. It weighs 13 ounces and is powered by an ARM Dual Core Cortex-A9 1.6 GHz processor. The device comes with 8GB of storage. The unit’s display resolution is only 1024×600, although it features a wide viewing panel.
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In less than two months, April (2013) to be exact, you will be able to buy a Slate 7 Android tablet from HP for $169 USD.
Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad.
But for that price, what will you be getting?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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“The fact that we are open source is critical to most of our customers. The fact that it is absolutely transparent, that they can inspect the code if they want to, that they can pack up and move to self support is the ultimate alignment of our customers’ interest in our business model. And what they really care about more than anything else is that our business model must remain in radical alignment with theirs .”
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Free whitepaper – Cern and FuseSource Case Study
A group of Adelaide researchers has released an open-source tool that helps identify document authorship by comparing texts.
While their own test cases – and therefore the headlines – concentrated on identifying the authors of historical documents, it seems to The Register that any number of modern uses of such a tool might arise.
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No matter what technology exists, the wrong people seem to be in charge of turning the taps, argues Simon
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School budgets never seem to get any larger, but one way educational institutions may be able to cut costs is by deploying open source software. The open source community has developed applications that educators can use directly in the classroom, apps that are great for use at home and tools that administrators can use for school management.
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DoubleTwist, an iTunes alternative for the Android ecosystem, has teamed up with chipmaker Qualcomm on the release of “MagicPlay,” which the two companies are describing as an open-source, media-streaming platform meant to challenge Apple’s AirPlay. The technology is built on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn protocol, a mesh networking platform that has been in development for several years, but which has yet to achieve serious OEM or consumer adoption.
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Events
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The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one.
SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.
Many of the sessions had full attendance, and some were in overflow status. A testament to the quality of the presentations during the course of SCALE 11X is that some of the final presentations on Sunday afternoon were also full.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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So, which is the best? Well, for my money, Chrome seems the easy best pick. Not only does it tend to be faster, usually far faster, than IE, it runs on almost every desktop platform you’re ever likely to use and it’s more HTML5 compatible. That said, if you’re running Windows 7and you must use IE, this latest Microsoft browser is a good choice.
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Mozilla
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After recently announcing the final version of Firefox 19, the Mozilla team is now focussing on the beta version of Firefox 20. The latest release of Firefox for Android Beta is ready for download and testing.
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We recently reported that the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open are the first Firefox OS phones shipping this summer. You might think that there is not much to boast on the specs-front for these devices, but their availability does provide consumers with a different platform to choose from (especially with the likes of Android and iOS becoming pretty popular as well as common these days).
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In the wake of Mozila’s announcements regarding Firefox OS at Mobile World Congress, lots more details about its mobile operating system are emerging. Sony has joined several other hardware makers and said that it intends to deliver Firefox OS phones in 2014. The initial telcos that will deliver phones and services for it are now known. LG Electronics, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch will all ship Firefox OS phones in the coming months. Chinese company Huawei is on board as well, and ZTE has a strong presence in China.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle no doubt got the bang for the big bucks it paid for MySQL via its Sun acquisition. But the original developers of MySQL won’t let it die and as developers and customers begin to defect to their increasingly popular MySQL Fork — MariaDB.
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LibreOffice can only exist since people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I hear he was here last time in the mid-90ies, but that happened ages ago and very few people know it ever happened, so when Richard Stallman came to Bucharest it was quite an event for the local FOSS community, many traveled long distance to see him talking. For me it was obvious to go there, I never attended one of his talks and it was a perfect opportunity to take some photos.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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With the cost of forking reduced or eliminated entirely, software development is parellelized; much as bacteria evolve more quickly because they iterate in peer to peer fashion, so too can software projects innovate along multiple parallel tracks rather than a single serial development path. DVCS-enabled forking, then, is an enormous step forward for software development.
What is less clear, however, is the impact of forking on platform compatibility in an age of permissively licensed software. In his counterpoint to Schuller’s original blog post, VMware’s Patrick Chanezon pointed to this timeline of the various Linux forks, saying in part that there would be “No Linux of the Cloud without forking.” This assertion is likely correct; certainly it’s difficult to imagine Linux evolving as quickly or successfully without its decentralized – and fork-friendly – development model. As many are aware, in fact, Git – the most popular DVCS tool in use today – was originally written to manage the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.
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The Obama administration is right to direct federal agencies to make public, without charge, all scientific papers reporting on research financed by the government. In a memorandum issued on Friday, John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop plans for making the published results of almost all the research freely available to everyone within one year of publication.
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A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”
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The White House responded last week to the petition: Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research. It was posted to the We the People petition site and got 65,704 signatures (the minimum required is 25,000).
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Programming
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Oracle has released version 7.3 of its NetBeans open source IDE; this is mainly used in Java development, but also works with PHP and C/C++. The new release’s features cater predominantly to the needs of programmers who increasingly need to include HTML5, JavaScript and CSS in their desktop and mobile applications. As a consequence, the majority of new features affect the web development and mobile capabilties of the IDE. The highlight of these enhancements is the new JavaScript editor and debugger that is based on the Nashorn project; Nashorn is the new JavaScript implementation for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
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Microsoft had the embarrassment of seeing its Azure flagship cloud storage system crash for 12 hours on Friday because it forgot to renew an SSL certificate. Before laughing yourself silly, are you sure that a similar disaster couldn’t happen to your internet presence?
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Health/Nutrition
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Japanese and American officials discussed taking action to weaken a prominent anti-whaling group, with Tokyo insisting that Sea Shepherd’s confrontations on the high seas actually hurt efforts to reduce whaling, U.S. diplomatic cables show.
The U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission, Monica Medina, discussed revoking the U.S.-based conservation group’s tax-exempt status during a meeting with senior officials from the Fisheries Agency of Japan in November 2009, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks on Monday.
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Security
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…Bank of America is paying contractors to discredit journalist and sabotage their work…
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The inventor who co-founded visual PIN company GrIDsure has become involved with another pattern-based authentication start-up in the hopes that the shoulder-surfer proof technology could replace two-factor authentication.
His new company, Brit firm’s PinPlus, does away with passwords and PINs by combining a method for securely delivering one-time codes to users, with an architecture for storing users’ login “secrets” on servers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Just how many classified opinions has the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued since President Barack Obama took office four years ago? The department won’t say.
Back in December, before disclosure of a Justice Department “white paper” on the legal justification for targeted killings set off a drumbeat of calls for the Obama administration to provide Congress with all OLC memos on the drone strike program, this reporter asked the Office of Legal Counsel for a list of every opinion it had issued during the Obama years.
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I think my patience broke with the revelation that the Obama administration was more willing to give Butters some bullshit info on Benghazi than to give any ground on releasing the full, complete, original memos used to justify the assassination of Americans who have joined the Jihadist enemy. The cynicism was staggering. Those of us who supported Obama need to express our disgust and anger at this – especially those of us who have defended the drone program as, within key judicial and congressional constraints, sometimes the least worst option in keeping us safe.
This cannot be regarded as somehow a state secret. It divulges no plans; it just explains to American citizens the criteria by which their own president can kill them from the sky without any due process. If the torture memos could be released by this administration, as they were, so can these. And not just to some Congressional Committee – to all of us.
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Let’s hope that newly minted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will live up to some of our expectations and not be afraid to tell it like it is. Let’s start with Afghanistan. We just found out today that an alleged data entry glitch in the Pentagon program that spits out regular assessments like the number of Taliban attacks on our forces prompted the Department of Defense to issue too-rosy proclamations on the progress of the war there.
