04.14.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Karen Sandler
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The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems and as a result is freezing non-essential expenses. The GNOME Foundation has eliminated their cash reserves leading to this dire situation, but should be recoverable in the months ahead. The GNOME Foundation got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and managing the program (and funds) for a number of other participating organizations. The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women is explained as “The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software.” They’ve had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle.
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Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Karen M. Sandler is the Conservancy’s new Executive Director. “Bradley M. Kuhn, outgoing Executive Director, gratefully passes the torch to his long-time colleague Karen Sandler. While Kuhn’s work as Conservancy’s President and on its Board of Directors remain unchanged, Kuhn’s new full-time staff role is titled “Distinguished Technologist”.”
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Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in New York, announced today the addition of a talented new member of its management team. Karen M. Sandler, formerly Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, begins today as Conservancy’s new Executive Director.
Mutter-Wayland
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GNOME’s Mutter-Wayland compositor requires EGL/KMS rendering back-end support and this currently isn’t supported by software-based drivers that aren’t backed by an actual GPU with hardware acceleration. However, developers are working to allow the swrast driver and LLVMpipe to work with this back-end rather than adding any FBdev/Pixman support to Mutter-Wayland. The primary use-case is to get Mutter-Wayland running in virtual machines where there is no accelerated GPU driver with DRM/KMS support (i.e. mainly outside of VMware’s VMWgfx world).
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Wayland branch is now (yesterday) merged into Mutter master and that also brought some small changes to GNOME Shell, i.e, changes in build, changes on checking when Wayland is the compositor.
Software
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The GNOME EasyTAG application is a simple, open-source way for editing audio tags within popular audio file formats. The much-revamped EasyTAG 2.2.0 is now available.
West Coast Summit
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This being last day of the hackfest, people started to disappear in the afternoon. Before that, we had a planning session for Wayland in GNOME 3.14, and came up with a number of concrete tasks and goals.
Participation
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With 3.12 out the door, it’s time to think about what we want to be doing for 3.14. I have a long list of design projects that I want to work on for the next release, but I also want to spend some time on how the GNOME project is working and how we can improve it.
One of my reoccurring interests is how we, as a project, can ensure that each module is in a healthy state. We want modules to have active developer teams around them, and we want it to be easy for people to get involved – not just because it is good for our software, but also because openness is an important part of our mission.
This interest in helping people to contribute isn’t just reserved for new, inexperienced contributors. There are experienced coders out there who are interested in GNOME but haven’t found a way in. Even members of the GNOME project itself don’t always know how to contribute to different apps and modules.
Misc. GStreamer Developments
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Previously there were a few sinks based on OpenGL (osxvideosink for Mac OS X and eglglessink for Android and iOS), but they all only allowed rendering to a window. They did not allow rendering of a video into a custom texture that is then composited inside the application into an OpenGL scene. And then there was gst-plugins-gl, which allowed more flexible handling of OpenGL inside GStreamer pipelines, including uploading and downloading of video frames to the GPU, provided various filters and base classes to easily implement shader-based filters, provided infrastructure for sharing OpenGL contexts between different elements (even if they run in different threads) and also provided a video sink. The latter was now improved a lot, ported to all the new features for hardware integration and finally merged into gst-plugins-bad. Starting with GStreamer 1.4 in a few weeks, OpenGL will be a first-class citizen in GStreamer pipelines.
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The GStreamer 1.4 release that will happen in a few weeks time is officially making OpenGL a “first class citizen” and can be used by all platforms / operating systems supporting this open-source multimedia framework.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kubuntu
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Kubuntu versions usually ship with a pretty standard set up of KDE, and Trusty makes no exception. You will find the clean, default and usual KDE interface, but fear not, for it is highly configurable and you can practically make it look and behave in any way you like it. Kubuntu Trusty will ship in four days with one of the latest and bleeding edge versions of KDE, 4.13.0.
