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10.23.13

GNU/Linux Became Invisible Yet Ubiquitous

Posted in GNU/Linux at 7:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Invisible at the beach

Summary: On the decline of GNU/Linux as advocacy-worthy

With GNU and Linux becoming so standard it sometimes seems like GNU/Linux advocacy is dead. It’s just hardly necessary anymore. People just use Free software for almost everything, even without making any noise about it. Almost everyone uses Google, Apache, and Firefox or another browser with Free/libre software inside it. Linux Format has a short new column that alludes to these points [1]. Clients at work, which include parts of the British government (especially now that policies are improving [2]), have moved to Free/libre software without even publicly announcing it. You have to see it from the inside to know it. It’s almost as though it’s not even something that merits announcing, so nobody bothers. We’re not in the 1990s anymore.

“Just because we don’t hear so much about GNU/Linux doesn’t mean it went away.”Here in my house everything is running Linux and GNU — from smartphones to tablets and laptops or desktops. The workstation that I bought just over 5 years ago is having serious hardware problems, but it still boots, so I had it re-purposed as a media centre in the living room, essentially making even the ‘TV’ a GNU/Linux-powered appliance (Free software from the ground up). This is not a unique practice [3]. Some use GNU/Linux for music production purposes [4], so it’s clear that even areas where GNU/Linux was notoriously lagging (audio, just like gaming) there is major change now. Sometimes, as in [5], the use of GNU/Linux for music production is not even mentioned, it’s implied.

Just because we don’t hear so much about GNU/Linux doesn’t mean it went away. It’s just being taken for granted. Its rise is no longer newsworthy. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Bishop to King 7

    Nine years ago, we were playing with a niche OS that had just become the default OS for the web. Now we’re playing with an OS at the heart of computer science, from educating our children to powering the world’s super-computers in the cloud.

  2. UK government picks first open standards in bid to dodge vendor lock-in

    The UK government has adopted its first two open standards under its plan to shift departments away from proprietary systems.

  3. Rejuvenating a four-year-old laptop – with Linux

    A few months back, after I installed Xubuntu on my eeePC netbook, and this effectively gave it a second and much faster life, I also asked you if you have recommendations for my T42 box. Well, today, we are not going to do that. Instead, we will dedicate some time in rejuvenating my LG RD510 box, which I purchased four years back and then installed with four instance of Jaunty.

  4. The Linux Setup – Gabriel Nordeborn, Musician

    There’s a definite interest in Linux for music. One of my more consistently popular posts is about using Linux for music production. Gabbe goes way beyond that post, completely revealing a wonderful workflow that optimizes his machine for making music and shows how the flexibility of Linux really lends itself to creative endeavors. Gabbe also makes the important point that Linux makes music production possible for people who might not be able to afford expensive production software like Pro Tools.

  5. Music for All with Open Source Software

    I am embarrassed to admit that I have never in my life considered the struggle of blind musicians to find Braille music scores. I did not realize until last week that only about 1% of sheet music is available in an accessible format, but my friend Robert Douglass is hoping to change that with his Open Well-Tempered Clavier – Ba©h to Bach project on Kickstarter.com.

Applications/Games-Related Links for September-October 2013

Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Android With Proprietary Apps Installed is Not Secure

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Security at 6:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Proprietary on top of Free/libre is like mud below a fortress

A fortress

Summary: The need to be able to verify that programs treat users respectfully and how it applies to Android

A new version of Android is said to be just days away [1]. There are already some rumoured features [2], but it is hard to tell more because the development process is not as open/free as Google would like us to believe. Google already lost a prominent FOSS figure because, according to him, Android was not so loyal to freedom or openness anymore.

“One cannot build back doors if they become visible. It’s a case of trust through deterrence.”Android is becoming somewhat of a de facto standard in watches these days [3,4], even though some companies go the other way [5]. In this area of watches, unlike CCTV-like eyeglasses (Google also explores taking fingerprints soon [6]), partners of Google appear to be ahead of Google. The same goes for TVs based on Android [7]. Android is almost becoming a de facto standard in embedded also [8].