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President Barack Obama’s administration is looking at easing the secrecy around the drone war against al-Qaida by shifting control for some air strikes from the CIA to the U.S. military, officials say.
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The nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director has prompted intense debate on Capitol Hill and in the media about U.S. drone killings abroad. But the focus has been on the targeting of American citizens – a narrow issue that accounts for a miniscule proportion of the hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in recent years.
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Weeks after they were rebuffed by the Sept. 11 trial judge, civil liberties and media groups have appealed to the Pentagon’s Court of Military Commissions Review for more transparency at the Guantánamo war court.
At issue is whether the world can hear the accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators talk about what the CIA did to them during their years of secret custody before they got to Guantánamo. Government officials already have acknowledged that CIA agents waterboarded Mohammed 183 times.
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Kiriakou, who also served as a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he feels “oddly optimistic” about his upcoming prison sentence and wears his “conviction as a badge of honor.”
“I believe my case was about torture, not about leaking. I’m right on the torture issue, the administration is wrong, and I’m just going to carry that with me,” he says.
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Its depiction of torture ruined its Oscars chances, but that’s the very reason this film will live on: Pop culture’s portrayals of military practices can shape real ones.
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The Air Force has some bad news for the pilots of its F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: Your planes are going to make you feel crappy and there’s not much anyone can do about it. And the message to the maintainers of the radar-evading jet is even more depressing. Any illness they feel from working around the Raptor is apparently all in their heads, according to the Air Force.
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“There have been a few tentative steps on accountability for crimes allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops and civilian officials during the war with the LTTE. President Rajapaksa named a committee to make recommendations to him on the U.S. incidents report by April, and candidate Fonseka has discussed privately the formation of some form of ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission. Otherwise, accountability has not been a high-profile issue — including for Tamils in Sri Lanka. While Tamils have told us they would like to see some form of accountability, they have been pragmatic in what they can expect and have focused instead on securing greater rights and freedoms, resolving the IDP question, and improving economic prospects in the war-ravaged and former LTTE-occupied areas. Indeed, while they wanted to keep the issue alive for possible future action, Tamil politicians with whom we spoke in Colombo, Jaffna, and elsewhere said now was not time and that pushing hard on the issue would make them ‘vulnerable.’” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
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Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has come under fire for paying almost a quarter of a million dollars to a neo-Nazi informer linked to a far-right terror group.
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The chairman of Dutch neo-nazi party Nederlandse Volks-Unie has been given 40 hours community service and a two-week suspended jail sentence for his role in an anti-foreigner demonstration in 2011.
The court in Almelo said Constant Kusters and three others were guilty of insulting foreigners and discrimination at the rally in the southern city of Enschede.
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HoRa (People-against-Racism) warns: nationalist and neo-Nazi tendencies made provocations during today’s (Feb. 24, 2013) procession, which started officially from the Ministry of Economics in protest of high electricity bills.
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Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, confirmed at the weekend it had halted public subsidies to the neo-Nazi party NPD over an unpaid fine.
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Cablegate
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Sensitive witnesses to testify behind closed doors about harm to US from WikiLeaks as Manning denied right to present evidence
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Decision to post 84 documents provides first crack in the army’s public information blackout during WikiLeaks trial
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The thrilling development in the trial of Bradley Manning is that Manning has acknowledged he is the source of the leaked materials, but employed a whistleblower defence. His case is that he was exposing illegal acts and trying to arouse legitimate public debate. However in the kangaroo court trial the prosecution has objected to Manning’s proposed evidence, and claims that Manning’s detailed references to specific war crimes are irrelevant and should not be allowed to be made in court. In other words, the state is seeking to prevent Bradley Manning from presenting his defence, and doubtless the military “judge” will comply with the state.
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One of the signature traits of LGBT subculture in the United States is its adoration of celebrity. If a well-known person voices the most milk-toast notion that gays are human beings, let alone deserving of legal equality, banner headlines in the gay press are guaranteed. If the celebrity comes out as gay, even more effusive coverage is given.
Any number of fading stars and starlets, and non-entities on the make, from Lady Gaga to Chaz Bono to Ricky Martin, have mined the LGBT community to support their careers. Our community’s eager rush to embrace just about any celebrity who deigns to notice our existence is emblematic of our lack of self-esteem, our internalized homophobia.
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Australian diplomats in Washington have continued to report to Canberra about an “ongoing criminal investigation” by United States authorities into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
However US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich and Foreign Minister Bob Carr last night dismissed any suggestions the US may wish to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher as ludicrous” and “sheer fantasy”.
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Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier who the United States military is prosecuting for providing classified information to WikiLeaks, will read from or refer to a typed thirty-five page statement on February 28 when he gives his proposed plea. The statement will include his understanding of why he is guilty of committing elements of the original charges or lesser-included offenses, along with why he decided to provide information to WikiLeaks.
David Coombs, Manning’s defense lawyer, said during proceedings at the military court at Fort Meade that Manning himself had typed it up and signed it. He said the court agreed to allow Manning to read the statement aloud.
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The US government is believed to be preparing to put a Navy Seal on the witness stand to testify that secret files published by WikiLeaks were discovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound.
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People shouldn’t fear their government; government should fear its people. Publishers and journalists will not be intimidated nor silenced. Now entering day 626 of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange sits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London awaiting safe passage.
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Finance
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The West Virginia auditor found that the State Office of Technology used a purchasing process which is unauthorized by West Virginia statute or legislative rule to purchase the Cisco 3945 routers under the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) grant. The Office of Technology used a “Secondary Bid Process” on an existing contract approved by the State Purchasing Division, instead of a competitive bid process open to non-Cisco vendors, as required by law.
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But does that folklore about French workers hold up? No. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (1/28/11) recently noted that worker productivity is basically the same as the United States. What’s different? The French work fewer hours, likely because they have more vacation time.
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To those who would argue that the notion of a perpetual motion machine is impossible, we give you the revolving door — that ever-spinning entrance and exit between public service in government and the hugely profitable private sector. It never stops.
Yes, we’ve talked about the revolving door until we’re red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Tuesday and railed against what he called “reckless and irresponsible” journalism by BuzzFeed reporter Tessa Stuart.
Stuart wrote a story Monday claiming that Michael Moore had overhyped the recent detention of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat at LAX as an attempt to seek publicity for Burnat’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “5 Broken Cameras.” Her story was based on a single government source, and she was forced to issue a correction after initially presenting it as based on multiple sources.
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One year ago today, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman. On average, 30 people are killed by firearms each day, so Trayvon Martin could have become just another faceless statistic. But the tragedy soon gained national attention as a result of the injustice wrought by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which was cited to protect Zimmerman from prosecution because he claimed to have felt threatened by the unarmed African-American teenager.
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Speaking of which: How many civilians died in the U.S.-led war in Iraq? CBS Evening News told viewers in December of 2011 that it was 50,000. It wasn’t until FAIR activists pointed out that this was woefully incomplete–as was even acknowledged by the source of that 50,000 figure–that the broadcast did an update, now telling viewers that over twice as many Iraqi civilians were killed.
But those Iranians and their clunky Photoshop skills, right?