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Windows XP has officially died today as Microsoft pulls the plugs that leaves millions of users as juicy targets for crackers and cyber criminals and there will be massive attacks on these systems so it’s extremely important for Windows XP users to move away from this dead OS. There are two options for such users – either they upgrade to heavily criticized Windows 8 (which may not even work on their current hardware) or they simply move to Linux.
KDE Applications
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In 2005, a friend told me about Ubuntu, and since then I discover it. I love the open source philosophy, I think it’s a great project and all those who participate are awesome people!
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As I probably already mentioned somewhere there is currently quite some energy going into the work of bringing more and better KDE applications to the Mac platform.
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The project plugin works by automatically reading a simple json file and providing the information found there to various parts and plugins in Kate.
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Thanks to Georgiy Syptchenko from Krita Russian Community [0] Krita’s translations into Russian got significantly improved recently!
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For a long time now we have had kmymoney.org, and used that in all our documentation. That has made it easy to change now. After migrating all useful content from the Sourceforge site, all we had to was change the IP address in the DNS and, voilá! the new site is online.
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Posted in Site News at 2:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Site traffic in March-April (2014) is increasing
Summary: Effective immediately, Techrights will do what it takes to bring back old volume and pace of publishing
LAST year was a slow year for the site for purely personal reasons. Recently we have been able to post new material regularly, even if just in links form, resulting in heavier load on the 4 cores of the site’s server (with Varnish) and also increased traffic, which peaked in the past week. In prior years like 2009 we were able to publish almost a dozen posts per day; we’ll strive to get back to that. We are going to try to improve the Drupal side of the site and maybe get out of WordPress soon, for it is having security issues and is now pushing an automatic remote update feature that can act as a back door. Two more changes are imminent: daily news links will be back (we have not done those since last summer) and TechBytes, the audiocast, will be regularly released, starting this week. █
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04.13.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Snowden and Journalists
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Two reporters central to revealing the massive U.S. government surveillance effort returned to the United States on Friday for the first time since the story broke and used the occasion to praise their exiled source: Edward Snowden.
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Reform
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With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it’s time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren’t they doing more to stop it?
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Revelations about the National Security Agency’s most controversial surveillance program, which centers on the bulk collection of hundreds of billions of records of Americans’ phone conversations, were quickly greeted with calls for reform by major internet powerhouses like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo last year. But all four companies, along with dozens of other major tech firms, are actively opposing an initiative to prevent NSA spying known as the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, leaning on secretive industry lobbying groups while they profess outrage in official statements.
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The recent ruling by the Obama administration that telecom carriers, rather than the National Security Agency, would be responsible for warehousing telephone metadata is a complete joke.
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One of Obama’s NSA reforms just makes the problem worse.
Obama
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But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.
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Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Barack Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.
Cost Analysis
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This past Monday, I had the honor of moderating a panel organized by students at the American University Washington College of Law’s National Security Law Brief, on Understanding the Global Implications of the NSA Disclosures on the U.S. Technology Industry. The panel (Elizabeth Banker (ZwillGen), David Fagan (Covington), Joseph Moreno (Cadwalader), Gerard Stegmaier (Wilson Sonsoni) and Lawrence Greenberg (Motley Fool)) was stacked with practitioners who are navigating, on a daily basis, issues related to data privacy, transparency, and cooperation with law enforcement/government requests, among other related issues. As we explored during the discussion, there are a number of recent media and other reports describing the “fallout” for U.S. industry as a result of the disclosures. So, at least two questions arise: first, are the reports to be believed, and second, if so, will there be a lasting impact, or is this only temporary?
Japan
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Last December the ruling Liberal Democratic Party rammed one of the most controversial bills in Japan’s postwar history through the Diet, or parliament, with an uncharacteristic lack of debate. The “Protection of Specially Designated Secrets Act” passed even as opposition politicians knocked over desks, chairs, and one another while trying to reach the podium to block it. Outside, nearly 10,000 protesters formed a human chain around the government building and chanted, “No Return to Fascism!”