Let’s accept the fact that Android is here to stay and to thrive (around 80% market share now), but how secure is it really? According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, spies are now accessing the microphone (and maybe camera) of Android devices remotely. Let’s accept the fact that the user is the weakest link (installing malware on one’s own [9]) and without a doubt users will always need to step in and do potentially risky things (adding software, as promoted in [10-12] this month, is the strength of Android). We are left dependent on trusting developers, not just within Google but also outside it (the community is developers is broadening [13]). Many of them are releasing proprietary software into Google’s digital market, so how can we — as users — check that these applications really respect our privacy and strictly obey OS-level restrictions? The users need not be developers, they can simply rely on several other users auditing or forking the code out of curiosity. One cannot build back doors if they become visible. It’s a case of trust through deterrence. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Android 4.4 KitKat tweets hint at Oct. 28 launch

    Two pictures shared by @KitKat on Twitter suggest Google will launch the operating system on October 28.

  2. Android signs up for official default setting for texting

    A single messaging app for Android might be closer than you think, as Google unveils new settings in KitKat to officially set a default text-messaging app.

  3. Sony SmartWatch 2 ticks as Google watch rumors tock

    Sony shipped its Android-based SmartWatch 2 in the U.S. market, featuring higher-resolution, NFC sync, and water resistance, while also launching its Xperia Z Ultra phablet and Xperia Z1 phone. Meanwhile, Google’s long awaited smartwatch — rumored to be a Nexus model codenamed Gem and featuring Google Now technology — is expected to be unveiled with Android 4.4 (aka KitKat) on Oct. 31.

  4. Review: Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch

    When a new tech product launches, reviewers usually come to some sort of consensus. Often something just clicks, and you see raves across the board. Other times, the product has obvious flaws, and critics are all equally quick to point those out. The early consensus for the Samsung Galaxy Gear, however, isn’t quite jiving with us. Though it’s been almost universally panned, we had a very different take on it. Why? Read on, as Gizmag gives you a different perspective on the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch.

  5. Nike’s no-Android stance on FuelBand is a huge mistake

    Nike is only shooting itself in the foot with its stubborn reluctance to work with Android.

  6. Android Fingerprint Sensors Coming Soon

    A coming web standard being pursued by the FIDO Alliance seeks to enable much wider use of biometric sensors to access accounts. FIDO should reduce, if not eliminate all together, the use of passwords to access accounts on mobile devices. The initial FIDO-equipped Android devices are on track to roll out in early 2014.

  7. Devs jump on Android TV ahead of Google

    Google may be keeping quiet on when the Google TV platform will be updated to the Jelly Bean operating system, but developers are already hard at work.

  8. Android HDMI-stick mini-PC includes Ethernet port

    Zhongshan Gosinggo has begun selling a 4.1 x 1.5 x 0.6-inch Android 4.1 mini-PC that includes both WiFi and Ethernet ports. The Gosinggo GSG-TB-06 is equipped with a 1GHz Allwinner A10 processor and Mali-400 GPU, as well as 1GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 32GB of flash, an HDMI port, and dual USB ports.

  9. How Secure Is Android, Really?

    Let’s get this out of the way. Android as an operating system is very secure. It has multiple layers of protection to keep malware at bay, and it requires your specific permission to do almost anything that could lead to your data or the system being compromised. However, Android is an open system that trusts you the user and its community of developers to do the right thing. If you want to, you can give away a lot of permissions, and even access to deeper parts of the system if you’ve rooted your phone. Android tries to protect you from yourself, but if you nudge it, it lets you have the final say on what to install (and from where, like unknown sources and beyond the regularly-patrolled walls of Google Play) and who to give permissions to.