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Standing with co-producers, including George Clooney, director Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award for a quirky film that stands as a humanist rejection of what has dominated Hollywood of late. How many films open, like Argo, with a voiced historical vignette admitting to a moment of American infamy in the Middle East? The U.S.-engineered 1953 coup in Iran began the Shah’s reign and set the country into a vortex of repression and violence, chaos that would ultimately result in American hostages.
Grounded in this context, Argo tells the story of a nonviolent rescue mission driven by a fantastical science-fiction film fantasy, instead of a mission that fills movie screens with Black Hawk helicopters and post-9/11 tropes that dictate mass murder of stereotyped enemies who so richly deserve to die.
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Still, he concludes by agreeing with the conservative reader. Without citing any examples of what he considers to be unfair treatment of opponents of marriage equality, Pexton writes: “The Post should do a better job of understanding and conveying to readers, with detachment and objectivity, the beliefs and the fears of social conservatives.”
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In Ontario, 465 union workers used to make locomotive engines. Then Indiana passed ALEC’s anti-union legislation, and Caterpillar moved the works to Muncie. And that’s bad for everybody.
It’s an anniversary London, Ontario, did not celebrate. It’s been a year, and the shock has yet to wear off in the Canadian city just an hour’s drive east of Detroit. All that remains is the hardship of carrying on through mass joblessness, and its hand-in-hand partners, surges in poverty, mental health crises and addiction.
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Officials were angered further on Sunday night when the US First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Best Movie gong via live video link from the White House.
The film, which recounts the 1979-81 US hostage crisis in Tehran, was denounced as “an advertisement for the CIA” by state TV.
Iran’s culture minister Mohammad Hosseini said Hollywood had “distorted history” as part of a “soft war” of cultural influence against his country.
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Iran’s state television has dismissed the Oscar-winning film “Argo” as an “advertisement for the CIA” and the semiofficial Mehr news agency called the Oscar “politically motivated” because First Lady Michelle Obama helped to present the best picture prize.
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That quiet punctuation mark ended a noisy past few months, during which committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, along with Senate colleagues John McCain and Carl Levin, loudly criticized the film, which dramatizes the 10-year hunt for and assassination of Osama bin Laden. In December, the three senators called “Zero Dark Thirty” “grossly misleading and inaccurate,” accused screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow of suggesting that torture led directly to Bin Laden and called on Sony Pictures Entertainment to add a disclaimer to the film emphasizing that torture played no role in the hunt.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that she sees “no need to request further information” from the CIA on the assistance it gave to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and denied that the Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry was an investigation of the film itself.
Screenwriter Mark Boal has been particularly critical of the Senate inquiry, saying that it raises questions of free speech and whether it will put a “chill” on future projects if movies are put under the microscope on how their creators gathered facts. He also said that he may be subpoenaed to testify.
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Censorship
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Charges in WikiLeaks case will not be dismissed as judge rules soldier’s right to a speedy trial has not been violated
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The Australian Federal Police has sought to prevent the public from ascertaining the identities of ISPs participating in the Federal Government’s voluntary filter scheme for child abuse materials, through redacting the ISPs’ details from relevant documents released under Freedom of Information laws.
In November last year, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy formally dumped the Government’s highly controversial mandatory Internet filtering scheme, instead throwing his support behind a much more limited scheme which sees Australian ISPs voluntarily implementing a much more limited filter which Telstra, Optus and one or two other ISPs had already implemented. Vodafone is also believed to be implementing the filter, and the process is also believed to be under way at other ISPs such as iiNet.
The ‘voluntary’ filter only blocks a set of sites which international policing agency Interpol has verified contain “worst of the worst” child pornography — not the wider Refused Classification category of content which Conroy’s original filter had dealt with. The instrument through which the ISPs are blocking the Interpol list of sites is Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act. Under the Act, the Australian Federal Police is allowed to issue notices to telcos asking for reasonable assistance in upholding the law. It is believed the AFP has issued such notices to Telstra and Optus to ask them to filter the Interpol blacklist of sites.
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Privacy
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You may think of your iPhone as a friendly personal assistant. But once it’s alone in a room full of law enforcement officials, you might be surprised at the revealing things it will say about you.
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Since 2005, the nonprofit data privacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has counted more than 3,000 separate incidents resulting in the exposure of more than 600 million records containing Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers.
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According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady’s new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.
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…version of Android developed by the National Security Agency
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Civil Rights
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Court’s conservatives say there’s no evidence plaintiffs, including Amnesty International, were harmed by controversial law allowing wholesale surveillance of international communications.
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In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled today that clients of the American Civil Liberties Union lack standing to challenge a broad surveillance law enacted by Congress in 2008 because they cannot prove that surveillance of their communications is “certainly impending.” The lawsuit challenged the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international emails and phone calls without identifying its targets to any court.
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The five right-wing justices hand Obama a victory by accepting his DOJ’s secrecy-based demand for dismissal
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This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the Supreme Court has completely shot down the ACLU (and some activists and journalists’) attempt to invalidate the part of the FISA Amendments Act that “legalized” warrantless wiretapping. As we guessed at the time of the oral hearings, it seemed like it was going to be difficult to convince a majority of the court that the plaintiffs had any standing to complain, since they couldn’t show that they had been directly impacted. And, indeed the court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no standing here. So, basically, there is simply no way to challenge the constitutionality of warrantless wiretaps.
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Legislation advances in three states aimed at protecting citizens from indefinite detention as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012
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1. Obama Says Goodbye to Freedom and Democracy In the NDAA Bill (Areej Elahi-Siddiqui, @andareejsays) – The NDAA bill is riddled with abstract and ambiguous terms making it easy to detain just about anyone.
[18 Mics, 14 Comments, 121 Shares]
2. Organizing For Action Sends President Down a Dark Path (Sal Bommarito, @SalBommarito) – The goal of the new OFA group is to support Obama’s second-term policies, including curbing gun control and overhauling immigration. There is no precedent for this presidential lobbying power.
[16 Mics, 47 Comments, 65 Shares]
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is finally launching. CAS is an agreement between Big Content and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer to peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe—via everything from from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds.
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Hadopi, the French “three strikes” administration, released yesterday a report [fr] on the fight against streaming and direct download sites. It advocates for the establishment of measures bearing a close resemblance to those of ACTA and the US SOPA bill, both shelved following a strong citizen mobilization for the defense of fundamental freedoms. Currently confined to the fight against file sharing between individuals, Hadopi now wants to extend its control to Internet intermediaries such as hosting services, search engines, Internet service providers or online payment services. Doing so, could only lead them to actively monitor content shared on the Net, with unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression, the protection of privacy and the right to a fair trial.
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This week marks the rollout of the long delayed “Copyright Alert System” aka the six strike anti-piracy program. It’s a bit confusing at a glance, but it’s not nearly as powerful as you’d think. Here’s how the system works, how it’ll affect you, and everything else you need to know.
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Send this to a friend
02.26.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The job market for Linux professionals this year is even better than it was in 2012. Ninety-three percent of hiring managers surveyed said they plan to hire at least one Linux pro in the next six months — up from 89 percent last year, according to the 2013 Linux Jobs Report released last week by Dice and The Linux Foundation. And 75 percent of Linux pros surveyed say at least one recruiter has called them in the last six months in an effort to find talent for positions that are getting harder to fill.