Germany/Europe
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In a testimony delivered by video-link from Moscow, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed to EU parliamentarians that the US NSA is actively spying on human rights organizations such as UNICEF and Amnesty International.
Deception
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The NSA engages in this fear-mongering not only publicly but also privately. As part of its efforts to persuade news organizations not to publish newsworthy stories from Snowden materials, its representatives constantly say the same thing: If you publish what we’re doing, it will endanger lives, including NSA personnel, by making people angry about what we’re doing in their countries and want to attack us.
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Last week, National Intelligence Director Gen. James R. Clapper sent a brief letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which he admitted that agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been reading innocent Americans’ emails and text messages and listening to digital recordings of their telephone conversations that have been stored in NSA computers, without warrants obtained pursuant to the Constitution. That the NSA is doing this is not newsworthy — Edward Snowden has told the world of this during the past 10 months. What is newsworthy is that the NSA has admitted this, and those admissions have far-reaching consequences.
Since the Snowden revelations first came to light last June, the NSA has steadfastly denied them. Clapper has denied them. The recently retired head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, has denied them. Even President Obama has stated repeatedly words to the effect that “no one is reading your emails or listening to your phone calls.”
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It was recently revealed that the NSA’s top-secret offensive security unit, a specially designed hacking group, can infiltrate systems at the speed of light through everything from satellite and fiber-optic connections
Data ‘Leaks’
Turkey
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Turkey’s largest military eavesdropping base, which is run under the country’s national intelligence agency, has been named the Signal Intelligence Directorate (SİB), in efforts to remodel the agency, inspired by the functioning of the NSA and the CIA in the United States.
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World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups
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The CIA has been training more than 1,000 rebels in Jordan in a program financed by Saudi Arabia. The rebels, blocked by Islamist militias in southern Syria, failed in two operations to establish strongholds in Syria.
PRISM CCTV
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Google is trying hard to register ‘Glass’ as a trademark for its wearable computer glasses. However, the search giant hasn’t been able to get through its bid with the US trademark office.
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Google is about to make its biggest push yet to get Glass in the hands of as many people as possible. The Verge has obtained documents indicating that the company will open up its “Explorer Program” and make Glass available to anyone who wants to purchase a pair, possibly as soon as next week. It’ll be a limited-time offer, only available for about a day, and only US residents will be eligible to purchase the $1,500 device. Google will also include a free sunglass shade or one of its newly-introduced prescription glasses frames along with any purchase. An internal Google slide shows that the promotion may be announced on April 15th, though all the details of this program have yet to be finalized.
Ukraine
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Arseniy Yatsenyuk promises devolution to local government in hope of staving off demands for their independence from Kiev
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World attention has focused on Ukraine recently. With President Victor Yanukovych making his exit and a new government formed, events shifted to Crimea, with accusations that the Russian military took over the region.
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The US has also come under attack from human rights groups for its use of drones against suspected terrorists but which has also killed many civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
Recently, the UN Human Rights Council published a Special Rapporteur’s report which detailed the deaths of civilians caused by US drone attacks, and raised many questions of possible violations of international human rights law.
Torture
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Senate committee found CIA interrogations and detentions to be ‘brutal’ and urges administration to release report as quickly as possible
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The lengthy report took four years to complete and still remains largely shrouded from public view. The treatment of 100 detainees was addressed — this, even though the official administrative line has long been that far fewer suspects were interrogated at CIA black sites. The report expressly states that the CIA misled the media and the public about the effectiveness of cruel and unusual interrogation. “The CIA manipulated the media by co-ordinating the leak of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee.
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We finally have been favored with the most inevitable leak in the history of the republic. Somebody’s sent the Senate committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program, and its description of what was done in our name, out into the world. This will light a fire under some asses in the Executive branch, I’m thinking. It ought to get people thrown in jail. (h/t to Martin Longman for the PDF.)…
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A classified U.S. Senate report found that the CIA’s legal justification for the use of harsh interrogation techniques that critics say amount to torture was based on faulty legal reasoning, McClatchy news service reported on Thursday.