  10. New Aviate app makes Android phones more intuitive

    There comes a time in every smart phone owner’s life when the number of installed apps outweighs the brainpower available to the owner to keep them all managed. Enter Aviate, a new home screen management system for Android that aims to keep everything under control, intelligently.

  11. 9 of the best video-player apps for Android
  12. Top 15 Android tablet apps for work and play

    Android tablets have come a long way since the first, the Motorola XOOM, appeared. The right apps make them great tablets for both work and play.

  13. The Big Android BBQ 2013 in pictures

    The Big Android BBQ is a unique combination of developer conference and enthusiast get-together, all wrapped up in a general celebration of the Android operating system. Attendees come from all over the world to share ideas, best practices, or just to hang out with friends. This year the conference saw more than 40 sessions ranging from Glass development to hardware hacking, with more than a few things in between.

Mozilla Gains More Credibility by Hiring Xiph.org Founder Monty Montgomery

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 6:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Monty Montgomery

Summary: Mozilla makes its commitment to a Free (as in freedom) Internet even stronger by hiring the man who brought Free/libre codecs to desktops and then to the Web

THERE is plenty to like about Firefox. In many ways, this browser has been responsible for breaking Microsoft’s Web browser monopoly (which had warped many sites into Internet Explorer-only walled gardens, until some time in the middle of the previous decade).

Mozilla — although some say that it relies on advertisers — is openly resisting some surveillance practices (only to alienate many advertisers) and after mostly abandoning Firefox several years ago (moving to Konqueror and Rekonq) I found myself drifting back to it earlier this year. Something appears to have changed internally at Mozilla and t doesn’t seem to be just a PR exercise. Mozilla made Firefox very simple to install on GNU/Linux (with Qt or GTK) and Firefox downloads helped me save a dying workstation this week (I very quickly download the latest Firefox for its WebM support and then run it every time I boot from a Live CD; the hard drive is a mess at all levels).

“The impeding forces that eternally detest and persistently hindered one encoding one’s own videos with a free format were Microsoft and Apple; both pretty much refused to support free multimedia codecs.”Mozilla’s support of open video formats has been noteworthy (Ogg). It goes a long way back. Opera did some work to that effect as well, years before Google had its own Web browser. The impeding forces that eternally detest and persistently hindered one encoding one’s own videos with a free format were Microsoft and Apple; both pretty much refused to support free multimedia codecs. Now that Mozilla hires Chris ‘Monty’ Montgomery (from Red Hat) it gains a lot of credibility. Monty Montgomery is very serious when it comes to open video/audio formats and his influence inside Mozilla can only be positive. As for Mozilla’s recent affinity for GNU/Linux, it should not be surprising. Firefox OS, after all, is where Mozilla puts many of its eggs [2] and it is based on Linux. There are more reasons than before to support Mozilla. Google too uses Linux (and sometimes GNU) to run its browser (Android, ChromeOS), but Google is not as serious about software freedom [3]. It is more like marketing to Google and it typically has two editions of every piece of software; one that’s free/libre and one which is proprietary and has extra features. It is being reported that Qt is moving from the KHTML-derived WebKit to Chromium Engine, which is not necessarily a good thing. Google may have a lot more money than Mozilla [5] (it also funds Mozilla indirectly), but given its tendency to use GNU/Linux only to promote its surveillance (via browsers) [6] it seems safe to always recommend Firefox over Chrome. When people show me an Android device the first thing I ask them is whether they want help replacing Chrome (spyware) with Firefox.

Speaking of freedom on the Web, some time this week an article will be published in the press about DRM in HTML5 and Techrights was approached for a column to give its take on the subject. There are still some dark forces trying to shut the Web, not just fill the Web with patent liabilities and unprecedented levels of surveillance. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Open codec pioneer leaves Red Hat, joins Mozilla to work on next-generation video codec

    Xiph.org founder Monty Montgomery is leaving Red Hat to join Mozilla next week. Montgomery announced the change on Google+ Tuesday, writing: “This is not a reflection on Red Hat, but rather jumping at an opportunity offered by Mozilla.”

