06.18.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 11:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Harvesting by force
Summary: Microsoft is trying to bribe the defectors and squeeze the existing clients in order to stay relevant in today’s Linux-dominated world
Microsoft is trying to impose its will on companies. Sometimes Microsoft extorts, blackmails, or bribes companies. Having taken control of some of Dell, the company’s gaming division (in a sense), despite its promises to GNU/Linux [1], leans towards Windows again. This is the type of attack we saw in the case of Nokia. This is not sustainable because it requires either buying the partners (sometimes potential competitors) or bribing them. It is a desperate attempt to remain relevant using big spendings; as we saw in the case of Nokia, this is bound to fail. One cannot just buy one’s way out of trouble when the products are fundamentally flawed.
According to Carlo Piana, the man who fought Microsoft in Europe while Microsoft bribed Novell to drop out of his antitrust case, there is another short-term and shortsighted strategy from Microsoft. “Microsoft is becoming annoying with its audits to clients,” he writes, “insisting on charging six-figures clients for menial inconsistencies. From what I hear, they are carpet-bombing with audits, which is not a brilliant marketing move, methinks.”
Citing Microsoft’s relationship with the NSA Will Hill asks himself:
Why might they be doing that? Thanks to Snowden, people are dumping NSA spyware like Windows, so revenue must be down. Microsoft is acting like their OS is going out of style because it is.
Well, this sure is a way to alienate customers, maybe even partners like Alienware. Windows PCs are no longer selling. Android and other Linux-based platform are the present and future. Some newer reports (cited in our daily links) already insinuate that Alienware is turning back again to GNU/Linux. We may revisit this at a later stage when Alienware makes it official.
Later this week we are going to publish an extensive post about China’s action against Microsoft’s patent extortion. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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While I can understand the financial difficulties inherent in waiting for a final release of SteamOS, I’m not sure that this is such a great idea on Alienware’s part. Is there really a market for this kind of device based on Windows? It seems to me that SteamOS was the big attraction for users who might buy a Steam Machine. I can’t really see the appeal of a Windows-based Steam Machine.
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06.17.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Last week, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) announced its plan to build a revolutionary new type of computer called The Machine. And here’s what makes it truly revolutionary, in all senses of the word: The Machine will run an open source operating system developed in universities, as well as Linux and Android.
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Where Windows has utilities, Linux has tweak tools. And whether you’re a Linux pro or a recent refugee from Windows XP, they can help you makeA Ubuntu 14.04 LTS “Trusty Tahr” (the latest and greatest offering from Linux distro pioneer Canonical) really start to feel like home.
Customizability has long been one of Linux’s most compelling features–particularly when compared with proprietary alternatives such as Windows and OS X–but the tweak tools out there today let you refine the OS even further. And if you’re making the migration to Linux on your workplace PCs, tweak tools can help ease the transition.
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Server
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SAP’s and IBM’s strategies around HANA emphasize how a unified in-memory platform can deliver the goods in both analytics and common line-of-business applications. That’s all good — but just as important will be the increasing competition that viable Power-based HANA solutions should inspire in the marketplace. Analytics and Big Data belong everywhere, not just in enterprise or BI ivory towers.
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In celebration of its 11th anniversary, cloud host Linode has slashed its prices. Users can now purchase hosting plans on Linux-powered servers with SSD storage starting at $10 per month.
The offering was made possible through a $45 million upgrade of Linode’s infrastructure back in April 2014, which brought SSD storage to the company’s servers, as well as Intel (INTC) Xeon E5 2680v2 Ivy Bridge processors, more RAM and higher network throughput.
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Kernel Space
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Following the exciting systemd 214 release that worked on new sandboxing features and other improvements toward a stateless Linux system, Lennart Poettering has blogged about the latest features and their plans going forward.
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With the recently released Linux 3.15 kernel is support for UAS. USB Attached SCSI will allow for significantly faster performance out of UAS-supported USB drive enclosures.
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At the end of 2013 I’ve spend 2 full months working on getting XHCI streams support and the UAS driver in the Linux kernel, which uses streams into shape. With the release of the 3.15 kernel this work now is available for end users to use.
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The latest addition to systemd’s networkd networking component is support for Virtual Extensible LANs.
With the latest networkd work, networkd can now create VXLANs. Virtual Extensible LANs are a network virtualization method designed for cloud computing needs.
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Developers have put out their latest batch of Allwinner patches that allow for basic upstream kernel support of Allwinner’s A23 SoC.
The Allwinner A23 SoC is a dual-core Cortex-A7 part that’s been out since last year. The A23 isn’t impressive by other tier-one ARM SoCs, but it’s low-cost and with the A23 System-on-a-Chip they switched from using PowerVR graphics to instead using ARM’s Mali with their new designs.
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Bill Traynor first got hooked on embedded Linux development when a friend who maintained Hitachi’s SH architecture helped him install Linux on his Sega Dreamcast. From there he developed a hobby of installing Linux on various gaming consoles, toys, and handheld devices. And when embedded development boards became more abundant, accessible and cheaper, Traynor moved on to more serious tinkering.
“For me, the availability of Linux on the many low-cost, ARM-based dev boards has been fun,” he said via email. “Small, powerful boards, like the BeagleBone Black have really made things fun again.”
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Graphics Stack
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With the Linux 3.16 kernel comes the ability to re-clock select NVIDIA GeForce GPUs when using the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Here’s my first impressions with trying out this option to maximize the performance of NVIDIA graphics cards on open-source drivers.
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The “Motorcar Compositor” is an interesting Wayland-based compositor that supports using an Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra with support for 3D windows.
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Rich Geldreich, the former Valve OpenGL developer that left the company and has been publicly expressing the poor OpenGL driver landscape, has another new post out today.
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A few days ago I wrote about Codethink getting Wayland/Weston running on NVIDIA’s Jetson TK1 Tegra K1 development board using a fully open driver stack. Codethink’s work is now available in both code and image form.
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Attention grabbing headline? Check. It seems the ex-Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has noted a recent Phoronix benchmark using apitest on how badly AMD’s Catalyst driver performed.
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Benchmarks
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Last weekend I published 2D performance benchmarks comparing Nouveau to NVIDIA’s official driver. To no real surprise, the proprietary NVIDIA driver beat Nouveau in most micro-benchmarks when it comes to 2D (and separately, 3D) performance. With the open-source Radeon stack, however, it presents a much tougher fight against the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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Applications
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Shutter, a feature-rich screenshot program that allows users to capture nearly anything on their screen without losing control, is now at version 0.91.
The Shutter developers don’t release updates often for this great software and you would imagine that each new version carried a huge number of changes and improvements. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
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XWiki Enterprise 6.1 Milestone 2, a professional wiki that has powerful extensibility features such as scripting in pages, plugins, and a highly modular architecture, has been released and is ready for testing.
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DockBarX is a lightweight taskbar / panel replacement for Linux which works a stand-alone dock (called DockX), as an an Avant Window Navigator applet or as a Xfce4 panel applet.
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Conky Manager makes using/managing Conky a lot easier and while I like it for the most part, I’ve encountered two annoyances (nothing major though). One is that the application creates a “conky-manager” folder in the home directory – this will be fixed in a future release though.
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This is actually a GUI for Conky, which is a lightweight system monitor for the X server. Having to manage the files and to configure the application is pretty hard and time-consuming when you’re not using an interface.
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Telegram is a free messaging app that focuses on speed and security, at least that’s what its developers say. There are official Telegram applications available for iOS and Android as well as various unofficial clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Windows Phone.
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Proprietary
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What Linux needs most is games, said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. However, “if you were trying to narrow it down to one app, it would probably still be Photoshop. For all the talk of how great GIMP has become, usability is still an abject nightmare, and in spite of the OSS community’s self-back-patting regarding documentation, there is no documentation for GIMP which is not pathetic.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Age of Wonders III, and turn based strategy game developed and published by Triumph Studios, is set to arrive on Steam for Linux soon.
Calling Age of Wonders III just a turn based strategy might be simplify the game too much. It’s a combination of Civilization and Heroes that managed to get good things from both worlds.
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A “Steamboy” handheld gaming console teased in a video appears to be the first portable Steam Machine to emerge for Valve’s Linux-based Steam OS platform.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the latest iteration of the famed Civilization series and one of the most addictive turn based strategy games, is finally coming to Linux and Steam OS. In a recent post on the Steam Community boards, Aspyr Media announced their first Linux and Steam OS title, Civilization V. The entire collection of the game, that is, the base game along with all the DLC and the two expansion packs, Brave New World and Gods & Kings are included in the Steam OS and Linux release.
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Valve is looking very seriously at Linux as a genuine replacement for Windows and the company has put a lot of effort into it. An interesting way of seeing just how much they care is to check the top ten most played games on Steam.
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Linux gaming has seen massive growth in the past two years, ever since Valve began openly supporting the open source operating system. That growth is nothing compared to what it will be after the launch of their Steam Machines, says Alienware’s product manager, Marc Diana.
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OpenXCom has taken its time. When we last posted about it—for its 0.9 release—it had been in the works for four years. That was over a year ago, meaning that this new v1.0 release has taken… well, you should be able to do the maths. It’s an open-source clone of the original XCOM: UFO Defense / UFO: Enemy Unknown, and lets you play Microprose’s original, brutal tactical strategy in an easier-to-use engine.
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War Thunder announced a little surprise for us in their E3 video! A Linux version that they have been showing off.
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Bravada is the new game from Ukraine developers Interbellum Team that features a cheery little story. This game differ from most of the others for it’s gameplay, in short it’s a mix of a vertical scroller with RPG and turn based strategic game.
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Advanced Micro Devices wants to bring console-quality gaming to Linux users by porting its Mantle gaming tools to the OS.
Mantle is a set of software development tools to make video games performance smoother and more realistic. It was introduced by AMD last year as the company’s answer to Microsoft’s DirectX. However, Mantle currently works only with x86 processors, the Windows OS and the company’s graphics cards.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Enlightenment 0.19 features improved Wayland support, the tiling module rework has landed, support for the new X PRESENT extension for reducing compositing overhead in X.Org Server 1.15 and newer, the E16-style live pager has returned, and the new compositor code has landed.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The new KDE Plasma 5 Beta 2 that was released only a few days ago can be tested in Kubuntu 14.04 LTS with a just a minimum of effort.
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One of the great things about Linux, especially for web developers or server administrators, is that all of the basic tools you need to get set with your remote server and files tend to be included and well integrated into the system from the get go. You don’t necessarily need to install an FTP client, a code editor or a special terminal emulator.
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Now that I have your attention: the binary of KWin/5 just got renamed from “kwin” to “kwin_x11″. For you as a user nothing changes, the startup is adjusted to start kwin_x11 instead of kwin. Nothing else changed. The D-Bus interface is still org.kde.KWin, the config file is still “kwinrc”, etc. etc. Only if you start KWin manually remember to run “kwin_x11 –replace &” instead of “kwin –replace &”.
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During the move of KDE’s software projects from Subversion to Git most projects split their subprojects over multiple Git repositories. Calligra did not, but is keeping all code of all apps and extras in one single repository. That is all of the apps Author, Braindump, Flow, Karbon, Kexi, Krita, Plan, Sheets, Stage and Words as well as all of the extras like the file format converter, the Okular generators, file thumbnailers and other file manager integration.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Linux Lite 2.0 includes updated applications, Whisker Menu as the default menu, Linux Lite software repositories, sound control from the tray, descriptive title bars in terminal windows, and more than twenty popular applications that you can easily install from the terminal window. This release also offers a new system font called Droid Sans, tabs in the file manager, and dialog boxes for auto-login.
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When I saw the release announcement for KaOS 2014.06 on Distrowatch, it caught my eye for two reasons. First, because there have been a few times when I have thought I would really like to have a special KDE-focused distribution with rolling updates where I could find and test the latest in the KDE Software Collection and associated packages. And second, because I have recently been trying and writing about a totally “over-the-top” Linux distribution (Makulu) with absolutely everything thrown in, including the kitchen sink and whatever other appliances and paraphernalia were within reach, so the prospect of a smaller, carefully focused and selective distribution sounded quite interesting.
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Rescatux can fix GRUB and GRUB2, check and fix filesystems (Windows MBR included), change GNU/Linux passwords, regenerate sudoers files, and much more.
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In 2005, in version 5.0, The Pharmacy Server was mature and solid, running on a central server that supported over 300 drugstore chains in Brazil, and has been featured by Red Hat as a certification success story.
In 2010, after mergers and acquisitions, the company’s operation was terminated and Pharmacy Server was shut down. Its last version used Red Hat 5.4, Firebird 1.5.3, and a custom version of Webmin web admin interface.
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New Releases
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Cubicle OS is a rather new operating system and it shows, especially from the way it’s built. The developer chose to implement GNOME as the default desktop environment, but it looks like he didn’t bother to customize it too much.
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OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.0.5 and is now available for download.
The OpenELEC makers usually follow the XMBC releases, but from time to the time the devs make their own upgrades that are not taken from the other project. After all, XBMC is just a software and OpenELEC is in fact a Linux distribution, which means that there are a number of other components that need improvements and fixes.
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Screenshots
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 14.06 is based on Gentoo and that is not something that you see every day. In fact, there are very few Linux distros out there that are using Gentoo as a base and it’s good to see that developers take the time and the effort to utilize something else than Debian and Ubuntu.
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Red Hat Family
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Perhaps the biggest release on the Linux Planet in the past week came from the world’s largest Linux vendor (by revenue); Red Hat.
After what might have seemed like an eternity to some (though was only 3 and half years in reality), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) officially became generally available. RHEL 6 was first releasedin November of 2010.
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The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV 3.4) platform, released today, provides new features that make hypervisor-based virtualization easier to deploy and manage. The new RHEV release comes at a pivotal time for the virtualization industry as Docker container-based virtualization is now beginning to pick up momentum.
RHEV 3.4 is based on the upstream open-source oVirt project, which had its 3.4 release March 27. RHEV provides additional hardening and commercial enterprise support.
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In this latest RHEV release, Red Hat states that it brings new “enhancements for traditional virtualization infrastructure, guest support for the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, as well as advanced OpenStack [cloud] support across compute, storage and networking.”