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Bill Richardson, a software engineer for Google, has detailed how to boot a conventional Linux distribution on the company’s new Chromebook Pixel. Google released the Chromebook Pixel last week – the device costs £1,049, has a 13″ touchscreen with a resolution of 2560×1700 pixels, a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB (64GB for the LTE version) of internal SSD storage. Where previous Chromebooks only supported booting Google’s ChromeOS directly, the Pixel has an added option to support a third-party bootloader which enables it to be relatively easily modified to boot stock Linux desktop distributions.
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The Linux Foundation has surveyed 850 hiring managers at small and medium businesses, larger corporations, government organisations and recruiting agencies, as well as 2,600 Linux professionals worldwide, about the state of the Linux job market for its 2013 Linux Jobs Report. The report was created in conjunction with the Dice.com career web site and concludes that 93% of the surveyed companies are planning to hire at least one Linux professional in the next six months and 90% said it was difficult to find people with the appropriate skill sets for these jobs.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Takashi Iwai has mailed in the sound updates for the Linux 3.9 kernel. This Git pull has the much anticipated HDA Intel audio re-work.
The biggest highlight of the sound updates for Linux 3.9 is the unification of the HD Audio codec driver so that there’s now a generic parser that is used by each HDA codec driver. This big fundamental audio change is covered in more detail in the earlier Phoronix article.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the GNU R programming language. It starts a series of articles devoted to programming with R. Its objective is to present, in an organized and concise manner, the elementary components of the R programming language. It is designed to help you understand R code and write your own. It is assumed that the reader has already some basic programming knowledge of R. If you are not familiar with any of R features it is recommended that you first read A quick GNU R tutorial to basic operations, functions and data structures.
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Games
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Nuclear Pizza War by Team Mojang has a Linux build and is open source as well, I doubt it will be long before it gets on github and picks up new contributors. No news on it’s license yet so I won’t be linking to the sources until it’s license gets explained, hopefully another “do what you want” license like they did with their game on the first bundle.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE and Plasma developer Aaron Seigo has given an update on the state of the planned Vivaldi tablet in a video published on his YouTube channel. In the video, Seigo addresses new developments regarding the tablet, which was originally announced at the beginning of 2012. The team has apparently changed its plans and has designed its own, custom tablet hardware which should enter general production in about three months. According to Seigo, the manufacturer has now begun the tooling for the hardware. The last official statement on the project dates from September and cites a major setback.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Projects announced a couple of days ago the first Beta version of the GNOME Settings Daemon 3.8 package for the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Arch Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. on Wednesday announced the contribution of its Hadoop plug-in to the Apache open source community.
Best known for its enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat announced the open sourcing of its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in as part of a broader announcement of a shift in direction toward embracing Big Data with an “open hybrid cloud” application platform and infrastructure.
As explained by company executive Ranga Rangachari in a Webcast, the open hybrid cloud is designed to give companies the ability to create Big Data workloads on a public cloud and move them back and forth between their own private clouds, “without having to reprogram those applications.” Red Hat said in a news release that many companies use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services for developing software, proving concepts and pre-production phases of projects that use Big Data. “Workloads are then moved to their private clouds to scale up the analytics with the larger data set,” the company said.
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In addition to its focus on cloud computing, which will be led by an OpenStack-based distribution and robust support plans taking shape this year, Red Hat is also doublling down on its focus on Big Data. The company has announced that it “will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTM Hadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments.” The goal is to be able to help companies put in place Big Data-crunching environments that work in conjunction with cutting-edge storage strategies.
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Fedora
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For me, Fedora 18 Spherical Cow was a big disappointment, mostly because Fedora 17 was a big positive surprise. It’s like that woman who keeps smiling at you through the dinner and flirts with you, and then when you take her into your motel room, she suddenly starts crying. I mean what’s up with that.
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It’s no secret that the new Anaconda installer for Fedora 18 has caused a stir. As part of a major internal re-write, the user interface has been completely re-designed which has caused some confusion and there are bugs and missing features. This is why we included an install video in Korora 18, to help walk you through the process.
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At our school we have around 100 desktops, a vast majority of which run Fedora, and somewhere around 900 users. We switched from Windows to Fedora shortly after Fedora 8 was released and we’ve hit 8, 10, 13, 16, and 17 (deploying a local koji instance has made it easier to upgrade).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical took the entire IT world by storm with the back-to-back announcements of Ubuntu Phone and then Tablet OS. It’s looks really impressive in the video (since most of it is in developer preview stage and non working, we can’t comment how it will shape up). It was really impressive to see how Canonical managed to do develop Ubuntu Touch from ‘ground-up’.
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There’s a Key Lime Pie-size hole in the Android ecosystem, and Jelly Bean hasn’t filled the gap. Jelly Bean has suited me well for the past five months, but that doesn’t mean I’m not getting bored with it. I’m looking for more quick settings in the notification pull-down bar, an overhaul to the app drawer to add more icons per page, and a maximum CPU-clock speed to negate Project Butter’s battery drain effect.
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After Mark Shuttleworth kindly demonstrated Ubuntu Mobile for us at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, we’ve all been patiently wondering how different — or similar for that matter — it would look on a tablet. Wonder no longer with this here preview video!
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Flavours and Variants
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David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, announced a few hours ago that he released the first Alpha version of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Server distribution.
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Wind River®, a world leader in embedded and mobile software, has joined the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL). With its membership, Wind River will collaborate with other OSADL members to further promote and support Linux solutions for the embedded and industrial markets.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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China-based Konka is all set to enter India with a range of Android smartphones. The company, in association with Mak Mobility, is planning to launch Android-powered Expose phone in India. The company said with Expose, it aims to target both photography enthusiasts and discerning smartphone users.
After launching Expose in the Indian market, the company has plans to come up with a few more handsets including ‘Tuxedo’ for business executives and Tango smartphones for music lovers.
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Long after giving up on TouchPads and other mobile devices, HP has made a tablet comeback with the announcement of its first Android device, the HP Slate 7. With a starting price of $169, it is likely to be launched in the United States in April this year.
Talking about the specs, the Slate 7 is a 7-inch tablet that runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS. With a soft-touch rubber exterior, the device sports a dual-core 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A9 chip, 1024 x 600 resolution FFS+ LCD touchscreen display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of solid state storage (expandable via microSD), 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It has a front-facing VGA webcam and a 3-megapixel rear camera. The speakers have Beats Audio processing with a stainless steel frame.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Hewlett-Packard has reentered the consumer tablet market with the Slate 7, an Android-based device with a 7-inch screen that will start at US$169.
The Slate 7 will run Android 4.1, also known as Jellybean, and have a dual-core processor based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 design. It will start shipping in the U.S. in April, HP said. It didn’t provide availability details for other countries.
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“On the one hand, a real Linux tablet is very attractive,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “On the other hand, what will the ecosystem look like? Will there be all of the apps I want? … There is a tendency still for companies to not create Linux clients for popular apps. So will there be Kindle app for Ubuntu? An Evernote app? What about all of the Google apps?”
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Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z is getting some second looks, with its slim-line design and trove of advanced features — not to mention its ability to take a bathtub dunking in stride. It’s a full-size tablet at 10.1 inches, but it’s only a quarter inch thick and weighs just over a pound. It’s also PlayStation certified.
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Samsung has turned Android into the leading player in the smartphone segment pushing Apple to the second position. The company is far ahead of the other Android players who have failed to mark any significant presence in the market, whether it be LG, Sony or HTC. This huge gap between Samsung and the rest of the Android players has started to worry Google, the company which created Android.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The not-for-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser has announced handsets based on its operating system for mobile phones.