The Central Intelligence Agency also issued erroneous claims about how many people it subjected to techniques such as simulated drowning, or “water boarding,” according to the news service, citing conclusions from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report obtained by McClatchy.
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A controversial torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee paints a pattern of CIA deception about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods used on terror suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to leaked findings. The committee said it will ask the Justice Department to investigate how the material was published.
The McClatchy news service late Thursday published what it said are the voluminous, still-classified review’s 20 findings. It concludes that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” failed to produce valuable intelligence; the CIA misled the Bush administration, Congress and the public about the value of the harsh treatment; the agency employed unauthorized techniques on detainees and improperly detained others; and it never properly evaluated its own actions.
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Congressman Keith Ellison is among 40 House Democrats calling on President Obama to quickly declassify portions of a report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques.
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One U.S. interrogator, speaking to Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity, explained the “enhanced interrogation” program as being “the Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.”
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CIA operatives called things like waterboarding “enhanced interrogation methods.” But the only adequate word to describe them is “torture.”
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Fresh claims emerge of high-level British government involvement in the programme
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Drones
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Schiff is co-sponsoring the drones report bill with an unlikely ally, Rep. Walter Jones. The North Carolina Republican is a mostly staunch conservative and Schiff a reliable Democratic vote on contentious issues. But Jones has broken with Republicans sharply in recent years over civil liberties issues and foreign policy generally.
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The Freedom of Information Act is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects — positive and negative — of the federal government’s policies.
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Because Arab Americans and American Muslims have been waiting to see when the Obama administration would finally act to end Bush-era ethnic and religious profiling guidelines and practices, I was troubled to read press accounts this week indicating that US attorney general Eric Holder may be proposing to keep in place many of the programmes that have so compromised our rights. American Arabs have been waiting for five years for the administration to end these practices. Now we fear that they may not.
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…United States’ earliest days, the country tried to win the respect of the world by faithfully adhering to international law.
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Mohamed Sakr and Bilal al-Berjawi had been friends since childhood, and they were both stripped of their citizenship within months of each other. After losing their citizenship, both were targeted for drone strikes. It took two separate attempts to kill al-Berjawi, while Sakr was successfully killed with one bombing. American officials, who supplied the drones, and British officials have denied the accusation that the governments are attempting to skirt due process laws by removing citizenship prior to assassination, though they did admit that the same intelligence may have led to both actions.
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On April 4, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s killing of three American citizens in two drone strikes in 2011.
The complaint was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of the families of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son.
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Relatives of victims of US drone strikes in Yemen have come together and formed the National Organisation for Drones Victims aimed at crusading against the controversial US programme and bringing justice to victims.
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Al Gawili said that he lost two of his relatives in a drone strikes in Khawalan, northern Yemen in January last year. He said that his relatives had nothing to do with Al Qaida and were hit by drones when they were dropping unidentified passengers off another area”.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Jolla
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The fifth update of Sailfish OS, called Sailfish OS 1.0.5.16 Paarlampi has been released, coming with both interesting new features and bug-fixes.
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Hello Jolla Enthusiasts. As you may know, Jolla is a project developed by former Nokia employees. The first Jolla smartphone is running on Sailfish OS, a modified Megoo Linux system, which is Android compatible, uses Wayland as the default display server , uses Nokia N9′s Maliit touchscreen keyboard and impressive hardware specifications.
WebOS
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It is a known fact that Palm’s mobile operating system dubbed webOS never really took off commercially. However, that is no indication that the team behind the OS did not have great ideas. In the latest, the team is rolling out its interesting (read: exciting) user interface ideas to the community. Known as Mochi, the project aims at the community to further work on it as the team was working on some intriguing ideas before HP decided to stall its plan for the same.