  2. Firefox OS gets performance boost, wider distribution

    Phones running Firefox OS will soon also be available in Germany, Brazil and other countries

  3. Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary

    In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the “moat” around the Google Search “castle”—it would exist to protect Google’s online properties in the mobile world.

    [...]

    Android went from zero percent of the smartphone market to owning nearly 80 percent of it.

  4. Qt Switching From WebKit To Chromium Engine

    Digia developers working on the Qt tool-kit have decided they will switch from using the WebKit browser engine to instead using Google’s “Blink” engine fork for Chromium. The new Qt web rendering engine will be called Qt WebEngine.

  5. Google offers “leet” cash prizes for updates to Linux and other OS software

    Rewards designed to improve security of software critical to Internet’s health.

  6. Chromium OS Vanilla Is a Plain-Jane Browser-Based Distro

    If you are comfortable with the Chrome browser and can confine your computing tasks to the applications delivered from the Chrome store, the Chromium OS may well be all the computing power you need. This particular build is quite usable but not yet prime-time capable. It is fast on low-end hardware and has a moderately sized memory footprint.

Microsoft Culture Against Another Universal Standard: Unicode

Posted in Standard at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Unicode

Summary: Microsoft’s long battle against character encoding standards such as Unicode, which bridge the gap for communication between people, not just applications

HALF A decade ago we spent a lot of time here promoting open standards — the grooves for connectivity between applications, operating systems, and pertinent pieces of code. Without standards, there is little collaboration because the cost of connecting separate pieces of software is quite high.

“But to Microsoft consistency was an evil threat; it threatened its monopoly.”Assuming that collaboration is the key to rapid advancement and innovation — reusing knowledge, pooling human resources, etc. — standards are important everywhere we look, e.g. electrics, plumbing, energy, automobiles and so on. Encoding of characters is not everyone’s field of expertise; it is a low-level area of computing, akin to assembly code and little/big endian. But the principles of standards stay the same across fields and standards are almost always beneficial. I have wasted many hours of my life trying to overcome issue associated with Microsoft’s broken character encodings. It was a long time ago that people appreciated the value of consistency in some areas (not to be confused with monoculture or monopoly). But to Microsoft consistency was an evil threat; it threatened its monopoly. The Scientist published a piece called “Standards Needed” [1] not too long ago and Linux Journal praised Unicode [2], which helps bridge character encoding barriers. Thanks to Unicode, many of us out there can access and render pages in almost any language, even rare languages (and even if we cannot understand them). The Register, however, thought it would be productive to bash Unicode [3]. And watch who wrote the piece: a Windowshead. What a surprise! █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Opinion: Standards Needed
  2. Unicode

    Let’s give credit where credit’s due: Unicode is a brilliant invention that makes life easier for millions—even billions—of people on our planet. At the same time, dealing with Unicode, as well as the various encoding systems that preceded it, can be an incredibly painful and frustrating experience. I’ve been dealing with some Unicode-related frustrations of my own in recent days, so I thought this might be a good time to revisit a topic that every modern software developer, and especially every Web developer, should understand.

  3. Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

    In the beginning – well, not in the very beginning, obviously, because that would require a proper discussion of issues such as parity and error correction and Hamming distances; and the famous quarrel between the brothers ASCII, ISCII VISCII and YUSCII; and how in the 1980s if you tried to send a £ sign to a strange printer that you had not previously befriended (for example, by buying it a lovely new ribbon) your chances of success were negligible; and, and…

    But you are a busy and important person.

    So in the beginning that began in the limited world of late MS-DOS and early Windows programming, O best beloved, there were these things called “code pages”.