In a press conference ahead of Mobile World Congress, Mozilla said that 18 operators including Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, were signed up.
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Firefox is giving people concerned about their online privacy another reason to like the popular browser.
It will begin blocking cookies from third-party advertisers in an upcoming release. While Firefox users can already use the Do Not Track extension to stave them off, the patch will allow the browser to do it by default. That means sites you’ve visited can leave cookies on your computer but ad networks that don’t already have one on your machine can’t.
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In the World Wide Web, the latest in technology and knowledge base production begets the latest in browsers. And with innovations seemingly limitless, there is no reason why browser development—literally our window into the web—should lag behind.
With this logic to stay up-to-date and even take the lead probably in mind, Mozilla introduces Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. This latest and most up-to-date Firefox version features a cross-platform built-in PDF viewer within the latest Firefox browser. This improvement offers a safer and more seamless PDF viewing experience on any desktop and theme support on Google’s Android mobile platform.
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Jumping into bed with Apple was a mistake for the mobile operators. Firefox is their second attempt at a solution.
Apple was a mistake because operators gave away all their apps revenue to Cupertino, and that cash would have come in handy as voice and SMS cashflow declined. Instead, Apple was allowed to break all the rules – side loading, its own ecosystem, a share of revenues and many more.
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Unlocking the power of the Web on mobile, Mozilla on Sunday announced the first phones powered by its HTML5-focused Firefox mobile operating system (OS) at the Mobile World Congress. The Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open are the first Firefox OS phones which, Mozilla said, are coming this summer. These two phones will come with Nokia’s Here Maps application preloaded, along with deep Facebook integration.
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In conjunction with the Mobile World Congress conference, Mozila has officially taken the wraps off of its plans for Firefox OS, the mobile operating system that could represent the future of the company. Firefox OS is a free operating system that puts open web standards first, and the initial telcos that will deliver phones and services for it are known. LG Electronics, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch will all ship Firefox OS phones in the coming months. Chinese company Huawei is on board as well, and ZTE has a strong presence in China. Several analysts have already noted that Firefox OS has more support from hardware makers than Android had early on.
Sometimes people forget how very young Android is. It was only back in 2009 that we were wondering why HTC was the only committed hardware backer of Android. Fast-forward to today, and Android leads the mobile phone market. Can the same happen to Firefox OS?
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Firefox will now automatically block all third-party cookies, a crucial tool to help advertisers track users, and the ad industry is not happy about it.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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We had an amazing success with the release of LibreOffice 4.0. New website pages, a flurry of articles (Time Magazine, ZDNet, TechCrunch Ars Technica, Computerworld, Slashdot, just to name a few), and a generally good feedback. We’re collecting as much data as we can to see how far we went in terms of downloads, but empirically we can already say that it was a success. The infra team worked hard to handle a huge load of visits and downloads; a major “Tweetstorm” that lasted for about 9 hours, and web trends that now show that this release was a major milestone in pushing the brand “LibreOffice” across the Internet. One thing is sure: we went out of this release in a different state we entered it.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Hungary is creating a resource centre to help the country’s public administrations implement free and open source software and open standards. One of the main goals of the centre is to make public administrations aware of the free and open source alternatives to proprietary ICT solutions.
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Openness/Sharing
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We are excited to announce the first ever Open Humanities Awards. There are €15,000 worth of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects that use open content, open data, or open source tools to further humanities teaching and research. Whether you’re interested in patterns of allusion in Aristotle, networks of correspondence in the Jewish Enlightenment, or digitising public domain editions of Dante, we’d love to hear about the kinds of open projects that could support your interest!
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Open Data
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The public service is revolting against reforms brought in by the federal government to make it easier and cheaper for people to use freedom-of-information laws.
Nearly all public service departments have made a submission to a review of the laws saying the changes have created more work than they can handle and question whether the changes are delivering ”value for money” for the government.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/public-servants-baulk-at-foi-changes-20130224-2ezmu.html#ixzz2LvIMrItB
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Open Access/Content
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The odd thing is this little tidbit comes at the very, very end of a longer article, most of which focuses on the DOJ telling Congressional staffers that part of the reason they went after Swartz with such zeal was because of his infamous Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. That might explain why they were so eager to arrest him, but it seems like the much bigger deal, considering all the concern about prosecutor discretion, that after they arrested him, they then didn’t want to look bad, which is why they continued to demand jailtime and felony convictions.
Many people have assumed all along that the Manifesto played a big role in the case — and the Manifesto has certainly been a lightening rod concerning Swartz’s activities. If you read the actual “manifesto” it’s not quite as extreme as some make it out to be — with much of it talking about taking stuff that is public domain, but still hidden behind walls, and making that available again. The controversial bit really is this paragraph, which starts out with legal activities, but gets much more ambiguous at the end:
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Programming
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LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create simple one-off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems. As a production-quality, natural language hypermedia environment, LiveCode runs on all major operating systems (Linux, Mac, and Windows) and can generate code for all major desktop platforms, as well as all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS). They even got it up and running on the Raspberry Pi recently.
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I am stunned. And speechless. And can hardly believe the fact that this person actually decided to help me. And that the reason behind it was a reason I try to live myself: helping others where you can so that they help others, to make this blue marble a better place. To actually help someone you never met and most likely will never meet who is living thousands of kilometers away, is a beautiful thing to do. And just gave me a bit more faith in humanity.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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What if I told you police in your town could desensitize themselves to the idea of shooting a (armed) child, pregnant woman, or young mother, for just a couple of bucks? The “No More Hesitation” series from Law Enforcement Targets Inc. offers exactly that. For less than 99 cents per target, police can shoot at real-life images “designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.”
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I have known of allegations of sexual pestering against Chris Rennard for at least five years, and I find it impossible to believe Nick Clegg has not known for longer.
But I am baffled as to what the current fuss is about. The allegations of which I know are not of criminal offences, but the sort of inappropriate workplace conduct which should lose you your job. And it was always my understanding that was why Rennard resigned as Lib Dem Chief Executive four years ago. Unless there are new allegations which are actually criminal (and I have still not heard that alleged) what is actually supposed to happen now?
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Revelation by Lindsey Graham marks the first time any US official has given a number for drone fatalities.
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Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of the Times report on the tussle between the Obama administration and Congress on whether to release the targeted killings memos or more information about the Benghazi attacks in order to get John Brennan confirmed.
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Hamid Karzai orders US elite force to leave Maidan Wardak province after local reports of disappearance of nine people
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Egypt’s Interior Ministry ordered 140,000 teargas canisters from the United States in January, which the US State Department only allowed to be exported without the company’s name or any indication they were made in the U.S., the Egypt Independent reports Friday.
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The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.
Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set. It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.
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The United States has set up its first Sahelian drone base, in Niger, in order to carry on the war against “Al-Qaedah in the Islamic Maghreb”. The problem is that there is no such thing as “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”. The US seems to confuse Al-Qaeda with Starbucks. Al-Qaeda does not have branches everywhere, a highly organised supply chain, and transfer pricing.
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Cablegate
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On his 355th day in custody awaiting a “speedy trial” as guaranteed by law, alleged LulzSec hacker and lifelong activist Jeremy Hammond had his second week in solitary confinement interrupted by yet another pretrial hearing.
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WikiLeaks has published over 40,000 secret documents regarding Venezuela, which show the clear hand of US imperialism in efforts to topple popular and democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez.