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A class action lawsuit filed in the wake of that decision in 2011 has now been settled by HP at the cost of $57 million. The plaintiffs are primarily pension funds and other institutional investors, whose anger stems from the dissonance between what HP was saying publicly and planning privately. Citing employees from within HP, the lawsuit alleges that the company didn’t have plans to build webOS PCs or printers until at least the beginning of 2013, which would have contradicted its bold claims about flooding the market with webOS hardware.
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It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions.
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Firefox OS
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Firefox OS 2.0 plans include copy and paste support, a new mechanism for launching apps and switching among them, a more useful lock screen, a find-my phone system, and more. Those features will be crucial to the success of the nascent OS, which lags Android and iOS by years but which is critical to Mozilla’s continued relevance.
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The images display a new lockscreen, as well as new SMS interfaces and other features. It’s a flatter look, with more transparencies, among other changes. There’s also a view of the EverythingMe-based context-sensitive search function.
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Despite the fact that the newest Firefox OS version available on devices is Firefox OS 1.3, a preview of Firefox OS 2.0 is already available and it looks quite awesome, for an OS targeting low-range and mid-range devices.
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There have been a lot of interesting developments surrounding Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform and smartphones built on it. Mozilla made clear at the recent Mobile World Congress conference that it wants to seed a market for $25 phones based on the platform, putting smartphones in the hands of many people who haven’t owned mobile phones before. And, a while back, I covered Geeksphone’s concept for a high-end Firefox OS phone called Revolution that would purportedly run both Mozilla’s platform and Android. Now, the Geeksphone Revolution, an Android smartphone on which it is easy to install Firefox OS, has gone on sale in France, Germany and the U.K. Some reports say that it will also go on sale in Italy.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Swisscom
FireTV
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It’s interesting to note that, according to Koush, the APK is the “regular Android APK,” and can be used to mirror your Android phone with any other suitable Android device. As we all know, the Fire TV does run on Android and although, on the surface, it may not be immediately familiar to most Android users, its roots are the same and have allowed the app to work seamlessly.
Android TV
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Rumors of the impending sunsetting of Google TV have been around at least since September when Sony, Google’s most stalwart partner for its struggling, Android-based Google TV, announced a Bravia Smart Stick media player. Sony noted “Google services” but never mentioned Google TV. The trend was confirmed by several unnamed Google TV partners in an October report by GigaOM that cited the “Android TV” name. In December, when Marvell announced an Android 4.2.2-ready, Armada 1500 Plus SoC update to the official SoC of Google TV — the Armada 1500 — the Android TV term was used again.
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Leaked images of Google’s new Android TV user interface show a more streamlined and intuitive approach to the big screen than Google TV.
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The Verge reports that Google is getting ready to launch Android TV, a set top box based on Android that comes complete with apps and games. The new device is said to have an entertainment-focused interface, and it will be geared toward getting content in front of the user with three clicks or less. Such a product could prove to be a very tough competitor for Amazon’s Fire TV and the Apple TV. It looks like Google is declaring war on Apple and Amazon for control of the living room.
Android in Home-centric Form Factors
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Photographs serve as our best memories. Through good times and some great times, photographs stay with us etching our emotions deftly onto a little piece of paper. Over the years, photographs have gone a major transformation. Few years ago, taking a photo meant that you had some memory that you thought would be worth sharing. You took a picture and then kept it with you for the rest of your life. These days, taking a picture is all about getting the maximum likes on Facebook or Instagram. Oh, and there’s the bizarre trend of “selfies” that well, isn’t that cool as you might think.
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Laptops
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So the question is, what would Android need to do to make it a great laptop operating system? The biggest thing missing, in my opinion, is bringing great desktop apps to this OS through the same Play Store. Just like you install Chrome for smartphones, there should be an option to install Chrome Desktop for the same touchscreen devices—this app, however, would need to be made for keyboard usage.