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Red Hat is out with its new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform version 3.4, which arrives just after the new version of its Enterprise Linux offering. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.4 is being positioned as a bridge to the OpenStack cloud, among other things. The latest RHEV version offers new “guest support for [RHEL] as well as advanced OpenStack support across compute, storage and networking.”
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Goodtech develops and delivers projects, services and products creating business value for customers within a number of industries and sectors including manufacturing, energy, green technology and infrastructure. Among Goodtech’s customers in the Nordic region are industry leaders such as Astra Zeneca, LKAB, Vattenfall, Statoil and Norsk Hydro.
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Fedora
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A lot has been said on fedora-devel in the last few weeks about DNF and Yum. I thought it might be useful to contribute my own views, considering I’ve spent the last half-decade consuming the internal Yum API and the last couple of years helping to design the replacement with about half a dozen of the packaging team here at Red Hat. I’m also a person who unsuccessfully tried to replace Yum completely with Zif in fedora a few years ago, so I know quite a bit about packaging systems and metadata parsing.
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Following a lot of work by Hans de Goede at Red Hat, Fedora Rawhide now supports running the X.Org Server without root rights.
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The Bodhi2/Taskotron Fedora Activity Day happened earlier this month! A bunch of us gathered in Denver for a few days and worked on some of our critical releng & qa infrastructure. The hackfest was held in a conference room in my apartment building, which worked out quite nicely for the amount of people that we had. The hotel was right up the road, and we were able to walk to a lot of awesome spots, like the 1UP Barcade :).
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SouthEast LinuxFest is happening this upcoming weekend. I offered to host a PGP (I’ll substitute PGP for GPG, GnuPG, and other iterations) keysigning and CACert Assertion event and have been scheduled for 6:30 PM in the Red Hat Ballroom. Since there is a little bit of planning needed on the part of the participant I’m writing this to help the event run smoothly.
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Debian Family
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The Debian developers have announced a few of months back that they intend to make Debian 6 an LTS release. The period for this extended release period has now begun.
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Tails was built with two specific things in mind: sustainability and usability.
Sustainability refers to how this is a project that can be relied on by its users. The team goes on to explain the importance of usability: “We believe that the best security tool is of no use if people who really need it on the field cannot use it. Moreover, security tools must be hard to misuse, they should prevent you from doing critical mistakes, or ask you to make security decisions that you are not able to make.”
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Mate is a Gnome 2 fork, created by the Arch Linux developers as a an alternative to Gnome Classic (Gnome 2), when the Gnome developers decided to create Gnome 3. Mate became very popular in a short time and now is used on many Linux systems. The latest version available is Mate 1.8, which has been released a while ago.
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Debian developers have announced today that Debian 6 will be maintained as a long-term support (LTS) state until February of 2016.
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The Debian project is pleased to announce that the “Long Term Support (LTS)” infrastructure to provide security updates for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 (code name “squeeze”) until February 2016 is now in place. Users of this version should follow the instructions from the LTS wiki page to ensure that they get the LTS security updates.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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According to the Ubuntu Wiki, this feature comes down to “the main purpose of a trusted prompt session (TPS) then is to tie together the [application requesting access to a resource via a trusted helper, the trusted helper, and a trust prompt provider] components mentioned before, both in terms of presenting the final prompt to the user and in terms of lifecycle/focus mgmt. (from a shell’s perspective). In this respect, a temporary, virtual app is introduced that spans across all three components.”
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Canonical has announced that its Ubuntu for phones operating system has been activated on 10,000 devices, marking an important milestone for the company.
Ubuntu for phones was announced at the beginning of 2013 and the development team has been working on it since then. It took them a while to get a functioning version and they’ve been improving it constantly.
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First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won’t sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game. But what Canonical does want to do is let you fiddle with an Orange Box. It makes for an amazing demo platform—a cloud-in-a-box that Canonical can use to show off the fancy services and tools it offers.
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The stable Linux 3.15 is now available from the Ubuntu 14.10 development archive while the Linux 3.16 kernel isn’t landing quite yet in its early development form.
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Flavours and Variants
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As night follows the day, so too do Linux Mint launches follow Ubuntu releases. Linux Mint is a project which puts together a desktop-oriented distribution based on Ubuntu packages. The Linux Mint project tends to take a more practical and conservative approach to crafting a desktop operating system when compared to Ubuntu. While Ubuntu experiments with the Unity desktop, servers, cloud computing and mobile devices, the Mint team stays focused on producing a familiar, user-friendly, multimedia-enabled desktop solution. Starting with their most recent release, Linux Mint 17, the Mint team has announced they will be adjusting their release cycle, basing all Linux Mint releases on the most recent Ubuntu long term support release. This should make for a more stable platform and a more relaxed release cycle.
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In today’s open source roundup: Linux Mint 17 Xfce and KDE RC released. Plus: Deepin 2014 RC released, and a review of Linux Mint 17 MATE by DistroWatch
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The unofficial Tizen SDK Live DVD has now been updated to the latest version of lubuntu 14.04, and you can download the ISO image now.
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The IFC6410 Pico-ITX board is a tiny computer-on-a-board powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor as the Samsung Galaxy S4 or HTC One M7 smartphones. It sells for $149 and it’s aimed at developers, hobbyists, and others interested in testing their hardware or software designs… but thanks to a few recent developments, you can also use the IFC6410 as a small, inexpensive desktop computer.
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However, there is a need for more clarity on whether Google Fit will be integrated into the next version of Android, or offered as a standalone app that could be downloaded independently.
It added: “One source with knowledge of Google’s plans said Google Fit would allow a wearable device that measures data like steps or heart rate to interface with Google’s cloud-based services, and become part of the Google Fit ecosystem.”
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Makers, hobbyists and developers looking for a new Linux Fedora or Ubuntu development board for their projects might be interested to learn that the IFC6410 Pico-ITX board which is available to purchase for around $149.
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Phones
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The Russia Tizen App Challenge has been launched with the aim of bringing talented application and game developers to the new Tizen platform, for new challenges and above all new opportunities. The competition has started on the 9th June and is open to citizens of the Russia or Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan with permanent or temporary registration in the territory of Russia.
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If your phone can be connected to your computer with an USB cable you can do a lot more through this connection than just recharging it or transferring files to and from your phone’s storage. For example, you can make phone calls, read and send text messages, and see a bunch of other information from your phone, right on your PC. There is a number of Free Open Source software applications that allow you to do this, and you don’t even need to have a smartphone for this to work, just a phone that can connect to USB.
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Ballnux
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The document leaked to Android Geeks by an anonymous tipster indicates two versions of the S5 are due to receive the 4.4.3 update within the next couple of weeks. The leaked document was an email sent to Android Geeks titled “KTU84 Update Status Report”, containing a visible Samsung header and dated “June 10th”. The document suggests the Galaxy S5 (SM-G900F and SM-G900H) are both due to receive the update in June with both models having ‘completed testing’.
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Android
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Secure communications specialist Silent Circle recently set out to build the most secure Android phone in the world, and some have gone as far as to call the company’s Blackphone an “NSA-proof” smartphone. That statement can’t be confirmed, of course, since the NSA surely still has a few tricks up its sleeve that we don’t know about. What we can say, however, is that people concerned with keeping their mobile communications private will soon have a new option that is more secure than any publicly available Android phone currently on the market.
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Silent Circle in partnership with Geeksphone announced the Blackphone in January this year. The makers of the Blackphone claims that the handset is the world’s first smartphone that gives its user total control of privacy.
The upcoming smartphone is powered by a modified version of Android, PrivatOS, which is believed to be more security-oriented. The Blackphone will be carrier and vendor independent, which will ensure that individuals and businesses are able to make and receive secure phone calls, send texts, store files, browse the internet and more without compromising the privacy of the user.
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In Android Anti-forensics: Modifying CyanogenMod Karl-Johan Karlsson and William Bradley Glisson present a version of the Cyanogenmod alternate operating system for Android devices, modified so that it generates plausible false data to foil forensic analysis by law enforcement. The idea is to create a mobile phone that “lies” for you so that adversaries who coerce you into letting them take a copy of its data can’t find out where you’ve been, who you’ve been talking to, or what you’ve been talking about.
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In short, CyanogenMod (pronounced sigh-AN-oh-jen-mod) is an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets. CM is based on the android platform but contains a wealth of add-ons, third party extensions and customisations. Until now CM was pretty much an alternative operating system only used by those who were brave enough to self-install (aka ‘flashing’). However more recently CM is starting to hit the mainstream market in all new ways. At present CM can claim over 12 million installs which when considering was never released (until recently) as a direct-from-launch pre-installed product is quite impressive. In addition alternative phone manufacturers are starting to see the benefits of CM and jumping on board. The first device to officially utilize CM was the OPPO N1 which launched back in December 2013 with the ColorOS operating system. This was the first device ever to offer a pre-loaded CM firmware.
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It looks like the wait is over! OnePlus One has arguable created a lot of controversy over the last few months with the release of their new device. This first began with ‘OnePlus’ (the company) creating a real buzz around their open-source device ‘OnePlus One’ (the device – yes, it is confusing). However with increasingly delayed release dates and a purchase system relying on “invites”. OnePlus is starting to receive a backlash from the very people who were initially creating the buzz.
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Rooting your device and installing custom ROMs unleashes the true open nature of Android. Customising phone or tablet and having tight control over their functions is what hardcore Android users dream of. Once your device is rooted, it paves way for installing apps that can take advantage of the added permission and access to core software. Here are few of the best apps that will give you Super Powers that non-root users cannot wield.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve been diving into Android development using a semi-realistic project to force me to learn properly. I wrote a rough first version of a read-only Glom database UI for Android, called android-glom. So now there’s a version in gtkmm (C++), Qt (C++), GWT (Java) and Android (Java). It’s a good way to really try out a framework and I’ve really enjoyed doing that with no pressure.
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One of the most common complaints of smartphone ownership is battery life. Big displays and powerful processors conspire together to drain your phone of life before the day is through. You can get a portable battery charger to keep you going (and you probably should for emergencies and travel), but that’s one more device to carry.
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As one of the contributors to Black Duck’s eighth annual Future of Open Source Survey, the industry’s leading indicator of open source software (OSS) industry trends, JFrog was pleased to be able to help show the world the true impact of open source software. This was the first year that we decided to take part in the survey. We felt that it was a natural partnership, since our work revolves around regularly interacting with the OSS community to help create and distribute open source software.
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Ionic offers a free and open source library of mobile-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building HTML5 apps. Ionic has recently announced ngCordova, an open-source collection of AngularJS services and extensions that allow the use of Cordova plugins and native features in hybrid apps.
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There are many useful open-source technologies out there. With all of this competition, it’s critical to make it clear why your particular open-source offering should be considered, and for which needs. That’s the reality any builder of an open-source community needs to adopt right from the start: While participation by developers in an active, viable open-source community will undoubtedly improve their projects, as well as your product’s evolution, getting a community up and running can be a challenge.
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Once again, we’re celebrating the arrival of summer with a list of some of the best open source games available. We’ve updated last year’s list with some new arrivals, as well as getting rid of some of the older games that are no longer under active development. You’ll find arcade, board, casual, puzzle, educational, first-person shooter, music, racing, role-playing, adventure, simulator and strategy games, as a well as a few apps that aren’t really games but are still a lot of fun.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Want to replace Chrome OS with another operating system or partition the storage so that you can create a dual-boot setup?
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has been making much noise about the Firefox OS mobile platform, and new $25 phones that it wants to bring to emerging markets. The company plans to deliver a $25 smartphone by the end of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Now, TIME is pronouncing the move “a brilliant game-changer,” but let’s remember that mobile phones are all about the apps, and even Mozilla officials have stopped short of calling Firefox OS phones “smartphones” in the sense that they run the robust apps that iOS and Android phones do.
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Once upon a time, it was simple. Mozilla, thanks to its open source web browser Firefox, was the feisty David to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Goliath.
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As a reminder, starting with Firefox 29, the classic interface has been replaced by Australis, a new UI with rounded buttons and a bunch of new features. If you don’t like the new Australis interface and want to switch the the classic one, see the instructions in this article.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.
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Talend, which specializes in open source Big Data analytics and business intelligence, has announced that PC and smartphone maker Lenovo is deploying its enterprise software.
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The Hadoop Summit, sponsored by Yahoo and Hortonworks, went on recently in San Jose, California, and it showcased the fact that while enterprise adoption of the Hadoop Big Data crunching platform is moving briskly, there are needs for tools that work alongside Hadoop. For example, Microsoft officials delivered a keynote on “Transforming data into action using Hadoop, Excel, and the Cloud,” which focused on the cloud as a complement for Hadoop, and Excel as a powerful front end for it.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The developers from The Document Foundation have launched the second Release Candidate for the 4.2.5 branch. It’s not as big as the previous version in the series and the final build should be just around the corner.
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CMS
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How has operating in the Portland area worked to your advantage? Portland is a hotbed of technical innovation, and open source in particular. It’s also fast becoming a hub for Drupal, the open source framework we use for many of our projects. Finally, Portland is a magnet for people who care about more than just a paycheck. Our team is made up of folks who care as much, if not more, about the nonprofits we’re helping as the technology we use and user experiences we craft.
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The XOOPS development team have announced the release of version 2.5.7.
XOOPS is an acronym of, “eXtensible Object Oriented Portal System”. It’s a free open source content management systems (CMS), written in PHP.
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BSD
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This will (hopefully) be our last RC before releasing 10.0.2 officially sometime on or around the 23rd. We have addressed or fixed most tickets related to the 10.0.2 release, so if you are still running into any issues, please report them using our Trac database.
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The third Beta version of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now out and ready for download.
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The first point release to the recent DragonFlyBSD 3.8 operating system update is now available.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On July 7th 2014 Peter Schaar (Head of the European Academy for Freedom of Information and Data Protection, former Bundesdatenschutzbeauftrager) will give a talk about technology, law and surveillance in German. The talk will be at the Garching campus of the TUM (U-Bahn stop: U6 Garching Forschungszentrum), in the FMI (Informatics/Mathematics) building, in Hörsaal 3 (lecture hall 3) starting at 16:00. Admission is of course free, registration is not required.