The documents, which date from July 2004 to December 2011 and which were published through WikiLeaks twitter account @wikileaks and which are now available on WikilLeaks Global Intelligence Files online, are based on emails taken from the private US-based intelligence company, Stratfor.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Japan has sent a giant military icebreaker to bolster its whaling fleet in the conflict with Sea Shepherd off the Australian Antarctic Territory, anti-whaling activists say.
The 12,500 tonne Shirase, operated by the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force, has appeared near whalers and Sea Shepherd activists 50 nautical miles off the coast of the territory, the group said.
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Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman, who made headlines in December for an unprovoked attack on Kwanzaa, has set his sights on another imagined enemy: renewable energy standards. Although Sen. Grothman’s latest move is just as ridiculous as his past efforts, this one is part of a national effort backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute.
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Finance
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A US judge froze a Goldman Sachs account that regulators say was used to make suspicious trades in H J Heinz, after unknown traders failed to appear in court to defend their claims to the assets.
When the unidentified traders didn’t show up at a hearing on Friday in Manhattan, a US district judge, Jed Rakoff, said he would grant the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) request to freeze the Goldman Sachs account in Zurich until the case was resolved.
“They can hide, but their assets can’t run,” Mr Rakoff announced, saying he had granted the SEC’s request and signed the freeze order.
The agency said in its complaint that the trades came a day before Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital announced the US$23 billion (Dh84.4bn) takeover of Pittsburgh-based Heinz. The suspicious trading involved call-option contracts, the SEC said.
Goldman Sachs told the regulator it doesn’t have “direct access” to information about the beneficial owner behind transactions in the account. The New York-based bank told the agency the account holder is a Zurich private-wealth client, the SEC said. Goldman has said it is co-operating with authorities.
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In February 2010, just before the general election, chancellor George Osborne set out his economic objectives “against which I expect to be judged”. High among them was retaining Britain’s AAA credit rating. Now the credit rating agency Moody’s has stripped Britain of its AAA rating. So judging Osborne by his own criterion, he has failed.
Moody’s explained their decision as due to “continuing weakness in the UK’s medium-term growth outlook, with a period of sluggish growth which it now expects will extend into the second half of the decade”. Put simply, the economy isn’t growing, and isn’t expected to grow, and the implication of that for our debt to GDP ratio is dire.
In the short term, Moody’s decision is unlikely in itself to change anything, since the markets were expecting it and have factored it into their decisions. But it does signal that the government has failed. In three years we’ve gone from a triple A credit rating to a triple dip recession.
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Stop and frisk is definitely not sexy–and it might be not constitutional either. The practice of stopping people, mostly young men of color, and searching them without probable cause is a lot of things–racist on its face, for one.
But does it actually have anything to do with a reduction in gun violence? To think so, one would want to show that the stops wind up in weapons arrests. But the evidence is that they overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort.
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And these are the guys that Dudley wants to save, these self-serving miscreants who’re doing everything in their power to make the system more less safe, more unstable, and more crisis-prone?
The reason the money markets are so vulnerable is NOT because there’s no fix, but because the big money is blocking even modest changes to the existing system. Wall Street would rather put the whole system at risk, then lose even one-thin dime in profits.
More from Dudley: “The sheer size of banking functions undertaken outside commercial banking entities – even now, after the crisis – suggests that this issue must not be ignored. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist, or dealing with it only ex post through emergency facilities, cannot be consistent with our financial stability objectives.”
In other words, the Fed has no idea of how leveraged this gigantic, unregulated shadow banking system really is. All they know is that it poses unseen risks that WILL lead to another disaster. So, rather than implement rules that could improve stability–as one might expect from the nation’s chief regulator–Dudley wants a blank check to spend whatever-it-takes to prop up this ghastly system.
Unbelievable.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But it seems like their real problem with Chavez is that he gives away stuff. What do they mean by that?
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Censorship
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Freedom to Read Week begins on Feb. 24, bringing with it the perfect opportunity to kick the tires of democracy and make sure the old jalopy’s still running as she should.
What’s that you say? The bumper fell off when you touched it? The engine won’t turn over? That’s not so good. Better look under the hood
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While Geert Wilders was stamping around the country exercising his free speech about the impending Muslim takeover of Australia, on another more fundamental level, Thursday was a bad day for free speech and freedom of the press in Australia.
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Privacy
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New research published today by Big Brother Watch/ComRes finds that the majority of the British public are concerned about their online privacy (68%) with nearly a quarter (22%) saying that they are very concerned.
People are more likely to say that consumers are being harmed by big companies gathering large amounts of their personal data for internal use (46%) than they are to say that this enhances consumer experiences (18%).
As European data protection regulators prepare to take action against Google one year on from its revised privacy policy coming into force, more than 7 in 10 (71%) of the British public say that privacy and data regulators were right to investigate Google’s privacy policy and how it allows Google to collect and combine data on consumers.
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Civil Rights
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Why wasn’t Anonymous hacker-turned-FBI-informant Hector “Sabu” Monsegur sentenced as scheduled last week in New York? When I called Judge Preska’s chambers last Thursday to check whether the sentencing would actually take place the following day, the man on the other end of the line told me that it would not—but he couldn’t tell me why, saying only that the reason would probably show up in the federal court’s online PACER system at some point soon.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After years of government planning, the anti-piracy Copyright Alert System (CAS) will go into effect Monday February 25th. This all in an effort to thwart and punish (without any prosecution) the online users who casually download films, music, and other media.
ISPs under the Six-Strikes policy will use a series of escalating messages first to warn, then throttle access, then revoke access to customers that have been tracked. Downloaders of the allegedly copyrighted material will be forced to acknowledge that they have received warnings or or watched the ‘educational material’ about ‘sharing is crime’.
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Send this to a friend
02.24.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Linux Foundation and Dice have released a report about 2013 Linux jobs. The report indicates that Linux professionals are in high demand. You can download the report here.
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Those seeking to enter the rewarding world of Linux system administration can be scared off by the platform’s sometimes outright hostility towards the concept of “administrator friendliness”.
Linux – and the community that surrounds the open-source OS – can seem intimidating to the uninitiated, but it does not have to be so. To illustrate, I want to go over the single most common “why doesn’t it work” issue I encounter among junior admins: cloning CentOS virtual machines (VMs).
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The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced that its Linux Essentials program which measures foundational knowledge in Linux and Open Source Software has met the requirements of the K-12 Computer Science Standards of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA: http://www.csta.acm.org/). The CSTA has 41 chapters throughout North America and members in 126 countries worldwide.
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Desktop
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WiFi-only flavors of the Chromebook Pixel have only just started shipping, but if you’re already itching to install Linux on one of them, you’re in luck. Not only have kernel patches been submitted for the hardware, but Google’s Bill Richardson has now laid out exactly how to load up the devices with Linux Mint.
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Server
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The Pear OS developer, David Tavares, announced a few days ago that he works on a new project, called Pear OS 7 Server.
As its name suggests, Pear OS 7 Server is the Server Edition of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Linux distribution, which will be based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and released sometime this summer.
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Applications
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The latest release of NetworkManager, version 0.9.8, and its associated applet and VPN plugins now enable users to create Wi-Fi hotspots in access point mode with drivers and hardware that support this function. According to a list maintained by the Linux kernel’s wireless driver developers, many modern wireless chipsets by Atheros, Intel and Ralink include the needed functionality. The b43 and b43legacy drivers for older Broadcom chips apparently work as well.