    To the idle anglophone Windows programmer (ie: me) code pages were something horrible and fussy that one hoped to get away with ignoring. I was dimly aware that, to process strings in some of the squigglier foreign languages, it was necessary to switch code page and sometimes, blimey, use two bytes per character instead of just one. It was bad enough that They couldn’t decide how many characters it took to mark the end of a line.

    [...]

    As far as I know, there isn’t a creation myth associated with the unification of the world’s character sets.

    [...]

    For Windows C++ programmers, the manifesto identifies specific techniques to make one’s core code UTF-8 based, including a proto-Boost library designed for the purpose. (Ironically, the first thing you have to do is turn the Unicode switch in the Visual C++ compiler to ‘on’.)

    [...]

    Next weekend I will be scraping all my Unicode files off my hard disk, taking them to the bottom of the garden, and burning them. As good citizens of the digital world, I urge you all to do the same.

Patents and Lobbying Down Everyone’s Throat

Posted in Patents at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Lawrence Lessig

Photo by Joi Ito

Summary: The impact of intellectual monopolies (such as patents), as well as lobbying by the industrial farming giants, on our diet

In the age of patent maximalism and corporate-run governments (taking away from the public and giving everything to few private hands) we are no longer allowed to even grow our own food [1]. There is a strong confrontation against the likes of Monsanto, which seek to own all of the world’s food supply (animals too), putting aside the real debate over the health problems that genetically-modified crops are demonstrated to have caused (plenty of that in peer-reviewed literature). As one commenter puts it: “Most folks around here who garden grow potatoes and nobody i know uses patented varieties” (though the notion of having patents on organisms is contemptible in its own right).

“Perhaps when people’s health will degrade they will finally realise that GMO and government-subsidised obesity-inducing ‘foods’ are a very serious issue.”Agriculture is under a real, malicious, never-ending attack by the Cult of Patents and in this age of public perception manipulation [2] even our dietary choice are affected by heavy lobbying [3], as Larry Lessig helped show in his talks about fructose.

Perhaps when people’s health will degrade they will finally realise that GMO and government-subsidised obesity-inducing ‘foods’ are a very serious issue. Sadly, as some of those people will die, there won’t be many of them left to speak out. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. We Have a Right to Save Seeds. Right?

    Growing food should present no legal problems. You plant seeds, care for the plants, harvest the food, then save some seeds for the next year. Right?

    Not anymore. Big agribusinesses are enclosing the seed commons. Seed ownership has become complex, littered with regulation, copyright issues, forgery charges and corporate manipulation.

  2. Wiki-PR conducting “a concerted attack” on Wikipedia
  3. Obesity experts appalled by EU move to approve health claim for fructose

    Food firms using fructose will be able to boast of health benefits despite fruit sugar being implicated in soaring US obesity levels

Risky Energy and the Crushing of Protests

Posted in Action, America at 3:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Police Chief Blair

Photo by John Steven Fernandez

Summary: Tar sands profit drives political agenda and Canada is crushing protests again, bringing back memories of Toronto under Police Chief Blair (above)

JAPAN is learning the hard way that energy cannot be acquired so quickly and yet cheaply. There is a price to pay when you’re looking for shortcuts [1] and many people are likely to die from cancer as a result.

According to some reports [2], one family alone is poised to earn an outrageous amount of money by just destroying nature in Canada (and parts of the US). “Koch Brothers Could Earn $100 Billion in Tar Sands Profit if Keystone XL Pipeline Is Approved,” Alternet says.

“Many protests cannot happen without some level of privacy and policemen are increasingly turning to on-the-scene surveillance, taking videos of people’s faces at protests.”Meanwhile, reveals another report from the corporate press in Canada [3] (comments closed), Americans are protesting against fracking in their precious land and police vehicles are set ablaze, which may or may not be the action of the Americans. Past events suggest that sometimes the cars are set ablaze by the victim in order to demonise and crush the protests, as allegedly happened in Toronto due to overzealous ‘policing’ several years ago (Richard Stallman also alluded to this strategy a few days ago). A quick search for “shale-gas project canada police cars” reveals many more press articles, all of which suggest that the protests turned violent (tear gas and rubber bullets are said to have started this violence) and none refute the dramatic event which is police cars on fire by Americans.