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I was watching an issue of CNN’s “Forensic Files” early this morning when I was surprised to see GIMP on TV. A murder had been committed and the local anthropologist lacked software to compare a skull with a portrait to verify the identity of the victim. A local computer guru was able to use GIMP to compare photographs of the skull with the portrait. That set the police on a course towards solving the crime. It turned out the truck driver did it. DNA from a tooth compared to some surgical evidence confirmed GIMP’s conclusions.
What was interesting is that Forensic Files mentioned that GIMP was available to anyone for a $free download. I liked that. The software licence, GPL, described in generic terms the public can understand got out there.
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Public Services/Government
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In 2012, the Dutch police force – which consists of over 63,000 workers – came to the realization that their disunity was directly impacting their role in Dutch society.
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Public administrations using open source software help make the country more competitive and lay a foundation for a creative economy. Consequently, the South Korean government wants its public administrations to consider free and open source software alternatives, according to its national open source competence centre, presented at a workshop in the capital Seoul, on 3 June.
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The German city of Leipzig is switching to using open source suites of office productivity tools: Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. It expects that in the first five years the anticipated savings will be swallowed by the exit costs associated with the proprietary software used by the city. Starting in 2017, however, the city expects to lower its IT costs by some 100,000 euro, says Lars Greifzu, responsible for marketing and sales at Lecos, the city-owned IT service provider.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Open Source Seed Initiative is trying to preserve some of the world’s seeds from patents and licenses.
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Earth scientists, including remote sensing experts, climate modelers, practitioners, policy makers, and decision makers, have had a hand in furthering and monitoring the open source space. For example, the climate modeling community executes its daily operations of building, testing, and validating climate and Earth system models, many of which today are open source, released under Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, and software packages that involve community contributions from very diverse participants. Similarly, the remote sensing community leverages open source packages, including Python and R, as well as non-open source, but community oriented packages, such as MATLAB, ENVI/IDL, and other software to share code, disseminate it amongst the community of experts, and also to process remote sensing data.
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Open Access/Content
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That’s one among countless opportunities a new digital platform could offer in coming years.
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The medical image community embraced open source as a standard practice back in 2000, with the adoption of the Insight Toolkit (ITK). ITK is sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine and was built as a C++ library. It is the equivalent to a usable encyclopedia of image processing algorithms.
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Open Hardware
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There’s been a ton of excitement around 3D printing over the last few years and it’s definitely justified. While the techniques of 3D printing have been around for many decades, recent cost reductions have thrust 3D printing into wide-spread use. In fact, I designed a custom engagement ring for my wife and had it 3d printed in silver; more on that below.
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Standards/Consortia
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Internet of Things (IoT) market is estimated to generate $ 7.1 trillion in sales by 2020, but its main issue is often considered to be the lack of interoperability between devices belonging to different systems.
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The Unicode 7.0 standard was announced yesterday and adds 2,834 characters.
Unicode 7.0 brings in new currency symbols, historic scripts, and a variety of other symbols — including plenty new emoji characters.
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Science
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Built by Replica Labs, the program uses only a single camera to render the object. As you can see from the video below, the front of the object was very nicely rendered, but because they didn’t spin around the back, the object is “connected” to the background. However, thanks to the printed sheet, they should be able to get a 360-degree view of the object and allow the system to assess bulges, creases and other aspects of 3D objects. Plus it looks cool.
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Health/Nutrition
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The island of Kaua’i, Hawai’i, has become Ground Zero in the intense political battle over genetically modified (GMO) crops in the United States. But the fight isn’t just about the concerns over GMO technology. It’s also about chemical pesticides.
The four transnational corporations that are experimenting with genetically engineered crops on Kaua’i have transformed part of the island into what could be one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of U.S. agriculture.
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Despite efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate polio worldwide, ten countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria, are on red alert as new cases have been detected and fears grow of the virus spreading to neighboring countries.
Yemen is not on the list, but fear over the polio virus has increased amid a regional breakout and concerns that Syrian refugees fleeing to Yemen could reintroduce the virus.
Yemen’s Health Ministry on April 3 launched a comprehensive national campaign to vaccinate children against polio in cooperation with the WHO. The move was to act against fears of polio spreading in Yemen.
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Security
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Hackers who claimed to have compromised the database server of Domino’s Pizza have demanded a ransom of €30,000 to prevent the public disclosure of customer’s data.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The CIA-linked rebel Retired General Khalifa Haftar is continuing his Operation Dignity ostensibly designed to rid Libya of jihadist militias but which also involved an attack on the Libyan parliament.
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In the early days of the Arab Spring, according to a Libyan diplomat, Tunisians would mock Libyans by admonishing their neighbours to the east to keep their heads down so that they, in Tunisia, could have an unobstructed view of the real revolutionaries in Egypt, who had risen up against the long autocracy of Hosni Mubarak.
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According to CNN, the state of Israel is the largest exporter of drones and drone technology in the world. Leading Israeli defense concern Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, counts as its customers the military forces of more than two-dozen nations around the world. These customers buy Israeli drones first and foremost because they’re easier to acquire than American models — where sales can be held up by government restrictions on drone exports. But customers also flock to buy Israeli drones because they work.
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A CYNIC might interrupt here: “Why should the army bother with a coup? It governs Israel anyhow!”
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Eleven years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is on the brink of collapse. We have only ourselves to blame
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It’s predictably pitiful that the Bush-era architects of our Iraq disaster have resurfaced to insist that the current sectarian bloodbath is all President Obama’s fault.
They have no shame. In the words of Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst, these dogs of war precipitated “one of the biggest and costliest mistakes in American history” – and yet here they are, indulged anew in the press, shirking accountability and shifting blame and presuming to offer advice. This spectacle would be hilarious if it were not so nauseating.
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I have written it before and I will write it again: Iraq has made fools of us all.
It made a fool of George W. Bush, who invaded the country to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, only to have American troops get there and discover Iraq had no WMDs.
It made a fool of CIA Director George Tenet, who infamously responded to Bush’s skepticism regarding the WMD reports by jumping up and shouting “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President!”
The war made a fool of most Americans like myself, who believed that the U.S. military needed to invade Iraq to keep their country safe.
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The London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has said that he thinks Tony Blair “should put a sock in it” rather than comment on the situation in Iraq.
Mr Johnson said that when looking at the current situation in Iraq it was important to consider the impact of previous foreign intervention in the country.
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Boris Johnson has described Tony Blair’s argument that the violent insurgency in Iraq has nothing to do with the 2003 invasion as “unhinged”.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Mayor of London says the former prime minister is undermining the case for “serious and effective intervention”.
He described the invasion as a “tragic mistake” and a “misbegotten folly”.
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IF AUSTRALIA wants to assist the United States in Iraq with intelligence reports, that’s fine.
Just keep Prime Minister Tony Abbott away from the phone.
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The crisis in Iraq has brought war back to the US airwaves. But if you were expecting a more robust discussion about US military action this time around, think again. The rule seems to be that if you were wrong in 2003, you’re still an expert in 2014.
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Schultz: “They Should Not Be Treated As Experts, Because They Aren’t”
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The Iraq war was conceived in sin. It was based on the lies of the Bush administration, the most notorious of which were not about “weapons of mass destruction.” More dangerous were the fabricated projections they presented about how: the war would last only a few weeks and our presence would end in six months; it would only cost one to two billion dollars; American soldiers would be greeted as “liberators” with flowers at their feet; and Iraq’s new democracy would be “a beacon for the new Middle East.”
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No one has been held accountable for these actions, which indisputably constitute war crimes. Those responsible include not only George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the previous administration. Both major political parties, the media, the corporations and every American institution are responsible for the lies that have pervaded US policy—both foreign and domestic—for the past decade and a half. All of the criminal policies under Bush—aggressive war, torture—have been continued and deepened by the Obama administration. With its “pivot” to Asia and coup in Ukraine, it is preparing military confrontation with Russia and China and laying the groundwork for a nuclear Third World War.
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Despite the Obama administration’s vow not to put any troops on the ground, Mr. Paul, a libertarian icon, said members of the special forces or the CIA will be sent. He also warned against shipping arms to Iraq and said the Iraq military’s performance to date suggests that a lot of the money invested in it was “wasted or stolen.”
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If we are to solve our myriad domestic problems and revitalize our economy we need to be more selective about our involvement in foreign crises large and small. The president should embrace that truth in his remaining years in office. For starters, that means staying out of Iraq.
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The Iraq War hawks are back. And they have two knee-jerk ways of seeing the convulsions in Iraq where Sunni militants have seized cities from Syria to Baghdad’s doorstep, killing government workers and civilians, and grabbing weapons from a vanishing Iraqi Army.
First, it is always President Obama’s fault; and second, the U.S. must return to war, despite what has been one of the biggest debacles in American military history. Hawks are only happy when we are at war, fueling the military-industrial complex as U.S. soldiers die and platoons of maimed veterans return home to underfunded medical care.
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Walking TED talk and taxi-driver-chatter-upper Tom Friedman is obviously not a big fan of Iraq. Possibly because it doesn’t seem like a place where Apple would extend their global empire; building factories full of low-wage worker bees churning out iToothbrushes or whatever the hell they are going to iMake next in an effort to suck every last dollar out of every last wallet before Steve Jobs returns to Earth to take them all to iHeaven.
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Militants battled Iraqi security forces for control of a strategic northern town on Monday, prompting half the area’s population to flee, as Washington weighed drone strikes against fighters leading the charge.
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Then there’s this from Kristof: “The Democratic narrative is that President Bush started the cascade of dominoes. The problem with that logic is that Obama administration officials were boasting just a couple of years ago about how peaceful and successful Iraq had become because of their fine work.” Again: It’s just “the Democratic narrative,” not an objective fact, that Bush “started the cascade of dominoes.”
Just the latest Kristof embarrassment. And let’s not forget that he strongly urged Obama to bomb Syria last year—which would have aided the ISIS rebels.
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The US already has an aircraft carrier accompanied by two ships with guided-missile capabilities in the Gulf.
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The Obama Administration has been supplying Iraq with their foreign military sales program with a total of $15 Billion in supplying the country in chaos with F-16 jets, drones, tanks, arms, and Apache attack helicopters. Baghdad has been urging the US to deliver military weapons to stabilize its country, but the Iraqi military does not seem sufficiently trained to effectively use such complex military hardware.
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The U.S. military has the capability to conduct air strikes over Iraq within hours. The problem is they don’t know exactly who they are supposed to be targeting.
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Tony Blair came under fierce attack from former Labour cabinet members, some diplomats and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Ashdown after he called for limited military intervention to drive the militant group Isis out of Iraq and restore order in Syria.
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CNN on Sunday night aired a “documentary” about former President George H.W. Bush on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
It was a glowing tribute to the nation’s 41st president filled with testimonials from notables, including President Obama, Bill Clinton and 39 other friends and family members. What was missing was a warning that what viewers were about to see was propaganda masquerading as journalism.
As noted by the always spot-on David Zurawik, the program — titled “41ON41” —was paid for by the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and one of its producers worked as a speechwriter for Bush in the White House.
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That is the way of the world. We have seen this before. In March of 1973, American troops withdrew from South Vietnam, leaving our local allies to take over that war. Two years later the North Vietnamese reached Saigon, as the ISIS has reached the suburbs of Baghdad. Do you think we should have gone back and resumed the war in Southeast Asia? That would have been nuts, and it is nuts to go back into Iraq.
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Nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq to help secure U.S. assets as President Barack Obama nears a decision on an array of options for combating fast-moving Islamic insurgents, including airstrikes or a contingent of special forces.
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The U.S. was deploying extra troops to protect its embassy in Baghdad and mulling air strikes against militants who have seized key cities, amid warnings Tuesday that Iraq has polarized irrevocably.
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Now, our drone-happy President is under the illusion that he can find a “political solution” to overcome a 14-century-old animosity between the Sunnis and the Shiites and force them to compromise and reconcile. Good luck.
And John McCain, with his Napoleon complex proposes to bomb them, as he does in every other troubled corner of the world. Somehow, having spent the majority of his military service as a war prisoner qualifies him to be an expert on and a spokesman for everything military and foreign policy.
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A protest that began a week ago at Boeing Headquarters near Chicago, ended Saturday at the Air National Guard Base at Fort Custer.
The demonstrators want the U.S. to stop using remotely controlled aircraft to carry out military missions around the world.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Given its fragile and unusually rich ecology, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i seems ill-suited as a site for agricultural experiments that use heavy amounts of toxic chemicals. But four transnational corporations — Syngenta, BASF Plant Science, DuPont Pioneer, and Dow AgroSciences — have been doing just those kinds of experiments here for about two decades, extensively spraying pesticides on their GMO test fields. As a result, the landscape on the southwest corner of the island has become one of the most toxic chemical environments in all of American agriculture.
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Lord Stern, the world’s most authoritative climate economist, has issued a stark warning that the financial damage caused by global warming will be considerably greater than current models predict.
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That’s what the U.S. Department of Transportation called shipments of crude oil by rail last month when it issued an emergency order requiring rail companies to notify emergency responders when dangerous shipments of explosive crude oil move through communities.
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An environmental campaigner is killed every week in Brazil.
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Finance
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Parkland Health & Hospital System in Dallas will raise its own minimum wage to $10.25 an hour next month, paying for the increase with money originally devoted to executive bonuses.
The lowest-level employees at the hospital currently make $8.78 an hour, and the increase will give about 230 workers a raise. Those workers were already making more than Texas’s minimum wage, which is the same as the federal $7.25 an hour rate. The move also means that every worker employed by Dallas county, inside and outside the hospital, will make more than $10.25 an hour.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s meeting with Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff served to emphasize common interests. German-Brazilian relations increasingly shape world politics.
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Examples of extreme inequality are becoming easier to find. Progressive leaders have us thinking about revolution. If a revolution is to take place, Americans — especially young Americans— need to know the facts, and they need to know how they’re getting cheated, and they need to get angry. The following should help.
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Bitcoin is no longer decentralised and the cryptocurrency needs fixing if it’s to survive. That’s the warning some cryptocurrency researchers are giving since a single entity, a Bitcoin mining pool called GHash, managed to acquire 51 percent of total network mining power for 12 hours straight at the end of last week.