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There is no dearth for good quality music players in Ubuntu. Even the default Rhythmbox is pretty darn good. But how many of those music players can be considered as good-looking? It is a tricky question since looks are very subjective. Anyway, here’s a collection of 6 best music players for Linux which I think are among the most good looking alternatives out there.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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New distros come onto the scene on a fairly regular basis; SolusOS and Fuduntu Linux are two I’ve covered over the past few months, but recently another one caught my eye as being particularly worth covering.
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Yesterday, I posted an article about Ubuntu is still not profitable. It was really a surprise to me because Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro and it has been around since 2004. And this makes me wonder that if even a big distro – backed up by a big company – like Ubuntu cannot become profitable, how the small distros are doing?
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Last night I was browsing through my site states, and saw a link to a subreddit about distrohopping. I had no idea such a reddit existed, but I was delighted to find out that it did. One of Eye On Linux’s older columns was even listed in the top articles tab.
Currently, the distrohopping reddit has 515 readers. It might be a good idea to click the subscribe link, and see if we can help get that number up a bit. There’s some great threads to read there, and it’s always nice to connect with fellow distrohoppers.
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New Releases
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The SolusOS Team are pleased to announce the release of SolusOS Eveline 1.3. This is strictly a maintenance release, and includes base system adjustments and updates not present in the 1.2 release. This release is available in the following architectures: x86, x86 with PAE, amd64
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical says that Ubuntu 13.10 will include “a complete entry-level smartphone experience” when it ships in October. Anyone brave enough to try out the Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview, however, will quickly discover that the current incarnation of Ubuntu for phones and tablets offers considerably less than that.
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Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical make a lot of noise about phones and tablets they’re not shipping and desktop interfaces that are liked by some and loathed by many. Not that my current favorite environment, GNOME 3, is the object of universal love (hint: it’s not).
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Developers got their first hands-on peek yesterday of Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch OS for mobile phones, with the release of the first developer beta. So did I.
The good news: Ubuntu Touch is a more compelling mobile environment, even in the first developer version, than I expected. It borrows heavily from other mobile UIs, including BlackBerry 10, the iPad, Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone, yet manages to feel like its own OS. It’s much too soon to rate, but the OS is promising, for reasons I explain shortly.
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2 days ago, Sean Micheal Kerner from internetnews.com published a short article about how Ubuntu is still not profitable. According to him, Mark Shuttleworh had admitted that Canonical was not cash flow positive in 2008. And nothing has changed since then.
“Fast forward to 2013 and during a call announcing Ubuntu for Tablets and Shuttleworth once again said that his company was still not profitable.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s dual-SIM Galaxy S3 Duos – model number SCH-I939D – is now official in China. Featuring support for CDMA and GSM networks, the device is said to be virtually similar to regular Galaxy S3 versions sold internationally.
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Android
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The folks at security tools company Pwnie Express have built a tablet that can bash the heck out of corporate networks. Called the Pwn Pad, it’s a full-fledged hacking toolkit built atop Google’s Android operating system.
Pwnie Express will be selling the cool-looking hack machines — based on Google’s Nexus 7 tablets — for $795. They’ll be introduced at the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week, but Pwnie Express is also releasing the Pwn Pad source code, meaning that hackers can download the software and get it up and running on other types of Android phones and tablets.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Meet the Pwn Pad, a 7-inch tablet aimed at the professionals. Security tools company Pwnie Express has come up with its new tablet or rather a full-fledged hacking toolkit running Android 4.2 and Ubuntu 12.04.
The cool-looking device also features a OSS-Based Pentester Toolkit and Long Range Wireless Packet Injection. The company aims to sell the device at $795, a price tag that should turn many away except (perhaps) security pros willing to impress clients by showing how they can identify security issues with just a few taps on their brand-new tablet.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has released Chrome 25 to its Stable Channel. Chrome 25.0.1364.97 for Windows and Linux and Chrome 25.0.1364.99 for Mac OS X bring improvements to extension security, support for the JavaScript Web Speech API and fix 22 security vulnerabilities, five of which were fixed as part of Google’s bug bounty program for the browser; the rest were found by employees of the company.
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Mozilla
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Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross is leaving the company, he announced in a Facebook post yesterday afternoon.
For those of you who weren’t reading TechCrunch in 2007, Firefox co-founder Ross and Joe Hewitt came to Facebook through its acquisition of Parakey, a web OS that was still in stealth at the time. Parakey was Facebook’s first acquisition. Hewitt, who spearheaded many Facebook Mobile projects including iOS, left the company in 2011.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Just a few days ago, LibreOffice 4 was released. As you know, this is an important milestone, both technically and historically. Since the split from OpenOffice, managed by Oracle, LibreOffice has quickly grown to become the dominant open-source office suite, and has completely pushed away OpenOffice from the spotlight. Moreover, this latest version brings a whole bunch of good things.
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Business
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Hortonworks’ Alan Gates has announced the Stinger Initiative, a four point plan for making Apache Hive 100 times faster. With other Hadoop distributors already having taken steps to speed up processing of large data volumes (e.g. MapR’s Drill), Hortonworks prefers to rely on existing tools and input from Hadoop’s large community.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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After burning an effigy of Free Software Foundation (FSF) president Richard Stallman, protesters in Massachusetts today burned down the building housing the headquarters of the FSF in response to rising frustration caused by the user interface of the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today is proud to announce the winner of the first Liberated Pixel Cup, a design competition of free software video games using only freely licensed art and media.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Campaigners herald boost for accessibility of scientific information and say Aaron Swartz case gave momentum
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A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto. “We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”
The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
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Today, the White House released a memorandum (PDF) in support of a more robust policy for public access to research, making the results of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research freely available online. The memorandum gives government agencies six months to detail plans to ensure the public can read and analyze both research and data, without charge. Both open access and open data are key to promoting innovation, government transparency, and scientific progress.
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Programming
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The Foundation has announced the Eclipse Long Term Support (LTS) initiative. With industrial uses of software which expect support and maintenance of the software stack from ten to fifty years, there has long been a desire to address this need. With the new LTS initiative, led by CA Technologies, IBM, EclipseSource and SAP AG, the Foundation will provide the facilities and processes needed to create signed deployable updates for older versions of Eclipse. This should, in turn, enable a new ecosystem of companies and enterprises to share fixes and releases. The initiative will be open to all organisations with an interest in extending the productive life of Eclipse technologies.
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Responsive web design (RWD) has been the focus for the jQuery Mobile developers as they put together the new version, jQuery Mobile 1.3.0, of the touch-optimised mobile web framework. The developers say that they had been faced with designers asking whether they should use RWD or jQuery Mobile – the answer is “both” say the jQuery Mobile developers, and with 1.3, they have set out to educate users by adding responsive documentation and demos to explain key concepts. They have also added responsive tables, panels and grids to make it easier to build responsive sites and applications.
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Science
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Like a lot of people, I awoke this morning to the news of the new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Initiated by multibillionaires Art Levinson, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Yuri Milner, the Breakthrough Prize is intended to recognise “excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.” Winners are awarded $3 million each and since this is a prize, they can spend this money in any way they wish. According to the website, this prize is “dedicated to advancing breakthrough research, celebrating scientists and generating excitement about the pursuit of science as a career.”
Wonderful — anything to give science a positive and prominent public profile. But unfortunately, this prize is flawed and seriously misguided and thus, I don’t think it will accomplish its stated goals.