The bottom line is, protest is increasingly being crushed, even using weapons and unjust arrests that are supposed to intimidate and imperil protests. Many protests cannot happen without some level of privacy and policemen are increasingly turning to on-the-scene surveillance, taking videos of people’s faces at protests. If that’s not enough to stress the importance of privacy, maybe the victims of environmental pollution (dirty energy) will. Dissent is gagged when people are no longer able to express themselves without fear of retribution. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Radioactivity level spikes 6,500 times at Fukushima well
  2. Koch Brothers Could Earn $100 Billion in Tar Sands Profit if Keystone XL Pipeline Is Approved
  3. Violence erupts in N.B. as RCMP move in on anti-fracking protest

    Police cars were set ablaze near a reserve north of Moncton, N.B., on Thursday as the RCMP clashed with native protesters who are trying to prevent seismic testing at a proposed shale gas development near their community.

    [...]

    The protesters refused the demands to disperse, and the confrontation devolved into a melee of tear gas and rubber bullets. In the end, at least 40 people, including Elsipogtog Chief Arren Sock and several council members, had been arrested and five police cruisers had been set ablaze. The situation had calmed by early evening with news that Mr. Sock and some of the other protesters had been released.

    [...]

    Native leaders say it was the police who sparked the confrontation. They say police arrived with guns drawn and targeted elders with pepper spray. Ms. Levi-Peters said the police cars were set on fire after natives learned about the arrests.

Apple’s Latest Bogus Claims Give False Sense of Privacy, Paint iMessage as ‘Secure’

Posted in Apple, Security at 2:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

A matter of life and death sometimes

Noose

Summary: Apple’s iMessage, which is falsely advertised as secure, most likely finds its way into the NSA through PRISM

NOTHING threatens an activist more than a hostile constantly-observing eye. Everything that a dissident does in some nations can result in imprisonment and even death. When the NSA and the FBI set up Tor honeypots or break into anonymisation networks they show their endless contempt for what their government likes to label “freedom and democracy”. But leaving all that aside, the point to be made here that people’s lives can be at risk if they believe that they enjoy privacy/anonymity when in fact they are under surveillance. A false sense of privacy is worse than no privacy at all and promotion of tools as “secure” when in fact they are not is akin to setting up honeypots. Similarly, “a court order is an insider attack,” claims Bruce Schneier [1], alluding to the fact that risk comes in less expected ways than we’re accustomed to think of (someone at Slashdot is attacking this messenger right now).

“People who require privacy should shun proprietary software even when that software claims to be secure.”The interesting news is that researchers show Apple “could easily intercept communications on the service” called iMessage [2]. Apple is part of PRISM, so we might as well just assume that the NSA gets iMessage activity transmitted to its storage devices. Never trust proprietary software companies for security and privacy, Apple cannot be trusted to provide even security and real encryption for mobile payments [3], for instance. Google can’t, either.

Cryptology is largely broken because of Trojan horses from agencies like the NSA (people who pretend to be coding for security or are subverting standards-setting bodies); privileges of cryptology applications, or access to them from another region of the system (be it a driver, operating system, or other application) means that on proprietary systems the back doors need not even be in cryptology itself. The solution is thus Free/libre software, universally. Without it, nothing can earn trust. People who require privacy should shun proprietary software even when that software claims to be secure. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. “A Court Order Is an Insider Attack”
  2. Researchers challenge Apple’s claim of unbreakable iMessage encryption

    A close look at Apple’s iMessage system shows the company could easily intercept communications on the service despite its assurances to the contrary, researchers claimed Thursday at a security conference.

  3. The outrageous permissions required by mobile payments apps

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