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Here we go again. For the umteenth time in recent memory, the sanctity of the bitcoin network is facing an existential threat from a large and overly secretive organization. It’s not an exchange or wallet service this time around that has the attention of crypto-currency watchers, but rather a large mining pool, specifically GHash.io, the self-described world’s “#1 Crypto & Bitcoin Mining Pool.”
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He’s known as Bitcoin Jesus in the world of cyber-currencies. Though he can’t promise you heaven, he is offering a haven: a condo in the Caribbean that comes with a new passport and almost zero taxes.
Meet Roger Ver, ex-U.S. citizen, ex-convict, millionaire investor, self-described libertarian and founder of Passports for Bitcoin.com.
The ever-expanding universe of what you can buy with bitcoins includes a hotel stay in Rome, a kimono in Tokyo, and cable TV in the U.S. Ver, a pioneer investor in bitcoin startups, now says he can add citizenship to the list.
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Analysis: Expect hedge fund copycats to begin to buy defaulted sovereign debt and break apart previous settlement packages while a well connected global enforcer group filled with Blackwater thugs collects in mafia fashion
[...]
Another fallout from the ruling could be a rise in additional hedge fund managers imitating Elliott Management and other “vulture funds,” buying debt claims for pennies on the dollar and then demanding payment in full and breaking previous negotiated settlements. What is needed for this hedge fund strategy to succeed is a global enforcer, a more sophisticated version of dog the bounty hunter, to physically repossess debtor assets as Elliott did when it seized an Argentine navel vessel sitting off the shore of Ghana. Or think about those separate holdout investors who attempted to reposes the President of Argentina’s personal jet as it sat refueling in a foriegn airport – with el Presidente inside. The enforcer group must be led by a high level operative familiar with maneuvering government assets to benefit large banks. Eric Holder might be a good person, with potential sponsorship from the large banks and their venture capital arm. This group could include ex CIA working with Blackwater type thugs to collect debt the old school way with a baseball bat. Whatever the future, it might not be kind to governments that grow massive debts – including, surprise, the USA.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and related projects, explained yesterday that it will establish new rules covering paid editing.
The heart of the change is that anyone who is paid to edit the site must “add your affiliation to your edit summary, user page, or talk page, to fairly disclose your perspective,” according to Wikimedia’s explanation of the change. The organization has also published an FAQ on paid editing.
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So why doesn’t Congress agree with the people they represent? Two reasons. The lobbyists have bribed them into protecting the future of cheap labor for their rich clients. The second reason is the fear of the Republican Party and Tea Party that Hispanics would vote for the Democratic Party in elections.
This is the future of the United States of America; protecting the interests of special-interest groups and ignoring the majority of our citizens. The Constitution has died an unacceptable death, and no amount of CPR (Congressional Posturing and Rationalization) can bring it back to life.
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Censorship
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Most businesses that accept advertising—from magazines and television networks to news websites and Facebook—accept ads for condoms. But earlier this year, Melissa White, the CEO of Lucky Bloke Condoms, learned that there’s one major exception: Twitter.
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Privacy
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One of the UK’s top spies has said that the country reckons spying on British folks’ Facebook posts and tweets is legal because they’re classed as “external communications” – though he wouldn’t confirm outright that it did so.
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Mass surveillance of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and even Google searches, is permissible because they are “external communications”, according to the government’s most senior security official.
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One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.
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One year ago, Glenn Greenwald began reporting on the leaked documents provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Together, Snowden and Greenwald have exposed vast government programs of domestic and international surveillance that threaten civil liberties here and around the world. As a result of these shocking revelations, Snowden has been stranded in Russia, facing espionage charges, and Greenwald has become the target of media hit jobs questioning whether he had the right to report on these spy programs and the erosion of our civil liberties.
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Along with Edward Snowden, the NSA, and wars, drones are the hottest topic in national security these days.
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State Hillary Clinton angered the entire nation of Germany by refusing to support a “no spy agreement” with one of the USA’s most supportive allies.
The Voice of Russia reports that, “Clinton, meanwhile, said she understood Germany’s anger at revelations that the US Natural Security Agency (NSA) had listened into Merkel’s mobile phone as part of its large scale surveillance of electronic communications in Germany, America’s close ally.”
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Moreover, Access My Info is based on an open platform. As a result, it can be reconfigured to send the same kinds of legal requests for information to all kinds of companies: credit card companies, banks, stores, or even car companies.
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One year ago this month, Americans learned that their government was engaged in secret dragnet surveillance, which contradicted years of assurances to the contrary from senior government officials and intelligence leaders.
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In a broad legal rationale for collecting information from Internet use by its citizens, the British government has reportedly asserted the right to intercept communications that go through services like Facebook, Google and Twitter that are based in the United States or other foreign nations, even if they are between people in Britain.
The British position is described in a draft summary of a report to be released Tuesday by Privacy International and other advocacy groups.
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A California federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to produce top secret documents requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation related to the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Americans’ call data so that the court can review if they are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
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Leopold asked the NSA about its variations on the phrase “collect it all” (a.k.a. former NSA head Keith Alexander’s personal motto), including “sniff it all,” “process it all,” “exploit it all,” “partner it all” and “know it all.” As is its particular idiom, the NSA Glomared all over the response letter.
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An appeals court has overruled a groundbreaking decision by a Chicago judge to let lawyers for an alleged terrorist see classified surveillance evidence.
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For those people who still do not believe we have crossed a terrible line into a Post-Constitutional state, here’s another chance to repent before we all go to hell.
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) in-house watchdog has demanded that the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) turn over all information it has collected related to abuses and mismanagement at VA medical facilities, according to a subpoena delivered to POGO May 30.
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When the Espionage Act passed in 1917, the Federal government left no proverbial stone unturned, using all communication channels available at their disposal to secretly monitor as many citizens of the United States proper as they could, given the technology of the time.
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Most of us don’t like the idea of intelligence agencies or law enforcement accessing our data stored in the cloud; that doesn’t mean your data is, by default, being accessed, but it’s likely a matter of principle. As NSA spying scandal revelations rolled out over the last year, many businesses and individuals decided they don’t want their data stored in the US. Countries want their cloud data to be stored locally in hopes of keeping it safe from US snooping. Whether you regard that as a privacy issue or a security issue, one security expert basically says, “Get over it.”
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Google’s response to “erosion of privacy” has been to “encrypt everything…to protect people’s interests.” A top Google executive recently spoke to DW and will join the Global Media Forum on June 30 via video link.
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“We believe in transparency here, you have a right to know what the police are up to in your country.” – Camden Police Chief Scott Tomson
On VICE News, Vikram Gandhi went to Camden, New Jersey to preview the latest technologies and strategies that are being employed to help local law enforcement in the long fought, and long failing, War on Drugs here in America.
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This policy decision is likely the result of a penalty imposed in 2011 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that requires the social media mammoth to submit to 20 years of privacy audits conducted by the agency. Another provision of the penalty mandates that any new features offered by Facebook must be “opt in.”
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While the company’s technology has already been available to international customers, Levy tells me he’s hearing growing concerns from companies who’d like their cloud infrastructure to be hosted more locally. You can thank Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks for that.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is making his ‘telepresence’ felt at events across the world with a telepresence robot that transmits a live feed from his computer to a roaming robot.
Just over a year since Snowden first revealed the extent to which the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on not just US citizens but people across the world, the man is now looking to end his exile in Russia through the means of telepresence.
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When journalist Glenn Greenwald spoke via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago in June last year, it was just three weeks after he had begun reporting on the leaks provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the massive scope of government surveillance.
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Germany’s foreign intelligence agency officially lifted the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets Friday, acknowledging that half a dozen facilities around the country are in fact spy stations as anyone with Internet access could already figure out.
The Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German acronym BND, maintained the facade for decades that it had nothing to do with sites bearing cryptic names such as “Ionosphere Institute.” But amateur sleuths long suspected their true identities and posted them on websites such as Wikipedia.
The subterfuge wasn’t helped by the fact that some sites sport unmistakable signs of spy activity, like the giant golf ball-shaped radomes in Bad Aibling, near Munich until now, the “Telecommunications Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces.”
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Demeter considers himself a foe of both Democrats and Republicans.
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9. The Smoking Gun tape as the coup de grace. The release of the Smoking Gun tape, among 64 recordings that Nixon was forced to surrender by the Supreme Court, ended the Watergate drama. The tape showed Nixon ordering a cover-up of the break-in right after it happened in June 1972.
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Here’s a way to plant false evidence — call records, locations, etc — on your smart phone. I have no idea how good this will be. Presumably it will be an arms race between programs like this and programs that harvest data from your phone.
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Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service.
“Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment,” Stockman wrote on Friday.
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EFF recently kicked off our second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which we’ve launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. In just the first few days, we’ve seen over 600 new or expanded Tor nodes—more than during the entire first Tor Challenge.
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To mark the one-year anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the PEN Center has invited a number of journals to participate in a collaborative project on the theme of living in a surveillance society. For the American Reader’s contribution, AR editors Alyssa Loh, Uzoamaka Maduka, Jac F. Mullen, and Jonathon Kyle Sturgeon conducted a wide-ranging discussion on surveillance and its impact on narrative, free expression, and the creative arts. The edited transcript of this conversation, found below, also appears on the PEN Center website, along with the full suite of articles produced by the multi-journal collaboration.
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To many people, the design of email is fundamentally broken when it comes to security and privacy. That’s the impetus behind projects like the Dark Mail Technical Alliance, LEAP Encryption Access Project, and efforts to make PGP more accessible such as Mailpile, OpenPGP.js and Google’s recently announced Chrome extension, End-To-End. One issue is the contents of email headers. With all the recent talk about long-term technical solutions to enforce privacy by default, here is one thing that all mail server administrators and email providers should do to improve the security risks associated with communicating via email.
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Across the whole of America, you are continuously being monitored by local police forces using a secretive technology without any warrant, while you are completely oblivious to this and thinking that it’s just the NSA, according to media reports.
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Former CIA Director David Petraeus once stated that WiFi connected devices, such as appliances commonly found inside many homes, will “transform the art of spying.” Petraeus also said that spies will be capable of monitoring Americans without going inside the home or perhaps even acquiring a warrant. He went on to state that remote control radio frequency identification devices, “energy harvesters,” sensor networks, and small embedded severs all connected to an internet network will be all that is necessary for clandestine intelligence gathering.
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Civil Rights
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A few of us remember when a young man named James Risen joined The Journal Gazette fresh out of Northwestern’s journalism school and was a reporter here in 1978-79. He did some good reporting. In a yellowed clip file, there are photos of him using a drill and a welder for an article he did about working on the International Harvester Scout assembly line. And he got married at Trinity Lutheran Church while he was here, to his college sweetheart, Penny Blank, who was an editor at The News-Sentinel. They had their reception across the street at the Women’s Club.
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Ask five of your friends what “rendition” means and chances are you will not get a clear answer.
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A month ago, a federal court judge, Gladys Kessler, delivered a historic ruling on Guantánamo, ordering the government to stop force-feeding a hunger striking prisoner, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, and to release to his lawyers videos of his force-feeding and “forcible cell extractions,” whose existence had only recently been discovered by one of his lawyers. She also ordered the government to release his medical records, and to “file a list of all current Standard Operating Procedures/Protocols directly addressing enteral feeding and/or the use of a restraint chair at Guantánamo Bay.”
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I’ll bet you didn’t know that June is “torture awareness month” thanks to the fact that, on June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment went into effect internationally. In this country, however, as a recent Amnesty International survey indicated, Americans are essentially living in Torture Unawareness Month, or perhaps even Torture Approval Month, and not just in June 2014 but every month of the year.
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Senator Diane Feinstein, the head of the US Senate Intelligence Committee says she believes a secret report into the CIA’s extreme actions against terror suspects post 9 11 will be made public within weeks.
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To reconnect to the central question here of why protest is stumped in Pakistan, despite its critical economic and developmental challenges, it may be appropriate to end with the observation that it is this role of religion that used to be a subject of interest for an older generation that has now been sidelined and considered irrelevant by many post 9/11 scholar-activists.
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Noam Chomsky, whom I interviewed last Thursday at his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has influenced intellectuals in the United States and abroad in incalculable ways. His explications of empire, mass propaganda, the hypocrisy and pliability of the liberal class and the failings of academics, as well as the way language is used as a mask by the power elite to prevent us from seeing reality, make him the most important intellectual in the country. The force of his intellect, which is combined with a ferocious independence, terrifies the corporate state—which is why the commercial media and much of the academic establishment treat him as a pariah. He is the Socrates of our time.
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As you approach the Aboriginal tent embassy on the Block in Redfern, inner city Sydney, you see the sacred fire burning within a large circle marked on the ground, serving to cleanse the area. Some ten metres up from the fire, at the edge of the Block, the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) has erected a sign that reads: “Warning. Private Property.”
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A federal judge demanded access to key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to domestic surveillance so she can decide whether they are fit for public release.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the case at hand under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011, seeking access to opinions in which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found some of the National Security Agency’s surveillance unconstitutional.
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LORD Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent financed by his wealthy friends, the author of a new book claims.
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By day, we were an embassy family, raising our kids in foreign cultures and foreign languages. Our children’s lives were fairly normal: schools, parties, trips. But my night job was as a CIA operative — a second life my kids couldn’t know about until they were in their mid-teens. We needed to cut them in on the secret when they were old enough to handle the responsibility of keeping it to themselves but still young enough that they hadn’t stumbled across information that might disclose my true mission and then, unthinkingly, share it with their friends. Operatives try to find just the right age, when a kid’s judgment can be trusted not to compromise any operational cover, and by extension put their parents or their sources at risk.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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UNITED STATES SENATORS have introduced legislation to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from allowing internet fast lanes.
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That might seem perverse, since it means that Chilean mobile users must now pay to access those services, but it is nonetheless exactly what governments that have mandated net neutrality need to do. That’s because providing these services for free makes it much harder for newcomers — specifically new services from local startups — to compete with established ones that are provided free. Indeed, it’s striking how Facebook, for example, has kept its head down during the net neutrality debates — doubtless conscious that it has benefitted hugely from these schemes that run counter to net neutrality principles. As Vox wrote recently…
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Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor and author who coined the phrase “network neutrality,” is running for lieutenant governor in New York.