Tablets
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If you want to be totally up-to-date, HP has the answer for you — though it will cost you a little bit. The company has stealthily launched the Slate 8 Pro Business edition, which is similar to the non-Business version save for one key difference: It runs the latest version of Android — 4.4, or KitKat.
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Nikon (Microsoft-taxed)
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Nikon has launched the Coolpix S810, which packs in all the technology Nikon is famous for along with the most popular operating for smart devices – Android. It is a simple point and shoot camera powered by Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean.
Samsung (Microsoft-taxed)
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Samsung Electronics will add two safeguards to its latest smartphone in an effort to deter rampant theft of the mobile devices nationwide, the company said Friday.
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Samsung Galaxy S5 is the fastest smartphone available in the market right now. Galaxy S5 has top of the line Qualcomm 2.5 GHz quad core Snapdragon 800 chipset along with 2GB of RAM. The internal storage include options for 16GB or 32GB expandable up to 64GB using microSD. It features a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED display with FULL HD resolution of 1920×1080. The smartphone is running the latest Android KitKat 4.4. Special features include fingerprint sensor, heart-rate monitor, health-centric apps and water- as well as dust-resistant body. The device is powered by a 3,000 mAh battery.
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The Gear Fit is the first wearable device from a major manufacturer to truly look like it’s come from the future, though its warm reception was colored by one universal complaint: the orientation of the screen. Displaying the time, messages, and all your health data horizontally makes the wrist-worn device somewhat awkward to read, but Samsung hasn’t been deaf to the criticism. The company’s issued a patch to enable vertical display orientation, making for a more familiar reading experience when consulting the fitness band. This could be a great boon in Korea — where the updated UI first appeared on Samsung’s official store blog — but the narrowness of the screen may pose a challenge when displaying longer pieces of text in the Latin alphabet.
Project Ara
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Just days before its first Project Ara Developer Conference is scheduled to begin, Google has released the device’s Module Developers Kit (MDK), a set of plans and documentation designed to get hardware hackers started building modules for the componentized, mix-and-match experimental smartphone.
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Google’s Project Ara is an effort to create a modular smartphone that’s cheap and ridiculously customizable. Want a new processor? Just pop out the old one and pop in a module with a new chip. Need long battery life but don’t care about removable storage? Just replace the microSD card module with an extra battery module.
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Security
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Disturbing reports about fake Android apps are nothing new, but the latest one involves an app called Virus Shield. It sold for $3.99 and promised to improve the security of Android devices. Unfortunately, as Android Police discovered, it actually did nothing at all except to fleece users of their hard earned money. The app has since been pulled from the Google Play store, but the damage has already been done.
Misc.
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Android 4.4.3, also known as KitKat MR2 (Android 4.4.1 and 4.4.2 are known as KitKat MR1), has entered the dogfooding stage and has started rolling out to 1% of Google employees outside of the Android team. Currently, the dogfooding rollout is limited to the supported Nexus line (Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7 2012, Nexus 7 2013, and Nexus 10), with GPE and Moto X updates to follow.
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It isn’t easy being an Android smartphone maker these days. Your flagship handsets are scrutinised for cutting-edge features, yet they’re criticised if these features seem to be unnecessary, or are unnecessarily complicated.
Ever faster multicore processors are sometimes deemed by reviewers to be faster than needed, with the trade-off between power consumption and responsiveness often cited. Higher-resolution screens can be dismissed, as there comes a point where pixel count goes beyond being a factor in smooth text and graphics rendition. What’s a manufacturer to do in the face of such criticism?
Chrome OS
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Chromebooks are also getting support for folders in launcher. What it means is that now, like Android, you can create folders and club your apps in a much organzied manner. Google has also implemented the “OK Google” search feature with the launcher and the voice search can be triggered with hotword “Ok Google”. Google has also implemented support for ‘Captive Portal’ which makes it easier for users when they try to connect to the wireless of cafes, hotels, airports, and other locations which requiers them to go to an authentication page.