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Health/Nutrition
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What if the agricultural revolution has already happened and we didn’t realize it? Essentially, that’s the idea in this report from the Guardian about a group of poverty-stricken Indian rice and potato farmers who harvested confirmed world-record yields of rice and potatoes. Best of all: They did it completely sans-GMOs or even chemicals of any kind.
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Security
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Hacks have been popping up all over the place recently. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, various news organizations. And off-shore oil rigs aren’t to be left out. According to the Houston Chronicle, more than one of the things have been “incapacitated” by malware that can be traced back to the Internet’s most common vices: pirated music and porn.
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There are a lot of discussions at the moment about a SSHD rootkit hitting mainly RPM based Linux distributions.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Yemen’s fractured tribal politics reveal the shallowness of Washington’s current debate about targeted killing.
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Officials in Texas announced on Thursday that State Troopers would no longer be allowed to open fire on suspects from helicopters after the recent killing of two immigrants.
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John Kiriakou stood in the ninth-floor banquet hall of the Hay-Adams hotel Thursday night and took in the spectacular view of the White House and the Washington Monument. He recalled briefing two presidents during his career with the CIA. “It’s ironic,” he said, spreading his arms as if to embrace the tableau. “This really is the reason I came to Washington 30 years ago in the first place.”
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In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
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The accords with foreign governments — which include Pakistan and Yemen — are a key element excluded from the Department of Justice (DoJ) “white paper.”
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The expert told the Journal that the administration believes Congress would leak the information to the public, which could be extremely embarrassing to the U.S. and its foreign partners given the unpopularity of the drone program and the potentially shady details of the agreements.
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If Montana voters approve Gary Marbut’s referendum in November 2014, any FBI agent who tries to arrest a Montanan for a federal crime could be arrested—and charged with kidnapping.
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In January, the Interior Ministry ordered the import of 140,000 teargas canisters from the United States at a cost of LE17 million.
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Two ex-Blackwater Worldwide executives pled guilty to one count of “failing to make and maintain records related to firearms.” They were sentenced by a federal judge to three years probation, four months house arrest with stipulations and fined five thousand dollars.
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Journalists routinely berate governments for maintaining secrecy about security matters. Some of them seek to penetrate that secrecy, despite the obvious risks to the lives of agents, and to the success of the operations in which they are involved, that ensue when security leaks occur. Wikileaks has been responsible for some notable examples.
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The dark corners of the world of journalism are every bit as murky as those of the world of espionage. This should not come as a surprise. The activities of the two worlds are not unrelated. Even accepting, as I do, that Ben Zygier died by his own hand, I cannot help wondering how many other hands around the world are stained with his blood.
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Israel’s Mossad was responsible for killing Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, an investigative report published by the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar said.
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‘Autonomous weapons’, which could be ready within a decade, pose grave risk to international law, claim activists
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About 700 personnel and their families would move to Point Mugu under a military proposal to make Naval Base Ventura County the West Coast home for a drone aircraft.
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General Atomics of San Diego County plans to sell unarmed drones to the Persian Gulf nation, in what would be the first such sale to a non-NATO country.
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Please, please, do watch the video that starts about three and a half minutes in. Absolutely horrifying yet hilarious brief account of British complicity in torture and repression in Bahrain over sixty years.
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Cablegate
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A recent report from the U.S. Attorney General shows a real interest in seeing Wikileaks and other groups like them shut down. The report also suggests the U.S. government may be recruiting and using civilian hackers as an aide in catching cyber threats early on.
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For over a year, in a soundproofed courtroom located in the confined wasteland of Fort Meade, the U.S. Army is prosecuting the most consequential and unprecedented leak trial of the digital age in secrecy and managed obscurity. A twenty-five year old whistleblower, Private First Class Bradley Manning is charged with indirectly aiding Al Qaeda for allegedly providing information to WikiLeaks, who published the information on the Internet. Prosecutors have recommended life in prison; but the presiding military judge has the authority to impose the death penalty.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Locksmiths and firemen in Spain are rebelling against a wave of evictions in the economic crisis by refusing to help bailiffs open ruined homeowners’ doors to throw them out.
“Families’ lives were being ruined and we were acting as executioners,” David Ormaechea, president of the Locksmiths Union, told AFP. “It was causing us tension and unease.”
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Who does that elevating? Meet the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the billionaire-funded project that uses Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles as figureheads for a fearmongering campaign to convince Americans that the deficits the United States has run throughout its history have suddenly metastasized into “a cancer that will destroy this country from within.” It is the latest incarnation of Wall Street mogul Pete Peterson’s long campaign to get Congress and the White House to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.
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The achievement gap between school districts in high-income neighborhoods and those in low-income ones is already more canyon than crack, and if $1.7 trillion in automatic sequestration cuts are allowed to go into effect on March 1, that gap could grow even wider.
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Fashion in economics is fascinating. Now every financial pundit on the BBC and Sky has noticed that quantitive easing causes devaluation and inflation. Suddenly they have remembered that if you create a lot of something, it decreases its unit value.
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The most telling line from PBS’s Frontline piece ‘The Untouchables,’ on the absence of criminal prosecutions for the large-scale bank lending fraud behind the financial crisis of 2008, came when the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, voiced his concern that bringing criminal charges might cause thousands of bankers to lose their jobs. This came after voluminous evidence was provided that senior bankers, including former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were culpably aware the mortgage securitization businesses they were running were purchasing, packaging and re-selling trillions of dollars of mortgage loans that were never intended to be paid. It also came after it was known the economic calamity caused by corrupt bankers cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs, homes, life savings and all hope for a better future.
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Tens of thousands of enraged protesters from all walks of life have gathered in cities across Spain to oppose ever-increasing hardship and corruption brought on by the financial crisis.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In elite media, the way to make people know you’re mad about something is to express your disgust at the failure of both parties to “get something done.” What the “something” is doesn’t matter as much as your own conviction that the political parties have become hopelessly polarized, and that serious leaders are needed to find the Sensible Center.
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Censorship
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News may not be very profitable anymore, but it sure is popular.
Consider this: About half a million people pay for digital subscriptions to The New York Times, one of the few newspapers that commands a paid following online. Meanwhile, Google News, which curates primarily free content, draws 1 billion different readers every week. That is over 4,000 times the online subscriber base of the Gray Lady.
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Privacy
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Alan F. Westin, a legal scholar who nearly half a century ago defined the modern right to privacy in the incipient computer age — a definition that anticipated the reach of Big Brother and helped circumscribe its limits — died on Monday in Saddle River, N.J. He was 83.
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There are about 79 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide—and India’s government wants to hand its spy agency data on every one of them.
In late 2012, back when it was still officially known as Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry handsets worked with the Indian government to enable surveillance of Blackberry Messenger and Blackberry Internet Service emails. But now India’s authorities are complaining that they can only spy on communications sent between the estimated 1 million BlackBerry users in India—and they want a list of all BlackBerry handsets across the globe.
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Civil Rights
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Israeli media sources reported that Germany is to delay compensation payments for holocaust survivors until Israel halts its settlement building in the occupied West Bank.
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Item one: Matthew Duran, Katherine Olejnik, and Maddie Pfeiffer are still in solitary confinement at the SeaTac FDC. And Kim Gordon and Jenn Kaplan, the attorneys for Duran and Olejnik, say they still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer about why. (In response to a request from The Stranger about the three, a spokesperson for the FDC replied: “Where inmates are housed within the confines of our facility is not public information.”)
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Intellectual Monopolies
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