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DRM
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With the traditional family dinner and other pastimes on the verge of extinction thanks to an array of distracting hand-held devices, mobile applications are now available for parents to remotely bloc access to smartphones and tablets.
Are you tired of your child behaving like Pavlov’s salivating dog, mindlessly jumping for some smartphone or tablet every time it rings, sings or vibrates, crashing the solemn family dinner, or disrupting homework time?
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The big news this week is an important leak detailing what the European Commission will offer the US in the fields of services and investment. It’s super fresh: the document is currently being circulated to the governments of the EU’s Member States, and comments remain open until 30 June, so we are gaining important insights into real-time discussions that have hitherto been completely hidden from us.
That makes this leak doubly important: not just for its content, but also for the fact that it took place at all. It shows that despite the European Commission’s attempt to keep key negotiating documents out of the public debate, the Brave New World of leaking whistleblowers means that we will get to see some of them anyway. The only difference is that the Commission looks arrogant and high-handed by refusing to release them officially.
The leak takes the form of three PDF files – unfortunately they are scans, not searchable documents. They were leaked to the European Federation of Public Service Unions, which apparently represents some 265 unions and 8 million public service workers.
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Copyrights
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YouTube will remove music videos by artists such as Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead, because the independent labels to which they belong have refused to agree terms with the site.
Google, which owns YouTube, has been renegotiating contracts as it prepares to launch a music subscription service.
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We’ve written a bunch about the City of London Police* and their extrajudicial campaign against “piracy” by trying to scare web hosting and domain registrar firms into taking down websites based on nothing more than the City of London Police’s say so. However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet…
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06.16.14
Posted in Patents at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Further analysis of Amazon’s infamous “Studio Arrangement” patent and some thoughts from Linus Torvalds
A
new article about Amazon explains how it got a patent on one of the most basic things humanly conceivable — something that even a small child can come up with.
The patent examiner sat down at her desk and pulled up the next item on her examination docket. Patent application 13/292,359. “Studio Arrangement.”
Amazon has many outrageous patents and the above is just one of the latest — a patent which we mentioned here before. It is quite noteworthy that Mr. Torvalds, who has been against software patents for as long as we know (although his name is on some patents), says that this is “bullshit”, but the system is hard to change (that’s true). To quote a new article about it:
Torvalds recovered his plucky declamatory nature when asked about patents:
It’s all bullshit, sane people know it’s bullshit, but making real change is difficult. Politically, the US patent system also tends to help US companies, because once you get into a court of law, it’s not about the law any more (and it’s certainly not about the patent, which is crap and which neither the judge, the lawyers, nor the jury will understand anyway), and it’s much easier to sell as an “us vs. them” story.
How do I love patents? Let me count the ways.
The recent Tesla nonsense showed some changing perceptions around patents and we are eager to cover the issue more often in the coming months. The focus will be on scope, not trolls. Large corporations prefer to shift focus to the latter because it suits them better and ensures that no real reform is ever attained. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Both Linux and the BSDs are free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems. They even use much of the same software — these operating systems have more things in common than they do differences. So why do they all exist?
There are more differences than we can cover here, especially philosophical differences about the way one should build an operating system and license it. This should help you understand the basics, though.
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Desktop
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Two years ago, Samsung made the first great Chromebook. It was thin, and light, and had good battery life, but most of all it was a different kind of computer. Chrome OS wasn’t like Windows, which can do absolutely everything on earth including a laundry list of things that only confuse and overwhelm most users. It was designed to be simple, functional, and focused. “It’s just a web browser” wasn’t a problem, it was progress.
As Samsung releases its successor, the Chromebook 2, things have changed. Cheap laptops can be even thinner, even faster, even more powerful, even longer-lasting; the Chromebook 2 is all four. The opportunity has grown, too: these 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch laptops enter a market in which most of what most people do all day lives inside a web browser anyway. We can do basic word processing and number-crunching with Google Docs or Office Online; we store all our files in Dropbox or OneDrive. Chrome OS feels more native than ever, but in a very real way we’ve caught up to Google’s vision more than it’s caught up to us.
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While users were uncertain at first about the concept of using a Web-based operating system, Chrome OS morphed into something far more usable and appealing to the average computer user since it was first released in 2009. Not only are computer users more comfortable with accessing cloud applications and storing their data in the cloud, but Google has added a number of features that make it convenient to use Chrome OS productively.
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Server
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The Linux Foundation’s OpenDaylight project for promoting open source software-defined networking (SDN) continues to grow. Extreme Networks (EXTR), Flextronics and Oracle (ORCL) are now among the initiative’s members.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds will most likely be releasing the Linux 3.16-rc1 kernel today, now that the merge window has been open for two weeks and the feature pull requests are coming to an end. Here’s a concise look at the new features and improvements to be found with the Linux 3.16 kernel.
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Dr. Greg Wettstein and his dog Izzy have announced the release of the Hugepage Block Device Driver for the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest OpenGL 4 extension being enabled for the Nouveau “NVC0″ Gallium3D driver is GL_ARB_viewport_array.
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Version 1.3.2 of Intel’s VA-API driver for open-source video encode/decode using modern Intel HD Graphics GPUs has been released.
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Applications
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Unlike Google Drive and may other Windows and Mac friendly tools, Copy treats Linux well. Copy provides a native Linux UI to sync folders to its cloud storage.
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Synergy project was started way back in 2001. It is used in situations where several PCs are used together, with a monitor connected to each, but are to be controlled by one user. The user needs only one keyboard and mouse on the desk. Just a few weeks ago, Synergy version 1.5 (stable) was released. Though Synergy was Windows only earlier, it is now cross-platform and works seamlessly on Mac OSX and Linux as well.
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It is hard to keep up with the weather at times. If you are living in a place where the weather is unpredictable, knowing if it is going to rain or not makes a huge difference to you. That’s why you need to keep yourself updated about the weather from time to time.
If you are using Ubuntu or other Linux distro, this isn’t hard to do. Linux offers a plethora of options for users to keep an eye on the weather. Here is a selection of some of the best weather applications for your Linux desktop.
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One area on the Linux desktop that remains surprisingly conservative is email – email clients and webmail alike. While most if not all of the formats and protocols used are true open standards, you would think there could be a broad range of clients and webmails for Linux out there. Let me correct that: webmails are in a league of their own and I will not enter the webmail vs. email clients discussion. Many things are changing in that field, but one must differentiate between the actual email service, like GMail, your corporate mail, the webmail software (Roundcube, Horde, Citadel, Squirrel, etc.), the groupware platform (Kolab, Blue Mind, OBM, eGroupWare, and many others) and what lands and gets edited, if you’ve chosen so, in your email client, meaning the actual software program running distinctly from your web browser and handling anything from emails to calendars and contacts. Today I will focus on the email clients on the Linux desktop. I do not pretend that my list is exhaustive; it is but a personal selection; I have also excluded email client such as Mutt, mu4e, VM, RMail, Ner, Wanderlust, etc. as I will only be speaking of graphical email clients on Linux, at least the ones I’ve tried.
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I won’t spend too much time talking about trek. The game has been around since the practical dawn of the technology age, and if you haven’t played it yet, you’d do better to try it than listen to me yap about it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Copy is a cloud-based file storage, sync and sharing platform, similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, which has clients available for Linux (including Raspberry Pi), Windows, Mac OS X as well as iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
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SysPeek is a system monitor AppIndicator that displays CPU, memory, swap and disk usage as well as network traffic.
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Games
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Aspyr Media have quite clearly proven themselves at porting to Linux with a port that works this well, but the bigger news is that they may have more to come.
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War Thunder contains aircraft, vehicles, and ships from the pre-World War 2 era to the Korean war and maps are largely based upon real battles in the past. War Thunder so far in its open beta period has been a highly praised online combat game and now it looks like it’s coming over to Linux, per the YouTube video embedded below.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Standard Linux circulations regularly default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these give clients an instinctive and attractive desktop, and also offering a verity of media inbuilt softwares, system programs, games, utilities, web development tools, programming tools and so on. These two desktops center all the more on giving clients a cutting edge computing environment with all the accessories emphasized in Windows OS, instead of minimizing the measure of system resources they require.
If you are using Ubuntu (or other) and exhausted of utilizing Unity desktop constantly? At that point, you ought to look at different choices accessible that can swap unity for you. I have gathered 7 desktop environments that are great and you beyond any doubt would need to utilize them once you are finished with this article.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Below is a pop-up for a new message – now granted not much of a change BUT the work is being done on the layout of the thing. Essentially the Icons size in comparison with the Header and the subheader.
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You may have heard that KDE Plasma Next won’t support anymore the old X11,Xembed-based systemtray icons.
(More information here)
Years ago, we developed a nicer, model/view based alternative in which is the shell that actually draws the systemtray icon, allowing better integration with the workspace, it’s a specification that is now shared between KDE and Ubuntu Unity.
All KDE applications use it already, Qt4/Qt5-only application will use it depending on a small patch (and soon Qt5 will do out of the box)
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Some features take time to implement, and it’s great to see them finally working. Bug fixes and incremental improvements, on the other hand, are quickier to do but less exciting when taken individually. It’s only the sum of many fixes and small improvements that can make a difference.
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I’m writing from a warm and sunny Berlin, having attended my first Qt Contributors Summit. It is always nice to meet the Qt developer team, and to get a chance to hang out with the Pelagicorians from our Munich office.
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Starting from today, there is a new category in kde-look.org explicitly for Plasma 5 QML2-based plasmoids.
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Kglobalaccel is a service which is supposed to get started through dbus. My installation prefix is “/opt/kf5″ and so the service file gets installed to “/opt/kf5/share/dbus-1/services/org.kde.kglobalaccel.service” – that looks fine. After some investigation I figured out that dbus-daemon looks in $XDG_DATA_DIRS as a search path. Our startkde script adjusts $XDG_DATA_DIRS to include /opt/kf5/share before launching the dbus daemon. But when looking at the environment of the running dbus-daemon one could see the problem: it doesn’t use the set environment variable. The reason is obvious: dbus is nowadays started before the desktop environment gets started.
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During the first week of our Kickstarter campaign we collected more than 6500 eur, which is about 43% of the goal. That is quite a good result, so we decided to start implementing the features right now, even though the campaign is not finished yet 
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It was about a month when we last updated Krita Lime. And it is not because we had leisure time and did nothing here 
In reverse, we got so many features merged into master so it became a bit unstable for a short period of time. And now we fixed all the new problems so you can see a nice build of Krita with lots of shiny features!
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After the successful release of Krita 2.8, the advanced open source digital painting application, the we’re kicking off the work on the next release with a kickstarter campaign!
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Running a kickstarter campaign can be quite exhausting! But that doesn’t mean that coding stops — here is one new Krita 2.9 feature that we prepared earlier: painting with exposure and gamma on HDR images. HDR (high-dynamic-range) images have greater dynamic range of light than ordinary images. If you make one with your camera, you’ll combine a set of images made from the same subject at different exposures. If you want to create a HDR image from scratch, you can create one in Krita by selecting the 16 or 32 bit float RGB colorspace.
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We’re glad to announce that the contest has been a success with over 50 submitted wallpapers.
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At some point or other 23 of the 32 nations have had a Linux distribution. As you can see by the list I have had to name some discontinued distros and this is the nature of Linux.
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Screenshots
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Arch Family
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I have used a lot of rolling release distros in last 5 years, but, for production purpose, till recently, I mostly relied on only a few – Linux Mint, Debian and Ubuntu LTS. Primarily because the so-called “install it once only” promise hardly worked for most of the rolling release distros and they inevitably break or become unbootable after a couple of major upgrades. However, my experience with Manjaro Linux and Chakra Linux in the past 12 months have successfully changed that impression. These two Arch based distros survived 4 major upgrades and still running great, even with a whole lot of customization and niche packages that I installed.
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Red Hat Family
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Anyway. So yeah, the CentOS Project has been working feverishly AND they have been, unlike in the past, doing everything out in the open… transparency it is called. Yesterday they announced they had the packages building. Then someone on the centos-devel mailing list said they had a Docker CentOS 7 container image. I gave that a try. Then the centos-devs said they had the first build attempt completed although they have NOT gone through all of the packages yet and removed Red Hat’s branding… so it’s a very preliminary build. Then they announced they had a network install CD (~ 341MB). I gave that a try and it worked great.
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Governments should invest in open source cloud to avoid getting trapped with a vendor and their offerings when they need to meet policy requirements or the time comes to update to new technology, Red Hat says.
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At a time when Microsoft’s developer release cycle is markedly rapid (and arguably quite impressive), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 development is now strategically targeted to be a “consumable OS” full of simplicity.
“It’s the opposite of OpenStack, where new releases come to market every six months,” said Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat Inc., open-source OS developer. “Only hypercritical changes merit new version numbers. Otherwise, you’d drive IT guys crazy updating their deployments.”
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Fedora
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Never ever trust someone that will say that Rawhide works flawlessly (or the opposite!), and that’s because Fedora is a very famous OS for giving two kinds of experiences. From perfection to the totally catastrophe. A small bug is enough to get you there.
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Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for June 10th, 2014:
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It’s been more than a year since I’ve had a successful build of Chromium that I was willing to share with anyone else, but last night I pushed out a Fedora 20 x86_64 build of the current stable Chromium. Here’s where you can go and get it:
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Debian Family
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For some tests the performance doesn’t deviate much between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD given that both have a similar user-land. For our many source-based computational tests, the main factor to point out is that both GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD versions of 7.5 Wheezy have GCC 4.7 while the latest testing versions of these open-source operating systems are using the GCC 4.8 stable series.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A while back it was decided to create a separate Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn ISO running Unity8 on Mir, including the new core apps…
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
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This is just a quick note to say that for the next 7 days I will be releasing a number of Lubuntu based articles to celebrate the release of Lubuntu 14.04.
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Windows XP is dead. Some people may not be aware of this fact but I’m telling you now “That parrot is dead”.
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on April 8th 2014 but what does end of support mean? Does it mean it doesn’t work anymore?
Actually, Windows XP will continue to work perfectly well for quite some time but the trouble is that any remaining security holes will remain unplugged and that leaves a huge opportunity for the cyber criminals to exploit any individual or organisation that remains on that platform.
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A start-up is working on a Raspberry Pi-based network attached storage device that can be used to set up a private cloud.