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As Chromebooks–portable computers based on Google’s Chrome OS platform–continue to carve out a healthy niche for themselves, there are strong signs that we are soon going to see Chrome OS tablets. This, of course, has been in the rumor mill for some time. Last October, I reported on a developer-focused version of Chrome OS that included an on-screen keyboard, which of course would be ideal for use on a tablet. Now, the Chrome OS team has confirmed that the latest Stable Channel version of Chrome OS has such a keyboard, and it’s likely we’ll see tablets based on Google’s operating system soon.
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What I am trying to highlight from this post is that if you use a Chromebook you have given yourself a great chance to remain safe from viruses but it doesn’t mean you should go gung-ho and believe that you are invincible online.
Chrome
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It is unclear what they mean by ‘technical issue’ and how come Google has blocked the website. At the time of the writing, visitors are still presented with the malware warning message. Wired says it is waiting for Google chrome to remove the warning.
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Today’s Chrome Beta channel release includes a slew of new developer features to help you make richer, more compelling web content and apps, especially for mobile devices. Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to Chrome for Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.
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Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, has just received a new update, promoting the 35 development branch to Beta.
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Google today released Chrome version 34 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes support for responsive images, an unprefixed version of the Web Audio API, and importing supervised users. You can update to the latest release now using the browser’s built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
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According to a lucky reader of ours, Google opened up a beta test for its Chrome Remote Desktop app on Android within the last few days. The beta is invite only at this time, with invites rolling out to those who “expressed interest” in helping Chrome improve their remote desktop client. Like the Chrome extension, this app does indeed give you remote access to your desktop computers, only this time through Android devices (both phones and tablets).
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Google officially released the Chrome 34 web-browser this afternoon and with it comes new features.
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The Google Chrome 35 development branch, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, has been upgraded yet again, but this time it’s only a very small update.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
MongoDB
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On Friday I tagged the newest release of my primary responsibility at MongoDB, the new C driver. The driver is split up into two libraries, libbson[1] and mongo-c-driver. It feels like a natural split, since there seems to be a lot of interest in BSON outside of MongoDB.
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OPEN SOURCE DATABASE MongoDB reached version 2.6 on Tuesday after a six month developer test.
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MongoDB has officially released the latest version of its namesake NoSQL database, which introduces a number of changes designed to make it simpler to manage and operate, as well as making it easier to add new features in future.
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NoSQL
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AppDynamics’ Spring 2014 Release includes new support for NoSQL Big Data stores including MongoDB and Hadoop, Couchbase and Cassandra through its extensible API framework.
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Database giant Oracle is attempting to create a NoSQL standards body, The Register has learned.
The puzzling move was disclosed to El Reg on Friday by multiple well-placed sources at multiple database companies, who were each familiar with the matter.
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NoSQL database platform company MarkLogic is having a successful period of growth and says that MarkLogic release 7 is marked out for its elasticity, tiered storage and semantics capabilities.
MySQL
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The products are based on MariaDB 10, which became generally available on Monday
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Four of the titans of hyperscale Web applications – Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – have teamed up to create a set of common extensions aimed specifically at running the open source MySQL relational database at scale.
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There is something of a war of words (and code) going on between the NoSQL and SQL database camps.
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The latest release of MariaDB Enterprise removes the need to choose between different database technologies, says SkySQL
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For the next release of its open source MySQL, Oracle is making a number of changes designed to vastly boost the speed of the open source relational database management system.
Such a sizeable performance bump could help organizations save money in server purchases, because it would require fewer servers to run large jobs. Or, it will allow them to run complex queries that might have taken too long to run on earlier versions of the database system, said Tomas Ulin, Oracle vice president of MySQL engineering.
On Monday, the company released the latest development version of the software, MySQL Development Milestone 5.7.4, along with a number of associated programs for managing the database. The last major version of MySQL, version 5.6, was released in February 2013.