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DoodleBorg is] running off six motorcycle starter motors. It’s using mini all-terrain vehicle wheels and has a custom chassis made out of six-millimetre thick steel that has been laser cut. It has two motorcycle batteries, and six of our wonderful PicoBorg reverse control boards which are capable of five amps per channel, ten amps in total. We’ve got them connected up, one per motor so we can individually control each of the wheels. This means we can make alternate wheels go in all sorts of directions if we want them to. There are some big crazy switches on the front that serve emergency power-offs too.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Now Samsung’s announcing its newest tablet line, the Galaxy Tab S, available in 8.4-inch and 10.5-inch sizes. The Galaxy Tab S models are thinner, lighter, and faster than earlier efforts, and they have new Super AMOLED displays that Samsung says easily outperform their LCD-equipped counterparts. But one major thing remains the same: Samsung is very much still trying to beat the iPad.
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Tizen is being heralded as the “OS of Everything”, and you can really see it in action on the Samsung Gear 2, Smart camera’s, and Smart TV’s . We have previously mentioned the Tizen based Samsung WW9000 washing machine, but here are some more details regarding some of its features.
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At the Tizen Developer Conference, Onstar a General Motors subsidiary company, were showing off their car remote control solution, but with a little twist as it was working on a Samsung Gear 2, to control a lovely looking Chevrolet.
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Android
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KitKat made the best of Android accessible to more people than ever, but what will the next version do?
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Android/Linux is growing rapidly in Kenya while Series 40 is dropping fast.
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Mesosphere has closed new funding to expand the open-source Apache Mesos software for managing large compute clusters
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Perforce has released an open source version of P4CLI, its command-line interface to the company’s P4D versioning engine. In line with this release, the firm has also open sourced a version of P4Web, its web-based versioning client.
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Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Jim Thompson, CTO, TCIS, Unisys and L.N.V Samy, VP, Engineering, GTC, Unisys, about the firm’s operations in India.
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Open source is more than a type of software license. If you believe GitHub, it’s also a successful paradigm for collaborative software development. Will enterprise dev shops join the party?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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I just accidentally discovered a feature I didn’t even know existed. What feature? I’ll call it the Firefox Resolution Tester feature although I’m sure that is NOT the real name of it. I don’t know how long it has been a feature of Firefox… maybe for a long time… but like I said… I just found it in Firefox 30. How do you access it? Hit CONTROL-SHIFT-m. That’s it.
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Finally, Mozilla team officially released Firefox 30 for all major operating systems and the binary packages are now available for download. This release is not a major release, but still comes with few features, including support for Linux version of GStreamer 1.0.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Another scalable database platform for the OpenStack cloud has entered the open source fold. This week, Tesora made its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) software available to the open source community.
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One briefing highlighted an HP Labs project aimed at reinventing enterprise computer architecture. The other briefing highlighted how HP is going “all in” on OpenStack. The OpenStack press briefing was the more important one.
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Hewlett-Packard’s Atalla division rolled out new encryption offerings designed to make encryption easier and faster to deploy on-site and in the cloud.
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Does a day go past without a Hadoop update right now? — clearly not.
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CMS
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Healthcare
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The nation’s largest open source EHR system has received a substantial boost to its code base. The Indian Health Service (IHS), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services, has contributed its open source EHR technology, Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS), to the VistA code base hosted by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA).
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service (IHS) has contributed an open-source version of its Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) to the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) Technical Journal. This will complement the current open-source EHR capabilities of the VistA code base now hosted by OSEHRA.
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Funding
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In early June the open source search business arguably came of age when Elasticsearch closed on a $70M tranche of Series C investment funding. Elasticsearch is supported by both an open source search community and a commercial search business. In November 2012 the company received $10M in a Series A investment funding which was followed by a further $24M in a Series B funding in February 2013 — making the total of investment funding now $104M.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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GCC 4.9 was released at the end of April so this weekend I ran some fresh compiler benchmarks of the latest GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot to see if there’s been any performance improvements thus far in the 4.10 development cycle, although GCC 4.10 will not be released until 2015.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open science is one way today to deliver science to societies around the world. And, it can include open education, open research, open source, and open culture.
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Years ago, in a graduate computer science course, I was tasked with implementing an algorithm for “variational image segmentation by motion detection.” The algorithm was, as they say, a doozy. Tersely described over the course of half a dozen papers, it had dozens of subroutines, which when implemented grew to span thousands of lines of MATLAB code. But there was one subroutine, mysteriously called the “numerical upgrading” routine, whose description was mysteriously absent from the scientific record. Without this small but vital routine, the whole marvelous image segmenting machine just sputtered and ground to a halt. Crash! Panic! Woe.
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We live in an age where almost anything can be created – or replicated – for a fraction of the cost of a commercial product. For a couple of grad students wishing for some brain signal recording equipment back in 2011, their wish became a matter of original creation, eventually resulting in an open source community for neural technology and a device which is made at a fraction of the cost of its next least-expensive competitor.
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Health/Nutrition
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A German farmer has revealed shocking GMO company tactics to silence him in an exclusive interview with RT Op-Edge.
German dairy farmer, Gottfried Glöckner, has told William Engdahl about attempted blackmail, character assassination and, ultimately, wrongful imprisonment he suffered when he refused to back off his charges that the Anglo-Swiss GMO company, Syngenta, had provided him with highly toxic GMO Maize seeds that ruined his prize dairy herd and his land.
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Security
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“Could we – could I – make the gadgets that the agency uses to monitor and locate mobile phones, tap USB and Ethernet connections, maintain persistent malware on PCs, communicate with malware across air gaps, and more, by just using open source software and hardware?” he asked himself.
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Only 48 percent of respondents to a recent survey indicated that they test or validate third-party software to ensure it’s not vulnerable to SQL injection.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Western intervention has been the curse of the Middle East for over 100 years. The cure for the crisis in Iraq is not more intervention, says John Rees, but ending this disastrous history of meddling.
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Secret prisons, drone bases, surveillance stations, offices where extraordinary rendition is planned: Trevor Paglen takes pictures of the places that the American and British governments don’t want you to know even exist
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NBC and ABC’s Sunday news shows turned to discredited architects of the Iraq War to opine on the appropriate U.S. response to growing violence in Iraq, without acknowledging their history of deceit and faulty predictions.
This week a Sunni Iraqi militant group (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) seized control of several Iraqi cities and is focusing their sights on taking control of Baghdad and the rest of the country. The United States is still debating a response to the escalating violence, and has reportedly moved an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf.
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More than 750 cutouts of policemen have been bought by UK forces at a cost of more than $85,000. The 2D police constable cutouts are aimed at deterring shoplifters who would mistake them for real officers from afar…but no one knows if they really work.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The waters surrounding the Balearic party island are a world heritage site – and conservationists, politicians and tourist chiefs are adamant that plans to drill in the sea must be stopped
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Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes talks about her new book, which imagines that current inertia in the face of climate change will puzzle academics for centuries to come
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Finance
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In the sweltering mid-day Washington, DC heat yesterday, a small group of members of Congress and community leaders gathered outside of the capitol building.
Solemnly, as if at a funeral, they read a handful of stories written by a few of the more than 3 million Americans who are longterm unemployed (a category defined as being unemployed for six months or more and still looking for work). Since December 2013, when Congress let emergency unemployment compensation, or EUC, expire—a program that offers minimal financial support to the longterm unemployed—they have been without the help they need to get back on their feet.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.
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Civil Rights
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One man was crushed to death after getting caught between a conveyor system in December 2013 while sorting packages, the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration said yesterday. OSHA cited five companies for violations at the Amazon facility in Avenel, New Jersey, including the contractor responsible for the sorting operation, and four staffing agencies that hired temporary employees to work at the warehouse. Amazon wasn’t cited by the government for the death.
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According to the mainstream Western version of events, thousands of Chinese university students began their sit-in protest demanding democracy and transparency from the Communist government in April and into May 1989 in the huge Tiananmen Square, directly across from the historic Forbidden City edifice in central Beijing. They defiantly faced off against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army. On May 20, 1989, the CCP imposed martial law and ordered truckloads of soldiers to Beijing to take back the square from protesters. The Western account has it that then, on June 3 into June 4, PLA soldiers opened fire and killed “up to 1000 student protesters.”
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A federal judge today ordered the Department of Justice to hand over key opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the “FISA court”) so the judge can directly review whether information about mass surveillance was improperly withheld from the public.
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To be in Brazil for the World Cup should be every football fan’s dream, but as exhilarating as it is, it’s impossible for any sane supporter not to feel the competition has been tainted.
[...]
According to Samy, police are using a new law aimed at organised crime to hold and question individuals. “These activists are being accused of being part of a criminal organisation. The law passed last year created special procedures for crimes involving three or more people, and was aimed at organised crime, but it is now being used to criminalise, and eventually punish, protesters.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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WordPress has had it with copyright holders who abuse the DMCA takedown process to censor perfectly legal content. Through a lawsuit they demand $10,000 in compensation to cover the damage they, and one of their users suffered through a false DMCA takedown notice.
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If you’ve ever downloaded something via BitTorrent, odds are you’ve used (or seen) an app called Vuze. It’s one of the internet’s most prolific BitTorrent clients, and it’s used for downloading countless terabytes of copyright-protected material every day. The developers of Vuze have hit back at the online piracy epidemic, condemning copyright theft and promoting legal torrents.
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Send this to a friend
06.15.14
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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If you’ve not yet tried Linux Voice, you’re missing out on the most in-depth tutorials, features, reviews and interviews in the GNU/Linux and Free Software world. Every issue is packed with 115 pages of content from the most experienced writers in the business, and we donate 50% of our profits back to the community….
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My how the times have changed. At one point, HP and Microsoft were sharing friendship bracelets and having slumber parties. In fact, over the last decade, HP was a major player with Microsoft. Those days are gone. The juggernaut that was once Microsoft is slowly toppling and companies like HP are seeing the writing on the wall. That writing includes the likes of Android, Linux, iOS — platforms perfect for mobile and embedded systems.
To that end, Hewlett Packard has decided to kick Microsoft to the curb and develop their own operating system that will power all of their future devices. In particular, HP is working on a device they call “The Machine.” This new device will be made up of several new technologies — including a new type of memory — and will run a new operating system based on…
Wait for it…
Linux.
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A recurring Linux joke / horror story is running the command rm –rf /. Imagine if it actually happened? What would or could you do to recover?
Linux specialist Kyle Kelley recently decided to see what happened if he launched a new Linux server and ran rm –rf / as root.
This command is the remove (delete) command, with the flags –rf indicating to run recursively down all folders and subfolders, and to force deletion even if the file is ordinarily read-only. The / indicates the command is to run from the top-most root directory in Linux.
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Desktop
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That system is Wine, a software “go-between” that lets users run Windows applications without a copy of Microsoft Windows. Wine isn’t an operating system in its own right, just a layer that sits on top of free systems like Linux. It doesn’t run every Windows program but offers seamless compatibility on many of the most recent and popular applications. Used in conjunction with a free graphical operating system like Ubuntu, it’s an option that could save you up to £80 on Microsoft’s current asking price.
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Server
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Enterprises want to move into hybrid cloud services now and will probably spend the next several years making that move, according to Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. It won’t be an instant transition. He says that VMware, unlike Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, is in a good position to help them do so.
Lodge was on the road Thursday, visiting InformationWeek offices and other spots in his own “anti-cloud washing” campaign. He had a list of the requirements for a hybrid cloud and explained why some cloud services that talk about providing hybrid services probably can’t really do it. In case you’re wondering, he means Amazon Web Services, which struck a nerve inside VMware when it announced the AWS vCenter management portal, the connection between the VMware vCenter management console and Amazon’s EC2.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While EXT4 didn’t see any exciting changes for the Linux 3.16 merge window, the XFS and Btrfs file-systems are continuing to receive a great deal of upstream improvements.
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The 3.14.7, 3.10.43, and 3.4.93 stable kernel updates are available; each contains another long list of important fixes.
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Software engineer Thomas Gibbons remembers from an early age working with his father to set up mail servers in their home in Kidderminster, England. His dad, Christopher Gibbons, a BT (British Telecom) engineer, was always eager to teach him about things he expressed interested in, he said via phone this week.
“He got me into programming as well. I’m where I am today because of my father’s faith in me,” Gibbons said. “Whenever I wanted to learn something, he said ‘Great, we’ll learn it together.”
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Matthew Garrett sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Tuesday that are going into the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request is interesting for Dell Latitude laptop owners.
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For developers and debug-willing Linux enthusiasts, the Intel GPU Tools 1.7 open-source release is now available.
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Graphics Stack
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The first beta driver in NVIDIA’s forthcoming “Release 340″ driver series for blob-using Linux users is now available.
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Another OpenGL 4 extension has landed in Mesa by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center crew for the Mesa 10.3 release at the end of the summer.
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Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.1.
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Wayland 1.5 is released. It’s a pretty exciting release, with plenty of features, but the most exciting thing about it is that we can begin work on Wayland 1.6!
… No, I’m serious. Wayland 1.6′s release schedule matches up pretty well with GNOME’s. Wayland 1.6 will be released in the coming weeks before GNOME 3.14, the first version of GNOME with full Wayland support out of the box.
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The Linux graphics benchmarks we have to publish today at Phoronix are some tests of the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver that is independently developed by LunarG as an unofficial alternative to the classic Intel Mesa DRI driver that’s officially supported by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.
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At Apple’s recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don’t yet know — or can’t admit — whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform.
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Benchmarks
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After last weekend delivering 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA 2D Linux benchmarks this weekend I have some results comparing the GeForce GPU performance for 2D operations between the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine 1.7.20 was delayed an extra two weeks due to outside scheduling conflicts, but that new release is now available. While the release schedule was twice as long, the release isn’t too particularly exciting.
Found within Wine 1.7.20 is X11 drag and drop fixes, more C/C++ run-time functions have been implemented, fixes for more memory issues found by Valgrind, OLE storage fixes, and various other bug-fixes. This release has 88 bug-fixes found within this development version after the extended cycle.
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Games
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E3 and all of its shiny new game launches may be winding down, but the gaming goodness is just getting started. Friday morning, games site GOG.com launched its summer games sale, unloading a slew of games at dirt-cheap prices, with deals being swapped out day-by-day and even hour-by-hour.
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Linux is slowly becoming a gaming alternative, but it’s still a long way from consoles and Windows. How long will it take to see Linux represented at the E3 Expo in full effect, just like all the other platforms?
Making predictions is very hard, especially about the future. This simple statement from physicist Niels Bohr explains very well why it’s difficult to anticipate what will happen in the world of technology. Some things evolve faster than we can predict and others seem to stagnate…
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Ever since Valve released Steam for Linux, I had been hoping that Sid Meier’s Civilization V would come to the platform. In truth, I didn’t actually expect it to happen – not even after Beyond Earth was announced for Linux. As the game was announced for the OS earlier this week, though, this is one of those times I’m glad reality diverged from my beliefs.
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Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve, has been updated and a number of fixes have been implemented.
Team Fortress 2 has been available on the Linux platform for some time now and the developers have released lots of patches for the game already.
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2K and Firaxis Games announce that the Linux version of Civilization V has been released and the port has been made by Aspyr Media.
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When summer arrives, many games sites starts to sell out cheap games. We have found several games that works perfectly on Linux.
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Linux’s gaming potential is about more than SteamOS and blockbuster ports. Earlier this year, GOG.com announced plans to bring a bevy of classic games to Ubuntu and Mint Linux this fall, with more than 100 games expected to be available at launch. Expect them to work just fine with SteamOS when the operating system finally launches sometime in 2015, too.
Speaking of Steam, it’s not the big-name games but the indies that are driving Steam for Linux’s true growth. After launching with a mere 60 native games just over a year ago, Steam for Linux now stands at more than 300 games strong—tremendous growth in a very short time. More and more games—like Europa Universalis IV, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Dota 2, and Starbound—are starting to launch Linux versions alongside Windows counterparts.
It’s still not quite the year of Linux on the desktop, but one thing’s for certain: Linux’s gaming prospects are looking brighter than ever before.
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While LGP was once the leading source for providing Linux-native games, these days there isn’t much to say for them and their web-site remains offline one and a half months after trying to do a server upgrade.
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Crytek has been after hiring Linux programmers for years now and a Phoronix reader pointed out there’s a fresh job posting for working at Crytek in Frankfurt, Germany on the OS X and Linux versions of CryENGINE. The job posting is for an engine programmer working on Linux and Mac to maintain the support for CryENGINE, contribute to the development of CryENGINE’s OpenGL renderer, maintain and improve low-level engine subsystems, ensure the reliability of their UNIX-based build systems, provide training, and carry out other tasks.
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Sid Meier’s Civilization V was announced today by Aspyr Media for Linux and SteamOS. The release targets SteamOS on current-gen hardware and is supporting Ubuntu 14.04. Future Civilization V Linux updates will expand the range of supported graphics cards.
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An updated version of the open-source OpenRA engine is out, the project with the goal of being a libre/free real-time strategy project recreating the original Command and Conquer titles.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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First I would like to say that this release would not have been possible without the excellent user community effort that arrived to help by lending their time and knowledge, after the very bumpy beta debut. Thanks to all of you.
Team members also deserve recognition for tolerating difficulties with the beta and internal frustrations that needed to be addressed. Kudos. Now on with the release notes.
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The latest addition to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is Elua, a Lua-based Just-in-Time application runtime stack.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This is one of our first interviews with the excited attendees of the Randa meetings and today you shall get a glimpse into the mind, workings and makings of Cristian Oneț who has been with KDE since quite some time now and has been a prominent contributor.
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The KDE Project developers have revealed that the second Beta version of the next-generation Plasma workspace has been released.
Plasma Next has been built to eventually replace the current KDE Plasma, which seems to have run its course. This doesn’t means that the current Plasma used by the KDE project won’t be supported anymore, just that a change is coming in the near future.
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The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is just the development branch. It’s possible that some of the features integrated in this version of the browser will never make it to Beta and Stable.
Google Chrome Dev is the place where the developers implement new features and where the majority of fixes are added. There have been very few times when the Dev release wasn’t large, and this is not one of those times.
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Before you follow my instructions to install Plasma 5 on your system, keep in mind that Plasma 5 is under heavy development and the stable release has not been made. Since it’s in development stage, there are (as expected) issues. Some of the issue you should be aware of include the missing wallpaper, icons may stop working now and then and Plasma Network Manager is missing as well.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Sorry for a bit belated post. In the last month I attended GNOME.Asia, held in Beijing this year, in conjunction with FUDCon APAC. The conference was perfectly organized and I had a lot of fun with the enthusiastic people. Congratulations to the organizers on the successful event.
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One day while hanging around at the #gnome-design IRC channel, Allan Day made me aware of the fact that default avatars in GNOME could use a revamp. Sounded like a nice adventure, so I began following an exciting yet challenging path, aiming to find the treasure that is good avatar conceptual design.
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This may not be such a big deal on Linux, where distributions generally have ‘their’ theme, not to mention the many packaged and readily available themes. So, basically no Linux user ever sees the default GTK+ theme. The situation is very different on other platforms, where GTK+ is often bundled with applications, and it may not be easy to install themes, or get the bundled GTK+ to use them.
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The latest change abound for GNOME 3.14 is a new default theme for the GTK+ tool-kit.
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This article is a review of the latest edition of Antergos – Antergos 2014.05.26, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Like Manjaro, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, it is a relatively young distribution, and like its parent distribution, is a rolling release distribution.
A rolling release distribution is an install-once-update-forever distribution. That is, once a system is installed, there’s no need to reinstall when a new version is released.
The Antergos installer offers a choice of six desktop environments – Cinnamon, GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. This review features materials from test installations of the Cinnamon, GNOME 3, and KDE desktops.
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New Releases
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MythTV, a Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub featuring automatic commercial detection/skipping, intelligent schedule recording, parental control, remote administration, and many more other functions, is now at version 0.27.1.
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There were some nice items in the feeds on this unluckiest day of the month. Jack Germain says Pinguy OS is about as good GNOME as you can get. Andrew Powell asks Is Ubuntu’s Unity Really All That Bad Nowadays? And GamingOnLinux.com says Linux is “heating up” over at Steam. These stories and more on this Friday the 13th.
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Pinguy OS is easy to misjudge as being too basic for serious users. There is little to do but launch your applications and go about your computing tasks. It may not satisfy power users who like to control navigation with keyboard shortcuts and advanced system settings. However, if you are a normal computer user who just wants your system to work from the start, Pinguy OS has a lot going for it.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva SA is proud to announce the official Europe launch of the “out of the box” QNAP IT Management Station with its partner QNAP (Quality Network Appliance Provider) Systems, Inc., that aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability.
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Arch Family
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Few months ago I wrote about Xulrunner/AArch64 patches. Today I was able to make use result of them.
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The Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is out with its 0.8.10 update for its flagship Xfce version plus their editions for KDE, Openbox, and minimal “net” environment.
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Red Hat Family
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The same week as Red Hat announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, the CentOS community is now out with a public QA release for testing.
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After three and a half years in development, a major milestone update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform, debuts.
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Many of you probably noticed (or were gleefully anticipating) the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 today. Which means it’s a really super day to be a Red Hat employee — seeing the culmination of so much open source work come together as the next major version of our flagship product is pretty inspiring.
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Fedora
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Fedora 20 was released last December and the Fedora 21 schedule puts the next release as no earlier than mid-October, but there’s already a call for delaying this next version of Fedora Linux.
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Eariler this week, Mozilla released version 30 of their popular web browser, Firefox, and now Firefox 30 is available in the official Fedora Repositories for Fedora 20 (the Fedora 19 update is still in the testing phase).
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If you are missing a software in Fedora, it’s possible to ask for it and maybe someone will pick it up and make a rpm package for it.
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The feature proposal is moving forward for replacing the Yum package manager with the next-generation DNF solution for Fedora 22.
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Debian Family
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Getting MATE ready for Debian has been hard work for the MATE Packaging Team, but it looks like they’ve pulled it off.
“The MATE desktop environment is a fork of what was formerly known as the GNOME v2 desktop environment. The MATE upstream developers have performed a really good job in integrating the old GNOME code with latest technologies like DConf an GSettings.’
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The anonymous operating system that Edward Snowden used to evade the National Security Agency has more than doubled in popularity and use in the last year since the NSA whistleblower first made headlines.
The Amnesic Incognito Live System, known widely as Tails, was booted up 11,107 times per day in the last month, according to its developers. That number equates to a boot once every seven seconds or 344,328 boots over the entire month.
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Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase “package A depends on package B”, there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth is hosting his keynote right now for the latest Ubuntu Online Developer Summit. Mark mostly talked about Ubuntu Phone, the forthcoming BQ phone hardware, Unity 8, OpenStack, LXC / Docker, and cloud computing in general… During the question and answer period, he was just asked about Mir driver support.
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The latest Internet-based Ubuntu Developer Summit ended yesterday. For those not up to speed on your Phoronix reading, here’s a recap of the most interesting topics.
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Ever since the Mir announcement made by Canonical last year, the community has met the decision with some resistance. The Ubuntu developers have explained on numerous occasions why they chose this path for their systems and it all has to do with control.
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After testing the developer’s build of Ubuntu Touch smartphone OS in 2013, the company behind Ubuntu Linux (Canonical) has finally confirmed that it will soon release its first batch of entry-level smartphones running the open-source operating system later this year. The company has teamed up with Meizu and Bq to be its initial Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). As compared to the open source Firefox OS released last year in consortium with Alacatel, the mobile edition of Ubuntu is not an HTML 5 or browser-based ecosystem. Similar to Android, it loads native Ubuntu applications (messaging, phone, and camera) flawlessly, even with the absence of wireless connectivity.
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Canonical has just released a new Ubuntu 14.10 image that only comes with the new Unity 8 as the default desktop environment, but don’t expect it to become one of the main releases in October.
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Now, don’t get me wrong – when it comes to choice of desktop interface it’s a very subjective matter and often a matter of taste and what you, as the user, finds most comfortable and/or productive. Still, browse through various forums, comment sections or blogs across the internet concerning Unity or even Linux desktops in general and you’ll still likely find plenty of negativity towards Canonical’s flagship desktop offering. However, I do believe some of the common criticisms leveled at Unity are based on some of the early incarnations of that desktop. Is it really so bad nowadays?
Of course, amongst all the perceived ‘hate’ and general negativity for Unity, there are also users with positive reactions who either are new to Unity and find it to be a good, stable and easy to use desktop or they are users who once disliked Unity based on it’s earlier versions but since trying out the Unity of today (say, Unity as it stands in Ubuntu 14.04) have had a change of heart.
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Besides figuring out SSD caching and other features for Ubuntu Server 14.10, developers at Canonical and other stakeholders are figuring out Ubuntu Server’s future with systemd in the long-term.
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Ubuntu developers are moving forward with their plans to support Click packages on the Ubuntu desktop.
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A question and answer session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for those interested in the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 desktop with its focus on convergence.
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Canonical developer Michael Hall says that there are over 10,000 unique users running Ubuntu phone OS on their devices. Where did this number come from? Did they tracked the number of download? No, that would be too vague to conclude how many users are actually using the mobile OS.
Ubuntu Phone users have to log into their Ubuntu One account (U1 file storage and music was discontinued this year), so that they can get updates or manage applications, just the way it works with Android, iOS or Windows 8. This gives Canonical the ability to know how many users used their U1 account to connect to the store and that’s where these numbers are coming from.
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Flavours and Variants
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Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 SoC, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.
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Samsung have delivered several Tizen powered Smart cameras and now according to a new leak, they are getting ready to deliver another Tizen based flagship model named the Samsung NX1. The expected announcement of this new Camera is thought to be at the Photokina event in September.
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Codethink demonstrated its Baserock Linux stack running the new Linux 3.15 kernel and an open source graphics driver stack on Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 SBC.
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Phones
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The UK Online electronics retailer MobileFun have listed the Tizen based Samsung Z (SM-Z910F) as a unlocked smartphone on their site, with a release date to be confirmed. We are expecting a Russian launch event soon and MobileFun have confirmed directly to Tizen Experts that they are looking at stocking the Samsung Z in the near future, and will also be looking at selling a range of accompanying accessories.
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Android
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Early reports are suggesting OnePlus One devices are finally ready to begin shipping to customers.
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A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.
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If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.
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FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.
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Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.
Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.
“As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.
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The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.
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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The deal, which ownCloud, Inc. announced June 11, involves 18 research and applied science universities in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. Together, the institutions—which are collaborating under the name Sync & Share NRW—serve up to 500,000 users who will take advantage of ownCloud’s file syncing technologies, the company reported.
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Databases
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As we’ve been covering recently, Icehouse, the next major release of the OpenStack cloud platform, is picking up steam. One notable thing about Icehouse is that it has introduced a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is
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BSD
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The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.
The image checksums follow at the end of this email.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.7.4 has been released.
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I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.18.1.
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Licensing
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I’ve had my disagreements with Joyent’s management of the Node.js project. In fact, I am generally auto-skeptical of any Open Source and/or Free Software project run by a for-profit company. However, I also like to give credit where credit is due.
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Developers won’t be required to sign contributor license agreements before contributing to the open source software platform, although Node.js will still be distributed under the MIT License.
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Openness/Sharing
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In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.
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When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.
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As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.
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Science
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F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:
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References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.
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As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.
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Open Hardware
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Two MIT grad students offer up DIY brain-recording gear
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Programming
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In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.
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This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
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Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.
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People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.
Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.
He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent
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The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.
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Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.
The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.
Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.
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Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad
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All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.
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Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.
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He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.
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Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.
“For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”
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One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…
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Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners
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These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.
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What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.
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The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom
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Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.
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The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.
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An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.
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Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.
Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.
Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.
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According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.
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A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.
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The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.
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As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.
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Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.
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Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.
The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.
British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.
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Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.
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Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.
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Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.
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Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.
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Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.
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Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.
Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.
Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.
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The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.
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At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.
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After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.
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When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.
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“Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”
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The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.
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What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?
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Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.
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America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.
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The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.
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Transparency Reporting
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Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.
DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.
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The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.
Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.
Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.
Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.
The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.
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The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.
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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.
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Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn
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Finance
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Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.
The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.
Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.
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The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.
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It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…
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Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!
HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.
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Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.
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The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.
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Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.