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London, United Kingdom – 31 March 2014 – The MariaDB Foundation, an independent body which promotes the popular open source database MariaDB, today announced the much-anticipated general availability of MariaDB 10, providing today’s generation of application developers with enhanced performance and functionality.
WebScaleSQL
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The open-source WebScaleSQL branch of MySQL 5.6 was announced by Facebook on Thursday, and uses version 2 of the GNU General Public License. Engineers from Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have contributed to the project, although the group is inviting other interested parties to join as well.
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CitusDB. Oracle, PostgreSQL…
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CitusDB, a database analytics startup that is hoping to take on big boys like Oracle, today announced the release of CSTORE, a columnar store extension for PostgreSQL. The open-source tool, which the company says is the first for PostgreSQL, is available for a free download starting today.
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AMD has migrated terabytes of information from an Oracle Database installation to an Apache Hadoop stack, claiming Oracle’s pricey software was suffering from scaling issues.
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This is a guest post for Computer Weekly Open Source Insider written by Sandor Klein of EDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sharing textbooks
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These open-source textbooks have different features that electronic versions sold by traditional publishers
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Why not jump aboard the open source bandwagon since the world does seem to be moving in that general direction as well in tech matters? That is what the University of Maryland is currently considering, to make use of open source textbooks since textbooks happen to be the single fastest growing expense for college students, apart from the constant twin thorns of rent and cost of living. Many other universities too, are looking for a solution when it comes to textbooks, and the University of Maryland would not be the first to implement such an idea since both the University of California and the University of Washington have already kicked off programs to offer their students a catalog of free and freely available open source textbooks.
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Eben Upton is best known as the man behind the Raspberry Pi, a tiny, $25 computer designed to help turn kids into programmers. Upton priced it at $25 because he thought that’s around what an average textbook cost: “I now understand that’s an incorrect estimate. If we had a better idea of what school textbooks cost we would have had an easier job with the engineering over the years,” he joked to Wired years later.
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Fed up with academic textbooks making constant but minor updates, adding unnecessary chapters and providing unwanted worksheets, Scott Roberts was desperate for a new way to teach his PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology class.
In the fall of 2010, he found a solution that not only relieved his frustrations but also saved his students money.
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Holding a whiteboard, the University of Maryland-College Park students scrawled their complaints and posed for a picture.
“My name is Justin and I spent $114 on ONE textbook,” a student wrote. “My name is Jeff and I spent $736 on textbooks,” wrote another.
Academia
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Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the formation of the Readium Foundation (Readium.org), an independent nonprofit launched in March 2013 with the objective of developing commercial-grade open source publishing technology software. The overall goal of Readium.org is to accelerate adoption of ePub 3, HTML5, and the Open Web Platform by the digital publishing industry to help realize the full potential of open-standards-based interoperability. More specifically, the aim is to raise the bar for ePub 3 support across the industry so that ePub maintains its position as the standard distribution format for e-books and expands its reach to include other types of digital publications.
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We’ve been talking a lot about the power and importance of open access for academic (and especially government funded) research. More and more universities have agreed, with some even having general open access policies for their academics, requiring them to release research under open access policies. This makes sense, because one of the key aspects of education and knowledge is the ability to share it freely and to build on the work of others. Without open access, this is made much more difficult. So it’s immensely troubling to discover that one of the biggest science publishers out there, Nature Publishing Group, has started telling academics that they need to get a “waiver” from their university’s open access policies. The issue was raised by Duke’s Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith, though it’s likely happening at other universities as well:
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In the latest skirmish between academia and publishers over the costs of academic journals, the University of Konstanz in Germany has broken off negotiations over a new licensing agreement with the scientific publisher Elsevier. The publisher’s prices are too high, said university Rector Ulrich Rüdiger in a statement, and the institution “will no longer keep up with this aggressive pricing policy and will not support such an approach.”
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Further Recent Posts
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- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
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The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
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