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According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.
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When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.
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Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.
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Censorship
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Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.
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Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.
Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.
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A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.
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Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.
“We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.
“Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”
Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”
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A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.
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Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do
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Privacy
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Surfing the Internet?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is watching your every move on Web, and this time even more closure.
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Although privacy is now guaranteed under article 23 of the new constitution, an “NSA-like” agency – the Technical Agency for Telecommunications (ATT) – was also created back in November. Fears remain that Tunisia may not yet have turned the page on the Ben Ali surveillance era in spite of its new constitution.
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One year after Edward Snowden exposed the spying at the NSA, can the internet be re-set?
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The revelations drew international criticism, and led to the resignation of more than 33 DAS agents, more than a dozen of arrests and the eventual dismantling of the intelligence agency.
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So Secretary of State John Kerry thinks that Edward Snowden should “man up” and return to the United States. Well, fair enough, but should Kerry and other senior government officials “man up” and tell the public about the extent of spying on U.S. citizens as well as on our allies? Should they not reveal the civilian casualties of our drone strikes in allied countries such as Pakistan or Yemen?
Kerry also states that Snowden “should trust the American system of justice.” Tragically, the system is doing nothing to halt the illegal drone strike bombing in countries with whom we are not at war, nor the long-term imprisonment of individuals without bringing them to trial. It seems that the American system of justice has fallen far short of its ideals. The NSA and CIA are totally unaccountable to either Congress or the Courts.
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US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology
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Wyden made news last year when he caught Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in an obvious lie. Asked whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans,” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Wyden said he had written numerous letters to Clapper and NSA’s then-head Keith Alexander, seeking clarification on the agency’s programs.
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Rarely do you get a chance to ask a just-retired FBI director whether he had “any legal qualms” about what, in football, is called “illegal procedure,” but at the Justice Department is called “parallel construction.”
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Law and computer science both have their codes, but they’re disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It’s not that the twain shall never meet; it’s just that they seldom do.
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No, the pro-Hillary activists aren’t tapping your phones, but they are just as humorless as the spy agency when mocked. In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”
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Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.
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The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said no this week to tracking your movements using data from your cell phone without a warrant when it declared that this information is constitutionally protected.
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Yes, this is exactly what you think it means. The NSA can listen to your conversations and use your camera when you power off your phone. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.
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India’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government has come under pressure to scrap Aadhaar, the program which aims to enroll all of the country’s residents through biometrics.
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Last month, we wrote about how the USA Freedom Act was completely changed at the last minute in secret. This was even after the bill had been marked up and approved unanimously by two committees (Judiciary and Intelligence). Then the White House (read: NSA) came in and basically changed the bill around entirely, such that some say it’s even worse than before. Earlier this week, it even came out that the very author of the USA Freedom Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, was frozen out of the final negotiations on his own bill, such that the final product looked nothing like the original. While some in Congress tried to warn their colleagues that the bill they were voting on had been changed in secret, many Representatives didn’t fully comprehend what happened, and the bill passed.
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JOHN Kerry, the United States Secretary of State, has stepped in to oversee the investigation of reports that the National Security Agency is intercepting and recording all cell phone conversations in The Bahamas, with the ability to store them for up to 30 days.
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Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform
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In a 2013 Pew Internet poll, for instance, 86 percent of internet users reported “taking steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints.” This ranged from encrypting email to clearing cookies and masking internet protocol (IP) addresses to avoiding using their real name on virtual networks. The same poll found that 68 percent of users believe existing privacy protection laws are inadequate. The poll says nothing of mobile data privacy.
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A year on from Edward Snowden’s revelations around state sponsored mass surveillance programs, some of the major players in the online and technological world (including Google, Mozilla, Twitter and Reddit) have launched the Reset the Net campaign.
The program aims to increase people’s awareness and uptake of privacy and security tools so they can better resist surveillance, particularly that conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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I would like to give a brief history lesson to those who have either forgotten the past or wish to ignore it. In 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act in response to a terrorist attack. It gave Chancellor Adolf Hitler the power to enact laws without the involvement of the legislative body.
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Thousands of demonstrators might be camped outside GCHQ in Cheltenham for three days later this summer.
Activists who are angry at reports that GCHQ and its American sister agency NSA have developed large programmes of mass surveillance of phone and internet traffic are calling for a three-day protest outside the ‘doughnut’ in Hubble Road from August 29 to September 1.
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Google just bought Skybox Imaging for $500m to gain access to its capability to take real-time, high-resolution satellite images/videos of the whole world daily. Last week Google sources told the WSJ that Google was planning to spend $1-3 billion on “180 small, high capacity satellites at lower altitudes than traditional satellites” to enable two-way Internet access. In April, Google bought Titan Aerospace – which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones that Titan calls “atmospheric satellites” — for Internet access to remote areas and for disaster relief. And in March Google CEO Larry Page shared his ambitions that Project Loon “could build a world-wide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.”
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The Times cited Fellwock’s claim that the United States had encircled the Communist world with at least 2,000 electronic listening posts on land or on naval vessels or aircraft. It discussed his description of CIA covert action in Thailand, the NSA’s role in finding Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, and the stationing of the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty near the Israeli coast, where our the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attacked it, killing 34 Americans. Throughout, the article treated Fellwock as a whistleblower, not a traitor.
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Nine states this year placed new legal limits on police cellphone surveillance after revelations that law enforcement agencies across the country are gathering cellphone data of thousands of people at once, often without warrants or without regard to whether they are criminal targets.
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On June 12, 2014 Senator Wyden asked for permission to address the U.S. Senate regarding the Intelligence authorization bill. There he spoke of the contributions of whistleblowers.
A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization.
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Over 150,000 French people have supported a petition urging President Francois Hollande to grant NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in France after his refugee status expires in Russia in July.
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Oliver Stone may have purchased the film rights to Edward Snowden’s life story, but it seems as if the French are aiming for the rights to Snowden’s freedom by petitioning to grant him political asylum.
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Earlier this week, Simon Davies, the “Privacy Surgeon,” published a global analysis of the impact of the Edward Snowden revelations over the past year. The report, entitled A Crisis of Accountability demonstrates that, despite many strong and sweeping declarations, the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have failed to take meaningful action in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
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Civil Rights
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The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.
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The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.
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Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”
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Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.
Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.
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The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”
Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.
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The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.
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Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements
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U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.
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The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.
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As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.
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Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?
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While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.
It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.
First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.
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In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.
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Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.
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After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.
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The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.
During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.
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Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.
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The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.
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This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?
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Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.
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With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.
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City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Elon Musk from Tesla Motors claims to be ‘sharing’ inventions, but the true motivations are far less benign than it seems on the surface (if not malicious)
WE HAVE been patiently watching “Linux” and “Open Source” feeds filling up with something that is not related to software but claims to be inspired by “Linux” and “Open Source”. It’s some marketing stunt from Tesla, which got the attention of OS (Open Source) Vehicle (another openwashing attempt).
The post says: “Is this a marketing stunt?
“I don’t think so. This can be a genuine effort from one of the visionaries of the silicon valley, one of the most advanced companies on earth, taking finally into account that – by having a value proposition targeted at a customer segment that is pretty small, mostly made by wealthy people most of them living in the US. You can’t really change the world for the better in a short enough amount of time (do you remember we have only less than 6000 days? – look at this).
“As you may also know, Tesla is developing a pretty cool new technology for batteries and it’s probably sure that having other big automotive brands producing cars based on their technology, their batteries will be able to target a bigger market and – at the end – achieve a bigger transformation effect on automotive.”
But why were these patented in the first place? And if these were not patented, would Tesla be able to make a fuss about the so-called ‘giveaway’?
The post goes on: “But if Tesla really wants to scale up its contribution, it must work towards the real adoption of the technological solutions that it is making available, it must switch from a product approach to a platform approach and – in a way that is similar to what we are doing – needs to engage with the community, understand how these technologies can be used and are going to be used and make efforts to ensure that every player in the market will have the same access, an access that is clear in terms of rights, obligations and implications.
“Also, an open source (patents) car will work in the future only if it’s accompanied by an open and distributed manufacturing process, that is able to include multiple stakeholders and be based on a more participative value chain, also embedding the principles of Cradle to Cradle production, eliminating waste and obsolescence.”
We were preparing a long article about this whole marketing exercise that’s basically openwashing the company using the disgraced notion of “opened” patents. IBM, HP and other companies have been using this marketing exercise before. It’s utterly pointless and we have countered it repeatedly. Why are so many journalists bamboozled, including FOSS-friendly ones? Here is one key person from Canonical stating: “When I get home, I’m going to take down a plaque that has proudly hung in my own home office for nearly 10 years now. In 2004, I was named an IBM Master Inventor, recognizing sustained contributions to IBM’s patent portfolio.”
Further down he says: “I’ve never been more excited to see someone back up their own rhetoric against software patents, with such a substantial, palpable, tangible assertion. Kudos, Elon.”
But Elon did not revoke the patents, he just claimed to be sharing them (in a pseudo-geeky way with a famous meme). That’s a very different thing. It’s the same thing that IBM claims to be doing with OIN, among other strategic marketing angles.
Shameless here is the type of free marketing newspapers gave Tesla, characterising a patent hoard (followed by openwashing) as some kind of championship of FOSS. The PR nonsense audaciously uses the term sharing, even though it’s all about profit. They are selling patents as a form of marketing, creating dependence on their technology. Elon Musk, the CEO, has been getting far too much credit and publicity here; it’s rather familiar because all sorts of patent ‘pledges’ by HP and IBM are worse than useless and his is no better. Those two companies lobby for software and try to make it look OK. Likewise, Tesla is patenting all sorts of things and now makes the patents looks legitimate by ‘sharing’ them (whatever that means). It’s the Robin Hood mentality or the doctrine of ‘charity’, where rather than establishing social equality one works vertically, by giving from top to bottom, selectively, upon one’s will and supposed ‘generosity’. As long as there are patents on things like these, lawsuits will continue to harm small companies. “Heavy patent litigation scared off about $22 billion in VC funding over 5 years,” said this one new article, and it is one among many.
The press that Tesla received extends to other countries and resorts a to pathetic cocky attitude that uses metaphors (“Handing Over the Keys”) for openwashing or the notion that Telsa is “contrarian” and “open source” (“the open source movement”).
One decent response to the marketing from Tesla came from Jan Wildeboer, who wrote:
Thank you, Tesla Motors For The Patents, but …
Here’s the thing. Elon Musk doesn’t trust the patent system to protect his inventions. So instead of filing for more, he will simply not file at all and keep his inventions secret. The stuff that already got patented thus is already considered lost by him so it is safe to “open source” them all.
When will the press finally ‘get’ Tesla’s real reasons for doing this? It’s about self interest; Tesla would get sued by shareholders otherwise. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Security at 8:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s software must be so malicious if revealing its “secrets” gets people who work for Microsoft jailed for several months and then deported
A LOT of the press continues to ignore the real threats to our (digitised/digital) liberties online. The corporate press barely writes about back doors in proprietary software like Windows (the back doors are there by design) and instead props up the whole “Heartbleed” hype [1, 2, 3]. Here for example is an article where 2 months (yes, 8+ weeks) after some lines of code were shown to have an error in them (dubbed “Heartbleed” by a Microsoft-linked firm and then marketed like classic FUD) IDG is conveniently deducing that all of FOSS is not secure. This is disgraceful FUD and it’s part of a pattern we have been seeing. Sure, there is lots of business in such generalisations, including for insecurity firms like Symantec, which maliciously gets closer to Linux groups (surely to sell some snake oil and claim that FOSS needs proprietary “anti-viral” software add-ons to be secure).
It should be noted that months ago there were many articles about how insecurity firms like Symantec (with odious Microsoft links in the management) needed to intentionally overlook government-developed malware (like Stuxnet) and back doors. It all adds up to one thing: the least secure practice in IT is one that involves introducing secret code into complex systems. One proprietary program is enough to compromise a larger system.
According to this article, allowing the public to see Microsoft secrets is a serious crime that gets you imprisoned and deported. “The Government timed its Complaint and Arrest Warrant to coincide with Mr. Kibkalo’s pre-arranged attendance at a technology conference in Bellevue,” says one article. Another says:
Kibkalo’s circumstances are somewhat different than most employees that get on the “outs” with their tech companies: in his case, Microsoft sifted through the emails and documents of the French blogger in order to detect the source of the leaked information – and then discovered that it was Kibkalo. Microsoft says that it regrets its actions, despite the fact that it doesn’t need a warrant to search the emails of its own customers. At the same time, there was an issue with Microsoft’s violation of customer privacy – and privacy advocates find the company violation to be more than an issue of subjective preference. They view it more as an “improper search and seizure.” What grounds did Microsoft have to do this?
Here we have two issues: the first if that Microsoft illegally spies on E-mails (we covered this before) and the second is that the very notion of being allowed to see Microsoft source code (e.g. to find the back door) or some “secrets” is now a serious crime with serious punishment. For a ‘transparent’ and ‘open’ “new Microsoft” (marketing nonsene) this sure doesn’t bode too well. █
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Posted in Site News at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Profiteering by privatisation necessitates bribing many officials and interest groups, which is exactly what the Gates Foundation has been working towards, under the guise of “charity”
OUR Gates Foundation wiki page has been viewed nearly 200,000 times, but unfortunately we have not covered the crimes perpetrated behind this shell since around 2011 (due to lack of time). Some time ago we wrote about Common Core, which is just one vector/angle by which Bill Gates stages a coup, making a profit by privatising what’s public. We wrote about this several times before, so in order to spare repetition we’ll cut to the chase.
Huffington Post has traditionally helped Gates’ coup because Huffington was wining and dining with Gates (and by extension with Microsoft). Now that the paper/site is sold to AOL it is giving a platform to Diane Ravitch (Research Professor of Education), not to Gates himself. Yes, at least once for a change, the notorious Bill Gates lobbying platform has given a platform to his critics. Ravitch has published the article “Time for Congress to Investigate Bill Gates’ Coup” in which she says:
The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.
The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.
The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
Who knew that American education was for sale?
Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
Read the remainder of this article because Ravitch sure knows what Gates is really up to. She has been tracking and writing about this for years. She can’t just be dismissed as some kind of “irrational hater” or a “nobody” given her professional background. █
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